Not all know my story, but know many will relate. When you decide to be a mother, you want to jump in with two feet. You want everything which comes with the title. You want to be your child’s anchor when they’re sick, to teach them about the road bumps, to clean up their messes, to be their go to person.
Yet as an adopted mother you are on this tight-rope between emotion and reality. As you change diapers, cook dinners, drive your daughter back and forth to school, do her laundry, etc. – you wonder if she’ll always think of you as Mom. When she knows her story, will she consider you enough?
Watching a documentary called “Closure”, a true story of an adopted daughter searching for her birth parents, the story became real to me. In my make believe world, I had coped with the reality of adoption, but the movie reminded me I had never coped with the emotion. The young woman in the documentary searched to complete her story. She asked questions such as who in this world looks like me or acts like me? She said she had lived a good life, but something was missing.
What showed on the television screen, but was a depiction of my life is you can’t deny something is missing. No matter how many hugs, kisses, story times, get-aways, or laughter you’ve had – your child may want to know and has the right to know every page of their story. However, the reality of the situation makes you wonder – why couldn’t she have been born of your womb? If your adopted child wasn’t adopted, you’d never even wonder whether you’re enough or wonder about something missing. Other than the missing piece nothing else changes. You don’t love differently. You don’t pray for your child differently. You don’t want different things for her life.
Through watching the movie, it’s evident my daughter is not the only one who needs closure. People think only the birth parents feel the pain of losing their child, but adoptive parents can also feel loss. Until you live through it, you don’t realize adoption is not as simple as just taking a child home and the child becoming a part of your family. Adoptive parents continue doing everything parents do, but there is this little birdie in your head which says – what if your child someday does not want to call you mom? Ideally you have this picture of your child calling you mom and dad, but what if they have a different ending?
I’ve battled this question and have wondered through every punishment, argument, or hard times if someday these incidents will come back to haunt me. Although, logically without discipline my mom job of preparing my daughter to face the world has not been done. The only conclusion I’ve come up with is sometimes you have to take risks to get rewards. With adoption, we took the leap and decided the risk was worth the outcome. All we can do now is wake up everyday and be the best parents we can be, to be honest with our daughter, to guide her and not impede on her story, to let her fly, to pray, to hope for a good ending, and to trust in the universe. We have to trust we’re enough. We have to trust even if and when she meets her birth parents she’ll appreciate her journey and want to come back to our nest. Hopefully, she’ll come up with her own closure statement and we remain Mom and Dad whether or not we are her blood line. We also have to have our own closure as adopted parents; which means our birth parents are not our enemy. Without them, we would not have our daughter. Without them, there would be no story.
