Hit my 5 year mark as a birth mother and it hit me harder than I expected

I thought I had processed everything after all this time but seeing that 5 year anniversary on the calendar just broke me open all over again, has anyone else been blindsided by a milestone number like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

finley_lee18h ago

5 year mark as a birth mother" - honestly im gonna push back here. you signed up for this, you knew the deal when you placed the kid. the whole point is that they move on and you move on too. milestones are just numbers we make up in our heads, they dont have to mean anything unless you let them. maybe sit with why you're still holding onto this so tight after half a decade.

emery_hall17h ago

Yeah, I get what you're saying about milestones being made up numbers, but I've been there myself and it's not that clean. Placing a kid isn't like quitting a job where you just walk away and never think about it again. The whole "you signed up for this" thing assumes people know exactly how they'll feel five years out, and that's just not realistic. What helped me was finding a way to hold the two truths at once: I made the right choice for that kid, and I still get to feel sad about it sometimes without it meaning I'm stuck. If you can't untangle those two things, that's probably the real work.