What does Mother’s Day mean to me?

It’s a day of loss and sadness. The way I feel on Mother’s Day reminds me of my birthday. It’s very difficult. I know many other adoptees feel the same way. They have told me so.

It’s a remind of the women who should love me most giving me away and giving her right to parent me away to strangers. She never wanted to be my mother. She never wanted me to be attached to her or call her “Mom” or “Mommy”. She never wanted to talk to me or get to know me. She never wanted to celebrate Mother’s Day, not with me anyway.

I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like if she was alive and she wanted me in her life. I would go pick her up for Mother’s Day lunch, and spend the day with her. Take her flowers and a card and a gift, maybe…

So many might say how do you lose something that was never something to begin with? Easy, think of your Mother dying giving birth to you or your father gets in a car wreck when you were one year old and you never really getting to know him. The sorrow that comes with those two losses is the same sorrow that can come for adoptees but our loss isn’t just one person, it’s an entire family. It’s our Mother, Father, Grandmother and Grandfather and Siblings and Aunts and Uncles and Cousins that are gone forever never to be discovered or found. This is if the adoption industry had its way. This is the biggest loss adoptees will ever experience.

Mother’s Day is full of triggers for many adoptees. It makes a difference when you see everyone with their mother’s but you are not with yours. You log into your social media sites and you see your timelines flooding with pictures mothers and daughters that look alike and you will never get to experience that. You see 3 or 4 generations of mothers and grandmothers lined up all looking alike. Makes me so sad because I can’t help but wonder if they only knew how much that moment or picture might mean to those who will never get that chance. It’s tough. Very tough.

I haven’t spoken to my adoptive mom in over a year. It’s next to impossible for me to consider her a mother to me. The last contact I had with her I wrote her a list of boundaries she needed to accept before she could be around my children. Things like picking all her pill bottles up, not sleeping all the time, not trying to make them feel guilty for her being “Alone”. They deserve a happy healthy grandmother, and she has never replied to my list so I have had no contact with her. She is very emotionally draining and she needs some serious psychiatric help before I ever consider having her in my life again. I have had to set boundaries, and I would rather not have her in my life than deal with her emotional drama and manipulative behavior. This is another loss I think about a lot on Mother’s Day. I ask myself if I would feel different if she was different? I will never know the answer to that but what I do know is that the original trauma of being separated from my first mother happened BEFORE the adoption took place. My reason in mentioning this is because no matter how my adoptive family was or wasn’t the trauma is still there. It has just added to it.

This journey of discovering my first family has been the journey of a lifetime for me. My life will never be the same now that I finally have the answers I deserved my whole life. I believe this mother’s day I will reflect on the fact that I met my birth mother 1 x, and even when she rejected me at least now I know. So many other adoptees will never get that privilege. As I try to celebrate Mother’s Day with my own children, the loss is so great It’s hard to think of anything else. But I will try to put on a happy face and smile, for my kids…