I went to my favorite place near the edge of the lake with my rock in tow. Until that year, the adoption thing didn’t really move around my mind much, but as my body started changing, my moods started swinging and my social interactions grew more complicated (in that 12 year-old kind of way,) I started feeling like a complete freak. The best reason I could come up with was a cheapie, no imagination, but the easiest one to grab: “I’m adopted. My biological mother didn’t want me because I was a freak and my parents now don’t want me because I am a freak and poor me, no one wants me because I am, well, a freak…” I really shouldn’t have watched all of those After School Specials filled with the tragic angst of the early teen set, exaggerated nearly to melo-drama.

At that moment, sitting on the big, moss-covered rock, listening to the water lap methodically, rhythmically, soothingly relentless, clinging to my carefully chosen “burden” rock, I was convinced, not for the first time, that no one wanted me around.

There was a rustle in the bushes: it was Leanie. First, she just sat next to me. We didn’t say anything. We watched the water, listened to it. Then she quietly asked me some questions based on what I had shared in the group discussion (which included all the feelings but not the adoption theory of rejection.) After answering a few of her questions, the fact I was adopted and that no one wanted me as the root of all of my pre-teen angst came up.

She listened; let me offload the whole lot. When I couldn’t find any other fears or panic to spew at her and my tears were flowing at a substantial rate, she took my hand and told me her story.

She told me she used to have a boyfriend that she thought she loved very much. They started going out when they were both in high school and before her seventeenth birthday, she found out she was pregnant. They both knew they couldn’t take care of the baby. They were just kids themselves, and she wanted her baby to have a good life. Abortion, for her, was not an option at all. And so, she did what she felt was the only thing she could do that might enable her child to have the best of what life could offer: she decided to give it up for adoption.

It was the hardest decision she had ever made in her life, she told me. She said that just after she gave birth, she wanted to scream at the nurse to bring her baby to her, that she had changed her mind, didn’t want to give her up. Leanie said not begging them to let her keep her baby took every ounce of strength she had ever possessed in her life.

She said that she is always thinking of her daughter, who would be five soon. She said every year on her birthday, she sends her girl birthday wishes. She said every day of her life she would be wishing, hoping and praying that her daughter is happy and has a beautiful life, the one she could not have given her...

By the end of her story, Leanie was crying for her loss … and I was, too. For once, it wasn’t about me, the center of my 12 year-old universe, it was about Leanie and the hard thing she had done out of love for her baby and the need to give her baby a better life. I realized that Leanie was a good mother to her baby because that’s what good mothers do: they make difficult decisions and do selfless acts in the hope of doing what is right for their children. I realized that whoever was my birth mother, she, like Leanie, like my Mom, was a good mother that acted out of love for me, not contempt, not because I was a freak.

I threw my burden rock in the water, watched the circles grow.