Mother's Day Paradox

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and as an adoptive mom who has been online since long before Google and Facebook, I am deeply immersed in social media in ways that are natural, comfortable, and familiar to me.  Everything that has mattered to me in my world has come to me through online interaction...my home, most of my vehicles, my best friend, and you might even say my husband despite the fact that our relationship pre-dates the internet as we know it, for he and I met talking on the CB radio when I was 13 years old, so maybe that can be considered the precursor to the internet.  At least it was relationship development first without face to face contact. 

Because of the past 20 years lived online in the adoption world, it is inevitable that I will see multiple memes about birth moms as my adoptive mom friends share how grateful they are for the children they have been blessed to parent.  Quotes like the one above abound, which speak to the love a birth mom felt for their child, or about the sacrifice they experience in lovingly making an adoption plan and placing their child with others to raise.  While I have absolutely no doubt that for many, many birth moms, these sentiments ring quite true, what do you do when that may not be the case for your own child? 

Isn't it presumptive to assume that every birth mom deeply loved their child?  Isn't it projecting to assume that in every case, the birth mom felt all we do for the child we have parented all these years?

I contend that history sometimes tell a different story, that not all children or young adults have a "Fairy-God-Birth-Mother", and we run the risk of being dishonest or causing emotional harm when we contend that birth mothers always loved their children, planned for them to have a better life, and will ache with yearning once their children are no longer with them.

That sounds pretty, but it just isn't always the case.  It can be a dangerous and  utterly false narrative that can create great internal conflict for the other members of the adoption triad.

There are uncaring birth moms, there are birth moms who don't think often about the child they no longer parent, there are birth moms who are addicts and alcoholics who can never pull themselves away from the lure of chemical dependency.  There are birth mothers who are emotionally unstable or are mired in mental health issues with few treatment options in foreign lands.  Then, there are some who are narcissistic, selfish, and calloused.  And sometimes, in rare instances, they are murderers...

Just like there are adoptive moms with the same traits. 

Adopting a child doesn't make you a saint, despite popular opinion. 

Some families know their birth moms, they can present honest information, and sometimes that information is as loving as we always wish it could be.  There are birth moms who did make a plan with great intent, they care deeply and work hard at open adoption efforts, they are good and decent women who did, indeed, make the ultimate sacrifice in placing their child for adoption.

But what about the rest of us, for whom little is known and few facts exist?  What about when there is information, and it does not allow for creating a fairy tale of a sacrificial birth mom?  How about families, like ours, who have had to spend years and years dealing with the emotional wreckage that birth parents caused...the trauma, neglect, anger, and soul deep pain?  What do those sweet Mother's Day memes that acknowledge the birth mom and state falsehoods mean when they really do not apply in our own situation?

You know what we do?

We keep parenting, we keep loving, we share with honesty and we cry alongside our children.  We don't talk about thoughtfully crafted adoption plans, instead we speak to abandonment, we explain addiction and its hold, and we say we wish we had a better narrative...a sweeter one...to offer.

And then, you know what else we do?

We grieve in private, we beg God for grace, and then we offer gratitude for the birth mom, who at the very least, chose to give birth.

Oh, how grateful we are!  Yes, even for the anger often vented at us for years, even for the thousands upon thousands of dollars spent in an effort to repair broken hearts and sometimes broken bodies.  We are grateful for the opportunity to watch a child heal and discard the hard, protective shell to reveal their softer, more vulnerable and open selves.  We are grateful for the shy smiles that eventually come, for the first time they relax in our arms when being held, and for the years we will have together despite all the years we lost.

In our case, between all five of our children, we lost 32 years of parenting time with our beloved ones.  That shocked me when I added it up recently.  Consider that, then tell me there is a rush for any of us to move too quickly through this time in our lives with young adults. Few understand at all that it takes two or three years just to feel like you are REALLY family, and for some of us, that same amount of time to develop English enough where deeper communication can be shared.

So this Mother's Day, though we acknowledge the reality that is true for our particular circumstances, that we can not necessarily claim the great love of birth moms in each and every case, or that the facts are simply unknown and we can not assign blame nor love, we can always, always be grateful for life, for what we share now as a family, and for all seven of us surviving years without one another.  Trust me, Dominick and I were together a looooong time without these awesome people...17 years including marriage and dating.  We were as lonely and yearning as they were for the love we knew was missing.

So, thanks birth moms.  No matter how conflicting the truth might be, gratitude is always what I feel when thinking of you, even with hard stories we know a bit about, even with the lack of your own persective or answers to "why".  I am grateful for the nine months you carried someone I love so much.  I am thankful you gave birth.  And, because I am old enough, scarred enough y life myself, and imperfect enough, I may acknowledge the truth, but I have also tried to keep from demonizing you...always.  Life is hard, circumstances are sometimes out of our control, and in your cases, I know I can never, ever fully comprehend the sort of poverty that surrounded you, the lack of supports, and the condemnation you may have experienced in a more conservative society if you were pregnant out of wedlock.

Thinking of you this day...