You Only Have One Mother

. . . unless you were adopted or raised by a secondary “mother”.

An adoptee has two mothers – the one who gestated and gave birth to us and the adoptive mother who raised us. For adoptees in reunion, there was the initial relationship that may have been almost immediately terminated post-birth. Then that child shows up decades later ? This is one facet of the adoptive experience.

Some adoptees are closer to their adoptive mother and feel a kind of strain in their attempted relationship with their original mother. There is a lifetime of working on getting along and growing a lasting relationship with the adoptive mother.

For many original mothers, their “relationship” to the child they lost to adoption is rooted in heartbreak and loss. For both the adoptee and the woman who gave birth to us, there may have been a lifetime of loving someone from afar, someone we don’t really “know” in the usual sense – it can be hard to bring those lifelong fantasies down to Earth.

The in touch, in person reality will never match that fantasy we have harbored. It can take years before the original mother and her child – once separated – can feel a closer relationship.

For an adoptee, their two mothers will never be quite alike, they are simply different, that is the reality and they occupy different spaces in the life of any adoptee.

However, love is love and that is always true, even when one has two mothers.

Parallels

Parallels of Life – ART by Lena

The most fascinating thing for me about learning the truth of my family’s origins has been the parallels. Both of my parents were adoptees.

Both of my grandmothers lost their own mother at a young age.

Both of my grandmothers fathered my parents with a man much older, 20 years older, than they were.

Both of my grandmothers lost their children due to a lack of their family’s support and lack of paternal support.

There are contrasts as well. My maternal grandmother was actually married. Her father even signed the marriage license. Why then, did her husband leave her in her family home after only 4 months of marriage and her 4 months pregnant ? It is a question I will never be able to answer.

My paternal grandmother had an affair with a married man. I doubt that she knew he was married when she first began dating him but of course, he knew. His wife was over 20 years older than him and a private duty nurse. One can imagine he had the luxury of many nights when she was sitting at someone’s bedside. My grandmother was self-reliant and took care of the reality that she was pregnant on her own. He may have never even known . . . but she knew precisely and outed him in a photo album as a breadcrumb for me to discover many decades later.

These parallels may be a coincidence or they may somehow be part of the picture, the meanings, the reasons that things happened the way they did. I am simply grateful to be able to tell their stories now after 60+ years of not knowing about their actual existence.

Overburdened By A Need To Be Grateful

The adopted child has many challenges but one of the most unique may be this sense that they should be grateful to the adoptive parents for having taken them into the family.

Often unacknowledged is the loss that precedes all adoptions.

That loss is profound regardless of the reason the child was separated from its original parents to begin with. In that separation the child experiences many complicated emotions. There can be differences between the child and the adoptive family that become ever more obvious with the passage of time and that no one is at fault for – other than the fact of the adoption.

Such differences can include – ethnicity, physical features, preferences, and intellectual abilities, or being told they are somehow “special” or the “chosen one” by the family. Simply being adopted sets the child apart from most of their peers.

A syndrome referred to as being caused by the adoption itself leads to a strong desire to understand the mystery of having been adopted in the first place. A desire to know the people one has been born of and the conflicted feelings about wanting to know people who it seems to the child they have been rejected or abandoned by.

Even when the adoption is “open” (both sets of parents are at the least in contact with one another) or a “reunion” with the biological family occurs, differences in nurturing and life experiences may make even one’s genetic relations seem alien.