CARRYING provides a lens into adoption from the untold perspective of its central figures: birth moms. The feature-length documentary serves as an intimate portrayal of being pregnant and questioning whether you have the support, resources, or ability to raise your child. 

Observed with quiet proximity, CARRYING offers a new perspective on the families we inherit and create, and the profound responsibility of carrying another person through love, uncertainty, and loss. The film invites audiences to sit with moral and emotional complexity, asking universal questions about care, belonging, and what we owe one another.

Ultimately, the story reveals all that we carry as women - the impossible choices we make, the incredible strength we possess, and the quiet sacrifices we bear.

“I wish it could be me.” These were the final words that my daughter’s birth mom whispered to me after placing her baby into my arms. I can still hear the tremble in her voice as she uttered the words that made me a mom. As an adoptive mom, I'll never fully understand the depth of her grief, but I know this: grief like that only exists because love does. I want my daughters to understand that, so I started making this movie.

As  an adoptive mom, I am often cast as the hero of the adoption story. My daughters’ birth moms are cast as the villains. But why am I perceived as being more deserving of my children than the women who gave life to them? What does this perception show us about our broader understanding of motherhood? Of women? 

As a viewer, I most appreciate stories in which the storyteller is wrestling with a burden. And through their story, you feel them carry it, feel its weight, interrogate it and unpack it. The burdens I am wrestling with in this story are a set of questions: 

• What does it mean to choose to become a mother, or to choose not to?

• What judgments surround women with unplanned pregnancies? Why do they differ for men?

• Who do we deem ‘fit’ to be a parent? And what does class, race, age and marital status have to do with that ‘fitness’? 

For women who choose adoption, how can we understand their decisions through a lens of empathy and nuance? Too often, our adoption narratives begin with what was found. But the reality is that the adoption story actually begins with loss. How can we reframe the story of adoption to decenter its adoptive “heroes” and instead pull focus on its central figures: birth moms.