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"  On a bright, hot afternoon in July 2010, Julia Barnes* gave birth in a Chicago hospital to a slightly premature but healthy five-pound boy after a short labor. When he emerged, black hair plastered to his head, she looked away and did not ask to hold her child\u2014or, as she kept reminding herself, &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; child. This was far from the blissful scenario she&amp;#039;d imagined when she and her husband, her college sweetheart Bill, learned she was pregnant the previous fall. But as her stomach had grown and she&amp;#039;d begun picturing her future as a mother, Julia discovered a secret that upended her life. Lying in the hospital bed, now finding herself unable to take her eyes off her newborn as he was cleaned and swathed by nurses, she focused on what she&amp;#039;d trained herself to think during her pregnancy whenever she felt the jab of a small foot or glanced down to see her abdomen rippling: He doesn&amp;#039;t belong to me, he doesn&amp;#039;t belong to me. Julia had chosen a couple to adopt the baby, and the wife was there\u2014she cut the cord. Watching the adoptive mother trail out of the room behind the nurse and the baby in his crib, Julia silently repeated another mantra: I&amp;#039;m not what&amp;#039;s best for him, I&amp;#039;m not what&amp;#039;s best for him. Julia was not physically or mentally ill, nor was she poor or very young, unable to make a living, or alone in the world. At the time she gave birth, she was, in fact, a 30-year-old lawyer who&amp;#039;d been thrilled when she conceived the first time she and her husband tried. Yet eight months later, she was intoning to herself, The baby doesn&amp;#039;t belong to me; I&amp;#039;m not what&amp;#039;s best for him. Julia tells her story sitting nearly still in a straight-backed chair in a pristine little third-floor apartment she shares with her best friend from college, Beth, a linguist who has her own translation business. A short, curvaceous brunette, Julia has a measured, almost affectless manner of speaking that is at odds with her girly style. She&amp;#039;s wearing a deep green, clingy wrapdress that seems of a piece not only with her femininity but her sense of propriety, her habit of playing by the rules: To meet a reporter, you dress up. To begin at the beginning: Julia met the man she&amp;#039;d marry at a kegger at a small midwestern liberal arts college her senior year. Bill was her &amp;quot;type,&amp;quot; she says with a smile, pulling out a stack of photographs that show a good-looking guy with a chiseled jaw and green eyes. &amp;quot;Black Irish,&amp;quot; Julia calls him. Within months, the two were in love and had moved in together off-campus. Julia graduated that spring and left for law school in Washington, DC; a year younger than she, Bill followed the next spring after he got his degree. They lived together for four years in suburban DC before marrying in a large, formal Catholic ceremony. As the couple began married life, Julia&amp;#039;s career was taking off\u2014law clerk for a federal judge, a partner-track job at a small firm\u2014though she was realizing she really didn&amp;#039;t enjoy practicing law. Meanwhile, Bill hadn&amp;#039;t held a steady job in their eight years together\u2014though he&amp;#039;d spent nine months away from DC, and Julia, getting an MBA in the Midwest\u2014and he was deeply unhappy about it. Julia blamed the economy for Bill&amp;#039;s joblessness, not him, but as he became overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, Julia began to think that their marriage would be less fraught if he were the breadwinner. &amp;quot;As newlyweds, we had me slaving away working, and he was unemployed, and that was very hard,&amp;quot; Julia says, before adding that they still managed to remain supportive of each other. Eventually, Bill announced that he thought his best shot at lasting employment lay in the army. Julia was wary of all the moving of military life, but &amp;quot;he&amp;#039;d been talking about the military since we were flirting in college,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So I decided it would make him happy, which would make me happy, so let&amp;#039;s take the leap.&amp;quot; Bill enlisted in officer school, at a base in the South, while Julia says she resigned from the law firm without regrets. She&amp;#039;d planned on becoming a stay-at-home mom one day, anyway. She got pregnant, she thinks, the day she joined Bill at their apartment on the base (she&amp;#039;d stayed in DC for a while to finish up projects at her law firm). The next three months passed quickly. With Bill earning his officer&amp;#039;s stripes during the day, Julia padded around their spartan two-bedroom, poring over daily computer updates about her developing child and trying to adhere to the hyper-healthy diet in What to Expect When You&amp;#039;re Expecting. At night, the couple would have dinner together and talk baby names. Julia wasn&amp;#039;t used to the gorgeous early springs in the South, and on April 15, 2010, leaves were budding on the trees and daffodils were in full bloom as she drove to the gym for a workout, then returned home to start desultorily preparing for a weekend trip to look at apartments on the base in Texas to which her newly minted officer-husband was being transferred. &amp;quot;I started packing,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;Because my own suitcase is bulky, I was thinking, I need a little duffel bag that I can lift into the plane. I took Bill&amp;#039;s bag out of his closet. And I opened the inside pocket, and that&amp;#039;s when I found all these letters and pictures.&amp;quot; The packet formed an unmistakable record of a secret second life Bill had with a New Hampshire woman who apparently thought he was single. &amp;quot;There she is in her army T-shirt,&amp;quot; Julia says now, pointing at a snapshot from the cache she found that day. (Bill never asked her to return it.) &amp;quot;There he is with her at a Ben &amp;amp;amp; Jerry&amp;#039;s factory in Vermont; she looks a bit like me, and it&amp;#039;s clearly summer of 2009, because she dated the backs of the pictures.&amp;quot; She flips through more of the photos. &amp;quot;In this one, they&amp;#039;re in this nice restaurant behind wineglasses, and the waiter must have said, `Oh, I will take your picture! What a cute couple!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Stuck in place for who knows how long, examining and reexamining what she calls &amp;quot;the evidence,&amp;quot; Julia remembers finally dropping to the floor and literally crawling to the phone. She called Beth, leaving a message saying that she needed to talk. She then went on Facebook and searched for the name of the woman on the envelopes. Within five minutes, she&amp;#039;d &amp;quot;friended&amp;quot; her, wrote that she needed to speak to her about Bill, and gotten her on the phone. &amp;quot;I told her I was his wife and pregnant. She couldn&amp;#039;t believe it. She&amp;#039;d been his girlfriend for three years. She made me e-mail her our wedding pictures. I was like, `Okay! There are a lot of them!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Later that afternoon, Julia confronted her husband, who didn&amp;#039;t deny or explain anything but begged her forgiveness. She took their car keys and drove to a hotel, where she spent the night calling Beth and her mother, alternating between weeping, berating herself and Bill, and worrying that her hysterical state might harm her baby. The other woman had told Julia that Bill and she had discussed marriage! He&amp;#039;d met her parents. And Julia realized that during their honeymoon in New Zealand, Bill repeatedly wrote his girlfriend, claiming to be out of the country on business for the multinational corporation that supposedly employed him. In Julia&amp;#039;s life with Bill, there had been &amp;quot;odd stories that surfaced about once a year,&amp;quot; she says\u2014he told her he&amp;#039;d joined the Marine Corps but then announced a few days later he was kicked out for fainting; he confessed that he&amp;#039;d stolen a credit card at 17 and used it to travel abroad\u2014but none of it was tangible enough to douse her love for him. &amp;quot;When I&amp;#039;d express doubt or confusion, he&amp;#039;d offer me lengthy, detailed explanations,&amp;quot; she says. Her husband&amp;#039;s expert ability to lie not only shocked her but frightened her. Was he one of those sociopaths like you see on Lifetime TV? *Some names have been changed. That&amp;#039;s certainly the conclusion her friend Beth jumped to the next day. While Bill was at work, Julia returned home to get some things. She went on the computer and noticed that her husband had googled &amp;quot;guns and ammo&amp;quot; and downloaded directions to a local gun store. She called Beth immediately. &amp;quot;I was having visions of Laci Peterson,&amp;quot; says Beth, who has become almost like a mother to Julia, joining our conversation midway through. &amp;quot;I said, `You don&amp;#039;t need to just leave town now\u2014you need to go to the airport and meet me.&amp;#039; Sometimes Julia is too logical. She likes her lists, and she&amp;#039;d made a list: I have to cancel my mail, I have to see the doctor one more time.&amp;quot; Beth bought a plane ticket to Atlanta for later that day, and Julia did as she was told and met her. With Beth at the wheel, and Julia sobbing in the passenger seat, the two sped north &amp;quot;like Thelma and Louise,&amp;quot; Beth says. The friends chose Chicago as a destination because a third member of their college tribe lived in the city and invited them to crash on the couch. &amp;quot;When we arrived, it was late and chilly,&amp;quot; Beth says. &amp;quot;We felt a bit like immigrants, homeless, jobless.&amp;quot; During the drive, Beth, who had spent a few years working in entry-level media jobs in New York and was fed up with the place, had offered to find an apartment with Julia in Chicago and help her raise her child. Julia gratefully, if listlessly, took her up on the offer, and the two started to hunt for three-bedrooms. &amp;quot;I was not sleeping, I was not eating,&amp;quot; Julia says. &amp;quot;Excuse my language, but it was, `What the fuck am I going to do?&amp;#039; Really scary. &amp;quot;When I grasped what Bill had done, I said, `I&amp;#039;m sorry,&amp;#039; to the baby. Like, `I chose wrong, and I am sorry,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; she continues. &amp;quot;I wanted the world for this child. I was envisioning the next president of the United States. I was going to be a full-time mom and basically just shower this child with the best of everything. Now I was unemployed, the economy sucks, I don&amp;#039;t have family money, and if I do find a job, [my baby] is going to be in day care, which is the opposite of what I wanted. And there&amp;#039;s no father figure. And if I start dating someday? It&amp;#039;s totally unstable to have guys in and out.&amp;quot; Julia&amp;#039;s mother, a public-health worker who lives in Pittsburgh, offered to take her daughter in, but Julia wasn&amp;#039;t interested. &amp;quot;Julia and I talked superficially about her coming here,&amp;quot; says her mother, Ellen. &amp;quot;But she&amp;#039;s an independent woman. Coming home at the age of 30 would feel like a failure to her.&amp;quot; Meanwhile, Julia was fending off Bill&amp;#039;s large family, who were calling insisting she forgive him, minimizing his behavior, and suggesting that she return money she&amp;#039;d taken from their joint bank account when she fled. Julia tells her story on autopilot, as if she&amp;#039;s recounting the tale of someone else&amp;#039;s life, but her mother can&amp;#039;t talk about it for too long before crying. &amp;quot;When I first saw her, she was so, kind of hollow,&amp;quot; Ellen says. &amp;quot;And here she was with her little five-month belly. It was clear to me that she was so depressed and couldn&amp;#039;t figure out what to do. And I said, `You know, you don&amp;#039;t have to have this baby.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; What Ellen meant, of course, was that Julia could have an abortion. &amp;quot;I asked her, `How do you feel about that?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Ellen says. &amp;quot;We started playing out scenarios: `I have the baby, and I don&amp;#039;t get a job. Where do I get the money? I haven&amp;#039;t taken the bar exam.&amp;#039; But the crux of the whole thing was we were frightened for the baby and Julia, emotionally and physically. We didn&amp;#039;t trust Bill.&amp;quot; Terminating the pregnancy was &amp;quot;not an option,&amp;quot; Julia says, because she&amp;#039;d already bonded with her unborn child. Her mother&amp;#039;s mention of abortion did, however, spur her to think there were alternatives beyond &amp;quot;me in a total panic, unemployed, raising a newborn alone.&amp;quot; Adoption, for instance. As soon as Julia uttered the word, Beth says, &amp;quot;It was like a huge fog left the room. It just seemed like the only thing to do.&amp;quot; Julia went on adoption websites that night. &amp;quot;She was like, `This is what will happen,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Beth says. &amp;quot;\u2009`We will check out all the agencies.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; About 15,000 U.S. mothers a year relinquish their infants to adoption, making up a rather small proportion of the country&amp;#039;s 135,000 annual adoptions (roughly 40 percent are step-parent adoptions; another 57,000 are foster children), according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, an information clearinghouse. The overall numbers have been up and down over the years, from a low of 50,000 in 1944 to a high of 175,000 in 1970. (International adoptions have plunged from nearly 23,000 in 2004 to just above 11,000 in 2010, largely because due to allegations of corruption and child-selling and because foreign leaders can score political points by resisting so-called modern colonialism, adoptions have been shut down or severely restricted in countries such as Nepal and Ethiopia.) The explanations for the drop in domestic adoptions are perhaps obvious: increased access to contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the destigmatization of single motherhood, especially among whites. For instance, a Donaldson study revealed that between 1989 and 1995, 1.7 percent of children born to never-married white women were placed for adoption, compared with 19.3 percent before 1973. A detailed demographic portrait of women who give up their children isn&amp;#039;t available, but in the experience of Richard Pearlman, who runs the open adoption agency that Julia eventually enlisted, her situation\u2014older, still married, professional\u2014is unusual but not unheard of. &amp;quot;Even though the perception is that it&amp;#039;s teenagers who place children for adoption, they usually don&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s because the decision is a thoughtful decision. If it was just based on emotion, nobody would ever place a child.&amp;quot; At his agency, the average age of women who relinquish their children is 22, but Pearlman says he&amp;#039;s worked with women as young as 13 and as old as 40. &amp;quot;What often drives a decision to place a child is a sense of lack of resources, usually financial,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We recently placed a child from a couple who were students at a university who felt they weren&amp;#039;t in a position to raise a child. One was a doctoral student.&amp;quot; In a perverse way, Julia was well situated to give up a child. She went from being pregnant in a place where she barely knew a soul to a new town where, unemployed, she could essentially hide out for the rest of her pregnancy. There were no colleagues or neighbors to pry\u2014how to explain nine months of pregnancy but no baby to show for it?\u2014and Bill&amp;#039;s family had backed off. The apartment she and Beth shared was essentially her home for unwed mothers.  There, Julia listed the qualities she wanted in adoptive parents:1. Married and have been together for a long time2. In love. Strange, I know, but sometimes you can just tell3. Educated, minimum of bachelor&amp;#039;s degree, and, ideally, graduate degrees, too4. Financially stable, so that my son would have the option, theoretically, of private school, music lessons, summer camp, sports, etc.5. Value honesty6. Value family and friends above all else; spend lots of time with both7. Infertile, having tried to become pregnant on their own8. Stay-at-home mom (or dad) Once she decided on adoption, Julia initiated divorce proceedings against Bill, which he didn&amp;#039;t contest. And, at seven months pregnant, she flew back down South to ask him to sign away his parental rights. They sat together on the couch in their old apartment, she says, while she employed all the lawyerly logic she could muster to persuade him to go along. &amp;quot;So much of my effort was going toward keeping him as calm as possible, though the window of scariness had passed,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I had to do this weird dance, trying to be friendly. We spent hours crying and talking. At one point, he wanted to give me a foot rub.&amp;quot; At another point, he told her that he had to see his child. &amp;quot;I said, `I am going to do everything in my power to keep you from playing a role in my child&amp;#039;s life.&amp;#039; He was not going to take my child to a playground.&amp;quot; Julia sketched out what a custody battle would look like if he resisted. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not pretty, and I didn&amp;#039;t want my son to have to deal with it.&amp;quot; Bill relented, but during the final weeks of the pregnancy, he waffled, calling the adoption agency and threatening not to sign the papers within the 72-hour window after the baby&amp;#039;s birth. Julia forged on with her plan, studying profiles of prospective parents from Pearlman. A couple of weeks after the meeting with Bill, she found them: an infertile professional couple in their early thirties who already had a one-year-old adopted son. They&amp;#039;d begun dating in high school; she was a stay-at-home mom. Julia met with them in the company of an adoption counselor, and then, with her due date drawing near, she asked them over for dinner. &amp;quot;I wanted to talk to the couple in detail about Bill. I didn&amp;#039;t want to seem bitter or angry, but I was worried about what contact Bill might try to have with the child. I wanted them to protect the child.&amp;quot; Five days later, Julia went into early labor. The adoptive mother met her at the hospital, as did Beth, who arrived in time to see the birth. &amp;quot;It was quick. The head appeared, then he was suddenly all the way out. The adoptive mother had tears streaming down her face, and I was weeping,&amp;quot; Beth says. &amp;quot;Julia had her head turned away and didn&amp;#039;t look down.&amp;quot; Julia was busy talking to herself. &amp;quot;When I met this couple, I knew they were his parents,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I continued to carry him, but he was not mine anymore. I dreamed I said goodbye to the baby a day or two before he was born.&amp;quot; Julia left the hospital the next day without stopping in the nursery\u2014the baby was in an incubator because he was five weeks early\u2014but a few days later, she took a friend&amp;#039;s advice to visit her son to say goodbye in real life. &amp;quot;My gut reaction was not to do it, but I drove to the hospital when I knew no one else was going to be there. And I just bawled uncontrollably as he slept. It was the worst thing I&amp;#039;ve done in my entire life.&amp;quot; Bill showed up at the hospital too and signed away his parental rights. Julia never saw him. He then shipped out to Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of her wrenching visit to the hospital, Julia says she felt, surprisingly, relieved and &amp;quot;almost happy\u2014not happy to lose him but proud that I chose not to terminate the pregnancy, which would have been the easy way out.&amp;quot; (She adds, however, that she doesn&amp;#039;t judge women who choose abortion: &amp;quot;I am pro-choice, and it was a very real option.&amp;quot;) But fairly quickly, her feelings turned. Financially strapped, Julia had to plunge into job-\u00ADhunting but found it hard to explain the yearlong gap in her employment history without sounding weirdly cryptic (though telling the truth seemed impossible). &amp;quot;I must&amp;#039;ve applied for 150 jobs,&amp;quot; she says. She also desperately missed what she calls &amp;quot;the old Bill\u2014the man I thought I&amp;#039;d married&amp;quot;\u2014and such girl-power rituals as burning her wedding dress the day their divorce went through didn&amp;#039;t help much. And, all of a sudden, she noticed children and families everywhere. &amp;quot;It was hard to see strollers, but it was also hard to see playgrounds, mothers and babies, little boys with their parents, pregnant women, married couples.&amp;quot; The list goes on. It&amp;#039;s now been more than a year since she gave up her son, and Julia says she&amp;#039;s no longer plagued by sadness\u2014nor has she regretted the decision, which makes her pretty typical, at least according to the limited data available about modern adoptions. Most studies of birth mothers have been anecdotal, but one of the more rigorous efforts, by Columbia University public-health researchers, compared 272 young women who relinquished their children with a control group who became parents. After four years, 78 percent of those who&amp;#039;d given up their babies said they were &amp;quot;very certain&amp;quot; they&amp;#039;d make the same decision again, as did 91 percent of those who didn&amp;#039;t\u2014a slightly higher level of regret that &amp;quot;to some extent is to be expected, as it is unlikely a mother would say she regrets keeping her child,&amp;quot; noted a report from the Donaldson Institute. In the same study, 9 percent of birth mothers said they were experiencing extreme grief four years out; another 7 percent reported &amp;quot;some&amp;quot; grief, while 55 percent felt none. Overall, the &amp;quot;placers&amp;quot; were more likely than the parents to be content with their lives\u2014as measured by attitudes toward work, finances, relationships, optimism about the future\u2014though that was largely because women who kept their children were poorer, the researchers concluded. The Columbia study was published in 1997, and all the subjects had been involved in some form of open adoption\u2014they helped choose their babies&amp;#039; parents, met the couple, and/or had continuing contact with them\u2014a situation that most adoption experts think is less traumatic than the highly secretive process commonplace well into the 1980s. Then, babies were whisked away to unknown destinations the minute they were born, leaving birth mothers prey to intense worry about their children&amp;#039;s well-being. In those days, women also were much more likely to feel that they&amp;#039;d been coerced into adoption, and, because of the shame attached to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, suffered the loss totally on their own, with no one to confide in. Julia definitely believes that the peace she&amp;#039;s made with her decision is due in part to the support of friends and family, as well as visits to a therapist. She says she&amp;#039;s doing well\u2014she&amp;#039;s dating someone who befriended her while she was still pregnant, and she&amp;#039;s found a job in a law-related field. She&amp;#039;s converted to Judaism, her father&amp;#039;s religion, which gives her a sense of meaning, she says, and also has become a devoted practitioner of yoga. &amp;quot;I sorted a lot out `on the mat,&amp;#039; as they say,&amp;quot; Julia writes in an \u00ADe-mail. &amp;quot;Often I had an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, to be alive, that the baby was alive and well, that both of us survived this ordeal\u2014what else is there?&amp;quot; Still, spending time with Julia, everything doesn&amp;#039;t seem quite all right. She never wants to return to being a lawyer, she says, nor does she ever consider getting married or having another child, despite how much she wanted the first one. And her friend Beth, with whom Julia continues to live, treats her gingerly: cooking for her, patting her on the hand, smoothing her hair. Watching Julia, I am reminded of an observation made by Betty Jean Lifton, a psychologist and one of the country&amp;#039;s leading adoption commentators until her death in 2010. &amp;quot;The social worker said it would hurt for a while, and then [the birth mothers] would forget, as if they had experienced nothing more serious than a nine-month stomachache,&amp;quot; Lifton wrote in Lost &amp;amp;amp; Found: The Adoption Experience. &amp;quot;But they found they could not go back to the life they had left behind because they had become different people in the process of becoming mothers.&amp;quot; Julia says her son&amp;#039;s first birthday brought back a rush of feelings, but she found comfort in the message the adoptive family sent her the night they brought her/their son home: Hi Julia, Yes, baby is finally home. He didn&amp;#039;t get home until a bit after 9:00\u2014so we&amp;#039;re still visiting with his new and excited extended family. There is no doubt we are lucky to have him and lucky to have met you. His name actually means blessed...and that&amp;#039;s exactly how we feel. We thought about you on Saturday and your visit with him, it made us sad for you. We know you have been through a lot and admire the strength you carried through such a difficult time\u2014a virtue we&amp;#039;ll certainly talk highly of when he is older. We&amp;#039;ll definitely be in touch. Please know you will always be in our hearts and we are only a phone call away\u2014if you want to talk, want an update, want to see pictures...we&amp;#039;re here. Thank you for changing our lives and thank you for completing our family. Love, Mom, Dad, Brother, and Baby "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a11869/im-not-whats-best-for-my-baby-613884/>