It’s that time again, isn’t it.
Time for Mother’s Day and Birth Mother’s Day.
If anyone has read my blog long enough they already know my
feelings and opinions about Birth Mother’s Day.
And I don’t want to go there again this year.
Instead, I just want a post that remembers the many mothers
who have lost their children through adoption who will hurt this Mother’s Day
while so many others celebrate.
Remembers those who face days where they can’t stop the
tears. Can’t stop the pain.
Those who are hurting so bad inside but are forced to hide
it from so many.
The mothers who had to learn the reality of coercion in the
worst of ways, the loss of their child.
The ones who had to face such terrible heart-breaking loss
all over again when their promised open adoptions closed.
Nobody wants to think or acknowledge loss and pain on a day
like Mother’s Day. But the fact is,
adoption has, and will continue, to cause many women to suffer on a day meant
to celebrate the mothers they became when they carried and gave birth to their
babies.
Believing they weren’t good enough for their children,
signing a paper to terminate their rights, did not strip them of a mother’s
love. It didn’t erase the reality that
they are, and always will be, connected to their child.
So many adoptive parents will celebrate on Sunday without
realizing that the loss and pain they may have struggled with during the time
when they were unable to have a child of their own, is now the terrible loss
and pain their child’s First Mother must live the rest of her life with as
Mother’s Day comes year after year and they are forced to remember the child
that is theirs, but isn’t.
And so much of society will never know about the many
mothers who suffer and ache on this particular Sunday in May. If they think of loss on that day, they will
think of women who have faced infertility.
Mothers who have lost a child through death. Even mothers who may be estranged from their
children.
But most won’t think of the mothers who have lost their
children to adoption because, so often, society itself, encourages these
mothers to suffer such a terrible loss.
It’s actually believed their pain is somehow worth it, somehow deserved
for whatever failing these mothers are judged to have.
They are the forgotten mothers. The invisible ones who aren’t expected to
suffer from the loss of their children.
And yet, every single one of them deserves to be
remembered. Regardless of their
experience, of whether not they are judged to be happy or bitter First Mothers,
they deserve the acknowledgement that it is a terrible loss for any mother, who
wanted her baby, to face a situation where she believed, for whatever reason,
she couldn’t keep her own son or daughter and must, instead, give them up to
others to raise.
It’s time to stop turning a blind eye to the hurt so many
First Mothers suffer. Time to remember
them and their loss, their pain. Hold
them in our thoughts on a day that can, so often, remind them of everything
they don’t have. Of children that are
theirs but aren’t there in their arms.
Of a motherhood they have and yet so many, including themselves at
times, want only to deny.
It’s the very least that they deserve. The very least we can do for them so that
they no longer are forced to be invisible with their pain. No longer forgotten.
