Continued from the previous post ...

By the time I was 23, I was a single mom with two little kids struggling to go to school and work. For a while I worked three jobs ... one full time and two part time ... one being necessary just to pay for child care while I worked the other two.

I found my bootstraps, I hung on to them tightly and pulled myself up over and over and over again. My mom helped as she could, as did my in-laws, and it was thanks to their efforts that we had a roof over our heads for some of those years.

I raised my kids, now 37 and 35, and they are both wonderful people I am so very happy to know and love. I have a 5-year-old granddaughter who's a wonder of the universe.

I have no regrets.

Or do I?

I don't think it's possible to regret your children. It's not possible for me, anyway. I suffer frequent and powerful pangs of guilt for aspects of my parenting, and wish like anything I'd been more able to provide more for them in every way. (I won't even go into how guilt-bruised I am from moving around the planet from them.) Even though they're well grown, I'd give anything for a magic wand I could wave to make any troubles they might have go away.

One of my greatest joys in adopting as an older parent has been getting to do it over again, and much, much better, although this does tend to highlight my failures the first time around.

Would my oldest daughter have been better off if I had made a different choice? Could her childhood have been so much richer that she'd benefit now in a million ways? There's no way I can know, but I do ask the question.

How different would my life have been if I'd relinquished her to adoption? That's also beyond the range of what I can know.

What I do know, however ... what has become crystal clear and brittle bright, is that in a world where right things happen and wrong things don't I would never have been pregnant at seventeen. If I had been able to protect myself, I would have.

My youth and my future ... my life as it could have been ... all were taken from me because people in positions of power set me up.

In an effort to control my generation, we were sacrificed ... well fed, nicely dressed, then laid out on a slab where our bodies were used in the full measure and our youth and futures were cut from us, then disposed of in ways that assured we'd never find them again.

Continued ...