Mother’s Day sends me wondering, just where is the woman who brought me into this world? Over the years I have had an active imagination about her whereabouts or her identity. She’s been famous, she’s been a traveller, she’s been poor, and super wealthy. She’s been a writer, and actress, and a zoo keeper. Every time I imagine who she is she’s someone and something different. And, every time I think of her she’s also always been the same – my mother.
There have been many times when I have doubted that I really was adopted. It could have all been just a mean joke my parents thought they’d play on me. Their way of explaining away my differences to their family and friends. My younger sister wasn’t adopted… why did I have to be? But as I grew older and slightly wiser, I began to appreciate the fact that I was adopted for what it meant to me and my family.
It is hard to say who I respect more: my birth mother or my adoptive mother. My adoptive mother, and the woman I call, “mom,” made the decision to open her heart to another woman’s child and raise it as her own, while my birth mother, knowing she may not have been capable of providing for me, made the decision to trust that someone out there would be more able to do just that.
How do you thank or appreciate an absent or unknown mother? It isn’t the same as a mother with whom you have spent your entire life fighting with or a mother who has passed away. There isn’t anything that is known. No address to send flowers nor a headstone to visit, just an overwhelming feeling of curiosity.
I have an amazing respect for mothers. All mothers. Single mothers who sacrifice to care for their children, mother’s of murdered children, and mother’s of children behind bars, mothers married to soldiers off fighting wars, mothers with children off fighting wars, mothers of children with cancer, mothers of children with mental and physical challenges, the mothers of my closest friends, and mothers I don’t even know, the mother of my partner, my adoptive mother, my birth mother.
When I think about Mother’s Day it really sends me wondering about just how blessed I am to know more than one Mom.
GoHumble 