Celebrating Mother’s Day
Leceta Chisholm Guibault, Nancy Kato, Josée Larose
Carrie Kitze, Jean MacLeod
Nancy is the president of The Forget-Me-Not-Society, NACAC adoption advocate award winner and a board member of the AAC (American Adoption Congress...representing Canada). She is also a former board member of the Adoption Council of Canada. Josee has written numerous articles on the birthmother adoption experience (featured writer at adoption.com).She is also Founding Director of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers,
Editor SM Macrae
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Introduction
Who ran to help me when I fell, and would some pretty story tell, or kiss the place to make it well? My mother ~ Ann Taylor
What is a mother? Is a mother different to a mommy? What makes a mother? Is it giving birth, or is the act of caring for a child? Mothers shelter children securely within their arms, then shelter within family and then, gradually let them go, to an always expanding outer world. But the child is first sheltered within mother. Her body is the child’s first and most intimate nurturing clasp. Yet, experts also tell us that a mother’s body can signal to the child, even within the womb, her stress levels and even feelings of rejection toward the child.
It’s also known that the human child needs to be born ‘too soon’. The human baby could never exit the birth canal grown to a size where capable of independent movement beyond mother. Experts think that it is only at around six months that the human baby is capable of understanding that s/he is other to mother. That’s why, for humans, it’s especially important that mother and child are not separated at birth. Although a child is born and a mother made of the woman who carried that baby, the two are still joined at a fundamental level. And for the baby, its needs and psychological stability cannot be separated, and initially these come from mother. It’s a moot point, as well, whether separation from her baby is healthy for a mother. She however has other levels of understanding of the separation which she can bring into play to modulate the separation – however painful. The baby does not.
For us as adoptive mothers, are we stepping into someone else’s shoes when we become mother to her now our children? Will we ever fit her shoes, should we even try? Will we ever fit our children? That’s the nub of adoption parenting. We are not trying to step into another woman’s shoes. We are parenting her loss, our child’s loss, and that means we have a very different pair of shoes to wear than our children’s birthmothers’ required.
When we become our children’s mothers by adoption where does that leave their birthmothers? Many birthmothers are angered that we label them as simply birthmothers, resenting that this takes away their status as mothers. Leceta Chisholm Guibault sent the editor some powerful letters from some friends whose children have been placed into adoption. All consider themselves mothers. Here we have Nancy Kato speaking- she wants her status recognised, most particularly on Mother’s Day. Birthmother’s Day doesn’t feel right to Nancy – it excludes. Although most of our children are adopted internationally, it’s possible their birthmothers may retain the same passionate feelings as does Nancy…
(In celebrating Mother’s Day or Birthmother’s Day) I would prefer to go with the "real" Mother's Day. I remember wanting so badly to be like other mother's and to be acknowledged on that day. I had to keep my "secret" to myself and go and celebrate Mother's Day with my mother and my sister. Not once did they think about what I might have been going through or how hard it was to have to celebrate this day with empty arms.
I had found my daughter but not been reunited yet (she wasn't ready) when my mother gave me hell for not phoning her earlier in the day on Mother's Day (this was about 12 years ago). I snapped. I tried to explain how it felt to be so totally unacknowledged on this day, that I had a child out there, that I was a mother in my own right. Of course, poor mom was shocked...she told my sister and they both called me back and apologized and from that day on, I have received MD cards from them. This was important to me. I waited too long to be acknowledged, I don't want a different day - I want Mother's Day, the real one.
Nancy Kato
As adoptive mothers we can often be defensive about the term ‘real mother’, because we are the everyday parent, the parent in the trenches – but we are also the parent with the joy that children bring. This Topic offers a discussion of what makes a mother, makes a mommy, and what it takes to be an adoptive mother and mommy. And it asks a place for birthmothers. They are our children’s mothers too. And it asks what we do to celebrate on Mother’s Day
What makes a Mom? We are fashioned as mothers by our own Moms?
A woman is her mother ~ Anne Sexton ‘All My Pretty Ones’
Moms make moms. As we grow up we watch our mothers. How they parent us, how they nurture us, help us grow strong and healthy, physically and emotionally. Attachment therapists and therapists who treat damaged relationships tell us that how we were parented impacts hugely on our capacity to parent, and form other strong social relationships.
For those of us whose mothers and moms were unable within themselves to meet our needs, what do we do? If our mothers were stuck in anger or grief that they weren’t able to resolve and parented us with their hands tied (so to speak) because of their own issues, where does that leave us? Where does it leave us as adults, and mothers and moms ourselves? Is it inevitable that we will parent, knee-jerk, in the mould of our own moms?
It’s likely we will, without thought and perhaps without therapy. All children push the fullest set of parental buttons they can find, because children simply need to push to find that mom is safe, and will contain them. Whatever and however hard they push. For adoptive moms and mothers, where we have to learn our child, find the fit and know their losses, we may find that such children’s needs are so strong that we can’t contain them. The child’s needs trigger our own, and we struggle to parent our child – and our own needy inner child. It’s when a child challenges, and we crumble, the only parenting that is ‘there’ – is our mom.
So, therapists suggest that it’s important particularly for adoptive moms, with children whose needs may be very great, whose issues, and the source of them, is unknown, to get a toolkit. We need to know how to parent beyond our mothers’ parenting! Some great resources for this can be found in our previous Topic T#38 : Adult Attachment, and in the forthcoming EMK Press book Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections, where list member Kathy Reilly has an article Becoming the Mother I needed to be.
Common sense can prevail also. Adoptive moms whose children challenge need the ability to take time, step back and distance ourselves from our mothers when we respond to our children. That’s the split second, the 123 count that keeps us and our children safe from unsafe knee-jerk parenting. This is the ability that prevents a slap, prevents a harsh word that wounds our child with shame. It’s the ability to see our mothers as the size they are, adult size as we are. We are adult, we can challenge our mothers, and we can decide we will parent differently to them.
The breathing space also allows us calm down. Children who challenge thrive unhealthily on instability they may cause in our ability to parent and contain them. Breathing space gives us time to separate our needs from what the child needs. We can move away from dealing with the child on deeper levels right then, and take a greater amount of time to work out tactics for the long term. Sometimes the breathing space can lend humour to the interchange with our child. Hearing our mom in ourselves can be dealt with by smiles. If appropriate, it can even be shared with our kids. A look, a phrase if recognised by a child can be pigeon-holed as mom-via-grandma, and can be used as a teaching tool. Carrie Kitze holds that it is powerfully connecting to explain to a child why mom won’t parent one particular way – because Grandma parented mom that way, and it hurt. That doesn’t lessen our ability to contain a child – sharing builds bonds of connection. This strategy is very useful for a child who likes to talk, and for whom connections work.
What makes a Mom? What do mothers do?
Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible ~Marion C Garrety
A new book by Katherine Ellison The Mommy Brain (Basic Books) suggests that the becoming a mother makes you more perceptive, more resilient, more efficient, more driven and more emotionally intelligent than women who are not mothers ( and of course, more than men). Her theories are based partly on research which suggests the hormones of pregnancy and birth drive some of the changes in the mommy brain, but she also draws from research that shows how caring ( assumed to be maternal role) for children drives women to build relationships that support how children need nurturing. A review in the London Times said it was a book designed for dinner table talk – shaky on fact, but a great talking point!
One of the areas it highlighted catches the eye of the adoptive parent. It’s the research of Marco Iacaboni at UCLA. This suggests that parents who imitate their children’s expressions when the kids are non-verbal and who learn to read their social signals, in fact strengthen the neural circuits in the area of the brain which enhance empathy. For us as adoptive parents learning to read our kids is critical. It’s also difficult, because we haven’t had the base of knowing them all their lives.
Dan Hughes in his attachment work with adopted kids (Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, DDP) suggests that crucial to attachment and bonding is the fundamental that child and parent attune to each other. Practitioners of Hughes’ therapeutic style sometimes refer to the fact that adoptive parents and children need to learn the ‘dance of attunement’. If attunement is a dance, it’s one where each partner responds reciprocally – and where the steps fit the music. For a new adoptive mother, and even a seasoned one, the music may change abruptly without our changing it, and we find the dance steps change too. Our past and our children’s past may orchestrate changes which simply jar. So, it’s our job as adoptive parents to keep the tempo slow, so that we and our kids learn that there’s a scheme to dancing. Each dance is different, but what’s expected stays the same. Underpinning attunement is the need for adoptive mothers to learn what our children need, no matter that they are dancing fast or slow, or whatever the complexity of the steps. There’s no quick fix for ‘learning a child’, or getting to grips with what drives them. No amount of research or reading or even therapy explains a child totally. It takes time spent with new parents becoming part of family. Routines, new family tradition, all are part of the bonding glue that brings an adoptive family together. Research and therapy may help a mother develop understanding and empathy for her child. She also needs stamina in the early stages to let that child know that she will find whatever it takes to understand that child. She needs to develop support and relationships that will forge the family, and where necessary help heal the child. And she needs to teach the child that nothing will undermine her love. Teaching can be tough if the child rejects attempts to use a mother’s body language of love – hugs, kisses, laps to read on, good night snuggles. Adoptive mothers need drive and resilience to continue to signal willingness to love.
Birthmothers and Mothers – will both the real mothers please stand up?
The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection and not a fountain; to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do ~ Nan Fairbrother
On Mother’s Day, or near it, many adoptive families offer their children a honoured space to celebrate their birthmothers. Many families have developed new rituals that honour the relationship – sending letters by balloon or burning them, lighting candles, poetry spoken. It’s a developing new tradition that adopted children’s birthmother’s are celebrated on the Eve of Mother’s Day. Brenda Romanchik has a useful article which helps us understand the development of this day - http://library.adoption.com/birth-parents-after-adoption/birthmother-day/article/244/1.html . Yet, there is something bittersweet about this. It keeps us as the ‘real mothers, the mothers who tend to the children daily, and tend to the added layer needed in parenting an adopted child’ vested in the day proper, which is right, perhaps. But it also sends a signal to our kids that their birthmother is in second place, not celebrated on Mother’s Day itself. How many children can understand why we can’t celebrate both mothers on the same day? Most adult adoptees tell that it’s adoptive parents that get in a twist about adoptees having four parents. For adoptees, it’s simply a fact.
Birthmothers themselves are divided over a division between a separate Mother’s Day and Birthmother’s Day (or Mother’s Day Eve). Some say that a separate day for birthmothers underlines the pain of their loss. Here are two position papers from the CCNM (Canadian Council of Natural Mothers) on Mothers Day and Birthmothers Day:
http://nebula.on.ca/canbmothers/English/Position/MothersDay.htm
http://nebula.on.ca/canbmothers/English/Position/BirthMothersDay.htm and here also is some advice from a birthmother:
I, for one, suspect and acknowledge that most adoptees and adoptive parents have no idea that we feel this way (conflicted about a celebration on birthmother’s day as opposed to Mother’s Day and in fact, are trying to show their appreciation. What WOULD be nice would be if once apprised of the unintended effect of this separate celebration on some(not all) birth/natural mothers, they would attempt to find out how the birth/natural mother in their lives feels about that issue and take it from there instead of assuming that all is well.
Josée Larose
Perhaps as adoptive moms we can grow and allow our children to celebrate both their mothers on Mother’s Day itself? After all, our children’s birth families live in our family, mutual to us, because our children are them, as much as they are also ours. When our child tugs our heart because of their cheeky grin, their loooooong toes and their sweetly serious smiles or we cheer them at sports and applaud their musical talent – that’s their birthfamily talking to us through our children.
Leceta Chisholm Guibault in an early Topic (T#18 Mother’s Day & Our Mutual Family, also a guide on EMK press click here wrote that birthmothers and adoptive mothers are in mutual family with each other, and that is a powerful thought. It allows the past, genetics and what relationship our children had with birthmothers to be developed in our family, because it a mutual connection. We are bound to the birthfamily, through our children. Birthmothers are real mothers, and we are too. Taking anything away from one may harm the other - in the eyes of our mutual child.
This doesn’t mean displacing ourselves, and it doesn’t stop our children celebrating us as their mothers on Mother’s Day. It doesn’t diminish us because it clearly signals to our children that who they are, and from whom they came to us, is honoured. It helps us avoid awkward statements that birthmothers must have loved our kids when we cannot truthfully say that if we have no evidence of it. It honours birthfamily in our family, and in the here and now, which is hugely powerful for a child’s esteem in ‘who they are’. Who they are is in our family, and it’s celebrated.
Celebrating the Day: A Tale of Two Mothers
Affirming and celebrating with our kids that our family is a great one and that we are great mothers is right. Bringing birth family and our children’s first mothers in to celebrate is also good. Perhaps it is easier to do when our children’s parents are unknown. A virtual celebration doesn’t involve contact, which some (not all) families with open adoptions have.
We are the mom in the trenches, but we also get the sweetness that children bring. We are the mommy here, even if there is a mommy somewhere ‘over there’. We can enjoy Mother’s Day! But – as we sit in our kids’ classrooms and hear the sweet songs that school has orchestrated for us, watch as OUR child turns totally to us and sings her song for us alone, her whole demeanour signalling she is ‘ours’, think. Think of the joy our children bring us, and share that joy with another woman, in another place. Our kids’ birthmothers. She may be angry, oblivious, hurt, and defensive, her lifestyle may be chaotic and she may have prioritised her own needs above that of her child. Or she may be none of those. Unless we have an open adoption, we can only guess. It’s possible she may feel bereft, and may have a slice missing from her soul because her child is gone.
Send a greeting. Think it. Mothers communicate by thinking - if we think hard enough, maybe our mutual sister-in-motherhood will hear the song, and be affected by it. And celebrate with your mutual child their being – it’s our gift from their first parents.
The Healing Power of a Mother's Day Card
Leceta Chisholm Guibault
May 2004
My first Mother's Day was while on vacation in Miami with my husband in 1991. We had been proposed our infant daughter, Kahleah, born in Guatemala, just 2-1/2 months before. She was still in Guatemala and we expected her arrival sometime late summer. My husband took me out to dinner. The Maitre'D carried a beautiful bouquet of roses. He went to each lady in the restaurant, asking first if she was a "mother". (The year before I would have been in tears). When he approached me I was so overwhelmed with emotion when the words came out of my mouth, "Yes ... I am a mother". I felt like I was half lying!
I grabbed the rose so fast and placed it on the table between the two of us. Beside the rose was a tiny photo of our baby girl in Guatemala. It was the last "quiet" Mother's Day dinner I have ever had!
A son, Tristan, arrived three years later. I am sure we can all agree that those first handmade Mother's Day cards, made with love, make everything we have been through on our road to becoming parents worthwhile. The cards are priceless.
In 1998 I lost my beloved mother to cancer ... far too young. Oh how I grieved, and still do. We have an open international adoption, and stay in touch with Tristan's birthmother in Colombia. As the first Mother's Day approached after losing my mother, my grief was not allowing me to celebrate myself as a mother. I was too sad. Imagine my surprise to receive a Mother's Day card from my son's birthmother. There was also a card from his then-eight-year-old birth sister.
Piedad wrote: "In this month of mothers, since I know that you all must be very sad about your dear mother, I don't know how to tell you that I too feel the pain of losing such a great and important person as a mother and parent. I want you to know that I too feel it and understand your grief. I feel your sadness today and will share it with you. I pray for your mother's eternal peace. Her soul did not die, and feel her hope and strength for your family from above. I wish for you a happy Mother's Day. I thank you for your caring and loving devotion to our mutual son and remember, a mother is not the one who gives birth but rather the one who raises."
The card from the sweet sister included a prayer called, "A Children's Prayer for a Deceased Mother". It was absolutely precious. Needless to say, besides the cards I receive from my own children ... the first Mother's Day card I received from my son's birthmother and her daughter will always be close to my heart. They helped to start the healing of my heart. Since that time, we have been sending each other Mother's Day cards annually.
Resources
Josée Larose sent us these links:
http://e-magazine.adoption.com/articles/788/reunion-etiquette-
acknowledging-the-other-party.php
Reunion Etiquette: Acknowledging the Other Party, Josée Larose
"I am your child, but you are not my mother..."
http://e-magazine.adoption.com/articles/481/again-and-again-.php
A Birthmother’s love, Josée Larose
About doing the right thing
http://e-magazine.adoption.com/articles/415/a-different-take-on.php
Josée Larose on how much a birthmother feels her loss
http://e-magazine.adoption.com/articles/387/re-what-is-attachment-disorder.php
Attachment disorder – root is loss of birthmother
http://e-magazine.adoption.com/articles/158/in-rebuttal-of-celebrating-motherhood.php Josée Larose “In my opinion, Birthmother’s Day does not celebrate motherhood, it celebrates the marginalization of natural mothers and it serves to reinforce the adoptive mother’s contention that she is the adoptee’s only “real” parent”.
The Mother-Child Pendant
This special piece of adoption jewelry affirms the love you have for your child, acknowledges his/her love for you, and, vitally, includes the mother who gave her life. As a gift, this necklace symbolizes the important roles that the adoptive mother and the birth mother play in the world of an adoptee. Your love makes it possible for your child to openly accept his/her two mothers, and this necklace represents the gifts of life and love that two mothers impart. With your help, your child learns to deal with adoption grief and loss. In gifting your child with the Mother-Child Pendant, you help him/her make sense of circumstances, validate feelings, and let him/her know that s/he isn’t walking through the tough feelings alone. You may also want to purchase a pendant for yourself, wearing it in visible support of your cherished child, and of his/her ties to you and to his/her birth mother.
The pendant is an original design by adoptive mom Sherra Buckley that she calls the Cherished Wish pendant. It is sterling silver (measures 5/8" x 7/16") and comes on either an 18" sterling silver beaded chain (for a girl) or an 18" leather chain (for a boy) for a boy. EMK Press packages the necklace in a royal blue satin drawstring pouch (3" x 4") for special gift giving. Also included is one of our Jinshin Peasant Painting notecards. The sterling silver Mother-Child Necklace is available on the EMK Press website here, and arrives in a satin bag with an accompanying poem:
For a Daughter
Adoption isn’t always easy,
but good or bad, nothing in life is without challenges.
You are a wise girl with a wonderful spirit,
and I think you will appreciate what this necklace symbolizes:
The Sun is your birthmother, who gave you life.
The Star is YOU, of course!
And the Heart is me,
your forever mom, who loves you, and cares for you,
and makes a home with you.
I know adoption can be hard to understand
and I know you think about your birthmother.
It can be a struggle to make sense of your feelings,
but I believe your feelings and experiences
will someday make you a strong and brave-hearted woman.
You will also be the BEST of both your moms-
Stars shine!
Jean MacLeod
For a Son
This medal is a symbol of you
and the gifts that make us family.
From the sun comes a son.
Strong, courageous, truthful, unmolded.
Your birthmother gave you life
And started you on this journey.
From my heart I give guidance and support,
I want you to know that I will be your mom forever,
Loving, caring, nurturing, proud.
Watching as your life unfolds.
With each of life's experiences
You will learn more about yourself
And where you fit in this world.
From the sun and stars and the heart of two mothers,
Let your special gifts shine
With a light, a direction, and a purpose
That is yours alone.
Carrie Kitze and Jean MacLeod
Please contact Carrie
Kitze for information on obtaining reprints of this article
for pre and post adoption kits and seminars.
