A very special thank you to Kyle for sharing his story.

Happy Young Family

The journey from start to this day has been a learning experience. In the beginning it was very hard. I will tell you about the start of everything. My ex and I were just starting out in Pittsburgh PA when she got pregnant. I was only 19 years old and she was 20. We talked about what we could do. We didn’t have anything. We were living in a studio apartment, had no extra money and were just scraping by. I was only making $9 an hour and had a single cab truck. We had no room for a baby. That’s when we talked about adoption.

During everything I felt so scared and so alone being as though I had no family around. It was a hard decision to make. It was also very hard because he was born September 1st and my birthday is September 3rd.

My thoughts [about adoption] were that I was very scared. I didn’t know anything about adoption. I have always heard the bad stories. I didn’t know if I was making the right choice for my son. My feelings have changed A LOT. The 6th year mark is coming up and my feeling changed so much. Now, today, I feel that I did make the right choice. I see how happy he is and he got everything that I couldn’t give him.

I have a very open relationship with the adoptive parents. It is the best thing I could ask for. Having that open relationship, I feel, has helped me though all of this because I get to see how he is doing. When Nate was first born we would get emails every week. They would tell us EVERYTHING about what he did that week. They will send us Christmas cards and a photo book every year. Now that he is older we do not get a lot of emails but that’s because we have them on Facebook and we can text them at any time.

We are always invited to all his birthdays. It’s amazing seeing him grow up. This means the world to me. I can always see him happy. He is always traveling the states. It has helped me to know that I made the right choice.

Sometimes I am scared to talk about my story. I am always scared about being judged. Every single time I talk to someone about my story everyone seems to always say that my story is amazing and I should talk about it more.