When is a mom really a mom? When do we get to stand up and take the recognition being handed out in the Hallmark card aisle and the pews at church? In the newspapers and May issues of women’s magazines? In the perfume and jewelry departments? In the breakfast-in-bed rooms and brunch-serving restaurants?
In my younger-I-know-it-all days I would have answered, “When you give birth and raise that child you get the card, the flowers, the hugs and kisses.” Then life experience expanded to include miscarriages and adoption. Despite feeling just as fully a mother on those occasions, my perception of myself did not always match the outside world’s opinion of me. Indeed I would be rich if I had a dime for every time I was asked if I was my Asian daughter’s “real mother?”
Thank Goodness that Western culture has come a long way since 1950’s adoption culture where the topic was not discussed in polite company and babies were handed off in clandestine meetings in distant towns. Back then there was no such thing as “Gotcha Day” celebrations, single-parent-adoption or picture books with titles like A Mother for Chaco or How I Was Adopted.
No publishing houses, or magazines devoted to nurturing the adoptive child, giving them room to touch, name, explore their wonderings. No support groups or parenting tomes to guide the adoptive parent in this “same, same, but different” child-parent relationship. No esteemed and experienced professionals to turn to when the broken heart of a child – who indeed knew despite not knowing – needed healing.
In my mother’s day – just a brief sixty years ago – if a child was adopted, they either came into the home as an infant, blissfully – and destined to stay that way – ignorant of their unfortunate existence or as a lamentable older child, a waif who was expected to be forever grateful for their rescue. Discussions of feelings were either not necessary – for how can one have feelings of loss, disconnect, confusion, if one does not know – or not appropriate, as feelings were best kept tamped down, swallowed like bitter medicine that was best digested quickly and then long forgotten. My own father-in-law left “orphaned” at two when his mother died in child birth was handed off by his father to his aunt, who loved and cared for him perhaps as her own, but nevertheless instructed him not to ever call her mother.
Asian culture is slowly working to catch up. Just this week another first in the adoption culture there gave me hope. An email come across my screen advising that the members of my former Singaporean adoption play group were being invited to be interviewed by the Straits Times – the equivalent of the NY Times for this well-populated tiny island nation off the tip of Malaysia. “Hallelujah!” I thought, “It’s about time.”
Just six years ago, when living there as an ex pat, I was witness to the ignorance of adoptive motherhood. It permeated my adopted daughter – and my – daily activities:
As I stood by her in the park, our children playing nearby, a neighbor confided how she had not yet told her daughter she was adopted. I looked over at her six-year-old gleefully chasing my daughter and pondered her existence – happily ignorant or a ticking bomb waiting to explode.
As I picked up my daughter from Occupational Therapy (she had sensory processing disorder) our therapist shared how she had six adoptive children in her practice but only one – my daughter – knew she was adopted. The average age of these children was five.
As I attended a conference offered as part of our adoption support group I discovered the country had just enacted a new regulation strongly suggesting that prospective adoptive parents attend a two-hour course on “how to disclose to your adoptive child the fact they were adopted.” The intended purpose of the rule was to increase disclosure, which was very low in Singapore.
As I browsed a well-known children’s book store I found only one book by a local Asian author on adoption, a beautifully illustrated story of a child who discovers as a teenager – quite by accident in front of her teacher and classmates – that she is adopted and her incredulity of never having been told and her final place of acknowledgement at being part of her family despite having been adopted.
As I submitted a chapter to Our Own the first ever book in this country of 5 plus million souls, by adoptive parents about adoption. Amazon is full of western culture books like this and has been for ten plus years.
In 2008, adoption in this forward-thinking-but-blood-is-thicker-than-water culture was clearly still a taboo subject. In fact, during our time in Asia I remember being relieved that we – the US – had come so far in terms of how we now approach adoption, and thinking how far Asian nations – despite their prosperity – needed to come to catch up. To give adoptive mothers – and children – the recognition they need. To know in their hearts and on the faces of strangers what I know:
That I am a full-blooded mother through and through despite the fact that my daughter may not have “grown in my womb but in my heart.”
That my daughter is no less my daughter than my biological ones.
That adoptive mothers are not second class citizens, lesser beings, because they became mothers with the stroke of a pen rather than an act in the bedroom.
That despite our best intentions to keep children from the theoretical “pain that comes with knowing,” a child often does know deep in their soul their origins and so it is a blessing to raise this child in a culture where adoption is accepted, that mother is mother, and daughter is daughter and blood is not thicker than that simple fact.
I want all mothers, here, there, everywhere to know these things. Thank God we seem to be getting there by leaps – in the US – and baby steps – in Asia.
Jane Samuel is married and the mother of three girls (two biological and one adoptive). A former litigator she currently works full-time as a parent, writer and working board member of Attachment Trauma Network, a nonprofit supporting parents of traumatized children with advocacy and education. Her work on travel, ex pat living, adoption and parenting has appeared in the Singapore American Newspaper, Adoption Today and the adoption anthologies: From Home to Homeland and Our Very Own – Stories Celebrating Adoptive Families. She blogs on parenting children and caring for elderly parents for several local and national online publications.
