Renee and I met on a family day picnic for adoptive parents at Spence Chapin (an adoption agency in NYC). We’re Spence Mommies. Automatic sisters whether or not we ever clock in the hours one might imagine necessary to forge a bloodless bond. The shared experience of adoption ties us. Period. I asked Renee to write a piece for the Last Girl On the Hill series on motherhood and Mother’s Day after adoption. She offers a brave collection of words on the bittersweet challenge of finding and redefining oneself within the context of a personal journey. Reading her words made me remember the complex dance of reconciliation with God and ourselves. Renee shares her story. Listen.
When Lisha asked me to write about my first Mother’s Day after adoption, I eagerly agreed thinking of the charming anecdotes I could spin of a beautiful day with the babies I had always wanted. It’s funny how memory works though. When faced with the blank page, other memories eclipsed the ones I wanted to recall. I couldn’t remember much about the first Mother’s Day after my twins came home. I know it had to be pleasant: that my husband bought me flowers and there were phone calls from my friends and family. But I don’t remember the day as particularly special. What I can remember however, quite vividly, are the Mother’s Day before it; Mother’s Days where I was waiting, grieving, trying to put on a good face while family members struggled to say encouraging things, things I often took the wrong way. At first, I was consumed with my inability to have children biologically. Later, the anger seeped in when we did not quickly find a suitable match for adoption. I remember the waiting…the waiting….oh, the waiting.
There was more. My sons from my husband’s first marriage struggled with the absence of their biological mother, which compounded the issue. I knew that they saw me as a mother figure and loved me, but I also knew they yearned for her. Most of the time, we were happy forging ahead as a family. We created our own rites and rituals, but on Mother’s Day, I could tell they missed her. I felt like a fraud because I couldn’t make it better for them, and I was angry with her for relocating so far away. We just tried to make the best of what was clearly a complicated, emotionally-wrought day. I don’t know how we made it through those trying early years, but thankfully we did.
By the time our babies did arrive, I had waited a very long six years. No one can sustain the amalgam of emotions accompanying infertility for that amount of time without coming to peace with it, even only nominally. In retrospect, I realize that I suffered from a rigid notion of what it meant to be a mother, and the only way to move forward was to challenge that notion and find an alternative way to think about motherhood.
In her inspiring 2009 TED talk, award-winning Nigerian novelist Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie notes that there is danger in the single story that keeps us away from seeing the realities of our and other people’s lives as they truly are; we see one thing — the “script” that society sets for us — and the power of that narrative casts a shadow over other, equally compelling experiences of the world. Despite witnessing many models of motherhood throughout my life, I always expected that mine would fit into the fairy-tale, cookie cutter mommy narrative.
When it didn’t, it took strength, faith, and prayers (not necessarily my own) to get to a place where I could recognize that holding on to that script had the potential to destroy me and my family. In the language of drug addiction, I had to “hit bottom” before I could move on to find my own story of motherhood wherein I could encourage my sons to resolve their issues with their biological mother and teach my twins to leave a space in their heart for theirs. In a space where there’s room for multiple narratives of motherhood, there is room for – no, there’s grace in — generosity of heart.
I had to learn that being myself, being my best self, was the only thing I needed to be a mother. I had to open my eyes and see that all around me there were other stories of mothering/motherhood. Here are just a few:
• The aunts, grandmothers, neighbors, and teachers, who babysit, feed, clothe, take in, and subsidize the children of their loved ones when those loved ones cannot do it by themselves.
• The mothers who love not because their children resemble someone in their family but because these children ARE.
• Fathers who are both mother and father to their children.
• The mothers who allow others to parent their children because they know they can’t.
The single story of motherhood gets a lot of attention on Mother’s Day, so I would like to salute the ones that don’t fit so easily into it – the ones, like me, who had to create another narrative.
Happy Mother’s Day!
