When Mother's Day rolls around every year there's always the mad scramble between me and my sisters and my dad about what to get my mother for her special day. When we were younger and times were simpler, we would all go shopping with our dad and pick out a few blouses and maybe a cookbook. Now that we're older, it's expected of us to provide our own gifts without our dad providing his credit card. And so oftentimes I'd drag my sisters to the local greenhouse and we'd pick a few hanging basket arrangements for her to decorate our front porch with. It was a good gift that looked nice and we knew she wanted it (as evidenced by the not-so-subtle coupon sitting on my place at the dinner table). We would celebrate with presents and dinner out and it would be another cheerful Mother's Day checked off the list of holidays for the year.
And yet, with all the happiness and celebration, I often forget that I am lucky enough to have two mothers to celebrate each May.
I've always known I was adopted, my parents made no secret of it and so I was spared the traumatizing childhood reveal. It was never a huge deal for me while growing up. I don't think I quite grasped the importance of adoption until later in life. It wasn't until I began my awkward years of middle school and the identity crisis that comes when children are becoming young adults that I really started to think of my other mother. The woman, for all her intents, was the woman who gave me life.
But she was also the woman who gave me up. And for a short period of time, I couldn't reconcile that. I couldn't quite forgive her for not loving me enough to want to keep me and raise me as her own. Of course it was later I learned of the one child rule and the countless little girls that were sent away and I began to examine her motivations. And it was much later that I began to forgive her for leaving me on the doorstep of a small Chinese village police station late one evening.
But of course, if she hadn't done that I never would have ended up where I am today. A privileged young college graduate with a secure (if unsure) future and a stable ring of close family and friends. In America, of all places too. The land of freedom and opportunity for all those who dare to search for it.
It seems that she loved me enough that she brought me to a police station. She loved me enough to make sure I was found by people who would help me. In the end, she loved me enough to give me to people who loved me even more than she ever could; she loved me enough to let me go.
I don't know who my birth mother is. With the way records were kept at the orphanage back in China, trying to track her down would be like searching for a needle in a field of needles thrown into the ocean. There are stories of course, every adopted Chinese girl has heard the stories. Of babies dropped off at orphanages with scraps of cloth that birth mothers held the match to in the hopes of reuniting someday. Of videos and newsreels of smart young Chinese American girls returning to their country of birth, gripping fraying and fading threads that lead them back to mothers long lost but never forgotten.
But I have no need for that. Yes, there's a soft sense of curiosity hidden in the back of my mind and in the depths of my heart for the woman who gave birth to me and made her choices that set me down the path I'm on now. But there is no desperate need to fill a gap that she left behind because there is no gap. Not when I have a mother and sisters and a father, here and now and forever. Not when I am driving down a potholed Michigan road in late spring with my sisters to argue over purple or blue flowers for our mother's hanging basket.
But on this Mother's Day, I think of her. After I've kissed my mom on the cheek and given her the pink flowers we compromised on to hang on our front porch, I'll think of my other mother. Of the woman who, in giving me up, gave me so much more than I could ever ask for.
For Pamela and for all the unknown mothers out there
Happy Mother's Day!
:) Kathryn