Teen Mom Catelynn Lowell claims she’s ‘missing out on getting to know’ daughter Carly 12 years after her adoption
TEEN Mom Catelynn Lowell claimed she’s “missing out on getting to know” her daughter, Carly, 12 years after her adoption.
The reality TV star and her husband, Tyler Baltierra, are currently expecting their fourth child together.
Follow all our latest news & stories on Teen Mom.
In a clip for tonight’s episode of Teen Mom OG, the couple reminisced about their decision to put their daughter up for adoption back in 2009.
Catelynn says in a voiceover: “We’ve been trying to get pregnant so we can’t help but think of our first daughter, Carly, who we placed for adoption.
“Because of Covid, we haven’t seen her in two years so I feel like we’re missing out on getting to know her.
“Communication with her adoptive parents, Brandon and Teresa, has always been complicated.”
In the clip, Catelynn and Tyler get together with their adoption counselor Dawn to discuss their feelings and what they could potentially do to improve their relationship with Carly, who was adopted at birth.
As they sat together, the three of them talked about how, even after knowing they made the right decision, Tyler and Catelynn struggled with the guilt and said they sometimes wished they hadn’t gone through with the adoption.
The show also showed scenes from previous seasons where Tyler and Catelynn had to sit down with Carly’s adoptive parents, who expressed that she was now with them and they had to trust their decisions with her.
Catelynn continued in voiceover: “I don’t want to offend them with how we reach out to her.”
When talking to the counselor, the Teen Mom OG stars revealed they hadn’t reached out to Carly’s adoptive parents to FaceTime with her or send them pictures of her because “they don’t want them around and space feels like the best thing for them.”
The counselor then suggested that they need to make the effort to at least try and reach out to them “to start the conversation.”
She continued: “There’s a child you both love tremendously. Everyone knows their position in the relationship right now but in order to build a relationship with Carly as a person and an individual, that’s going to require you guys to come out of your comfort zone.
“I want you to be able to say to Carly someday ‘Hey, we sent you letters, we sent you cards, we sent texts, we tried to FaceTime.’ And hopefully, she’s going to already know that because those things are normative and she’s going to be able to part of that process.”
Dawn added: “You can’t expect a relationship unless you make the investment.”
Tyler and Catelynn were the only couple who put up their child for adoption on 16 & Pregnant as they recognized they were too young to provide her with the life she deserved.
In a recent interview, Catelynn confessed that she’s never seen the 16 & Pregnant episode where she and Tyler gave Carly up.
She said she’d like to watch it with Carly when the child is older.
She told ET Online: “When I am older and Carly is in her 20s or 30s, I’m blessed to be able to have a copy of my 16 and Pregnant episode that I can show her to.”
Catelynn went on: “I mean, right there is like, I don’t even have to say too much. We can watch it.
“Then I can answer questions that she has because it was so 100 percent real.”
Carly has gone on to have a private life with her adoptive parents Brandon and Teresa Davis.
Last month, the Teen Mom star admitted she and Tyler haven’t seen Carly in more than a year because of the Covid pandemic.
She told In Touch Weekly: “[She and Tyler] didn’t see [Carly] [in 2020] at all because of the pandemic.
“Like nobody was, you know, flying anywhere, going anywhere. So yeah. That never happened. That didn’t happen this year.”
However, they have been able to stay in contact through technology as the reality TV star explained: “We’ve done a FaceTime, like Novalee and [Carly] FaceTimed.
“But yeah, like visit-wise, it’s just kind of up in the air until things calm down or people are vaccinated.”
However, she also revealed that they don’t regret putting her up for adoption as she said: “I think sometimes we think about how weird it would be to have an 11-year-old right now.
“That would be crazy. We know that we made the right decision. We don’t ever second guess that decision at all.”
She added of how the adoption impacted her relationship with her husband, Tyler, 29: “Honestly, we both really do agree that if we would have parented her at the age of 17 – with everything that we went through as fiancés, as boyfriend and girlfriend, as married people together – we don’t really think honestly that we would be together.”
Most read in Entertainment
She added: “If you throw a child in the mix, mental health stuff, addiction stuff, relationship stuff, it makes it 20 times harder so we never regret that decision at all because we just look at what she has now and we know we did the right thing.”
Catelynn and Tyler are parents to daughters Novalee, six, and Vaeda, two.
The reality star is currently pregnant and expecting a baby girl with Tyler in September after suffering two miscarriages.