“Suddenly, I desperately needed to see her face again. I scrambled through boxes and boxes of family photos but she wasn’t in any of them.”
‘We gave her a hard time. She frowned at us. Then said, ‘We’re doing it.’ Reluctantly we gathered around, goofing off and teasing the entire time. She stood right next to me.’
‘Her right arm looked like a chicken wing. Her other arm started to hang limp. It was rotated inward, as if it were dislocated. I wanted to scream, ‘WHAT ARE YOU NOT TELLING ME?!’
“I didn’t have to wait long. At our two-month check up, our worst fears were confirmed.”
‘As our children become teens, they tell us THEY WANT independence. That THEY NEED it. They tell us they are grown up. That we are suffocating them.’
“’We don’t want a baby who is too attached.’ So we spend those early years pushing our children towards independence. They don’t need us as much as they think they do. We tell them they are big boys or girls. And we push. And we push.”
‘I received a message. My entire body began shaking. To the woman who called me SICK for talking about my children who died, my heart hurts for you.’
“You need to get past this, it’s so sick. Please, please get help. It’s so sick. Lay them to rest and move on. Get therapy but don’t drag your husband and child through this. So so sick. Please stop.”
‘My friend Erica was married to Chris. Chris came with baggage, his mother. To put it bluntly, Chris’ mother was toxic. From the moment Erica got serious with Chris, Chris’ mother was mad.’
“When Erica didn’t act a certain way, she ‘punished’ her by showing favoritism to her other grandchildren and leaving Erica and Chris’ kids out.”
‘My son has until this Tuesday to turn himself in. I love you, Josh. But the DEVIL returned this year. I made the decision to send my son to jail.’
“Yesterday he called. He wanted to come home. He even gave me the address where he was staying. I made the most difficult decision; I called the police to let them know where he was.”
‘The neck of my womb was open and was 100% effaced. I locked myself in my bathroom and refused to talk to my partner, the midwives or doctors.’
“My baby was struggling through contractions and distorting her head trying to get out. I screamed, cried, swore and kicked as I couldn’t understand what was going on.”
‘When you hear, ‘twin one is fine, but…’ your life is about to change. When I finally saw him after his birth, I could hardly process the absence. It was a blank, featureless canvas.’
“When I woke hours later, my partner and I were met by the serious face of one of the pediatricians. There is no way to explain how I felt at that moment, other than devastated. I was convinced I must have done something during my pregnancy to cause this.”
‘His eyes would shake back and forth. He started throwing his head back, screaming at the top of his lungs. He had lost so much weight. Something was terribly wrong with my bundle of joy.’
“Three doctors came in. They told us we needed to sit down and relax. Nothing could ever have prepared us for what they were about to say. I just sat there, blank. He’s just a baby.”
‘If she says mama, I won’t be able to go through with it.’ I never would have imagined the child we adopted would be my own cousin.’
“She never told him she was pregnant with me. To this day, he has absolutely no idea I exist.”
