What’s a "Real Mother?" An Adoptee & Birth Mother Perspective
Me and Mama at President Eisenhower’s visit to Alaska in 1960
Today marks four years since Mama (my adoptive mother) passed away. She was 94. I loved her with my whole heart, but our relationship had many complexities, and we were nothing alike.
She was sensitive, shy, private, wholesome, artistic, and even though she had an eighth-grade education, she could breeze through a New York Times Crossword puzzle in minutes. I can't spell to save my soul. She had an Irish temper. Unlike me, she could stay mad and cut a person out of her life without a blink. She used to say when I was wronged by a friend, "If they ever did that to me, I would never speak to them again!" Yet I'd be buds with them the next day.
Because I was adopted, I used to get angry when someone ignorantly referred to her as my stepmother or foster mother, and not my mother. She was the only mother I knew, the mom who comforted me as a baby, the mom who brought me Seven-Up and soft-boiled eggs when I was sick.
At 15, when I became pregnant, she was also my companion when I hid in the house once my "condition" became obvious. She let me win at gin rummy, and she prayed the rosary with me so my baby would be healthy and get wonderful adoptive parents. She rubbed my back while I was in labor and held my daughter when she was born. She even supported my search for my birth mother.
My Birth Mother, Ida Celina Reed - 1957 Pregnant with me.
In 1980, seven years after I relinquished my baby to a closed adoption, I joined ALMA (Adoptee Liberty Movement Association). This was a time before open minds, open records, social media, or DNA. I needed to know who Mary Monica Hall really was.
It took months until I finally "found," but all I'd hoped for, and dreamed about, would never come true. I'd never meet my first mother or ask her why she couldn't keep me. Ida had passed away at 30 of a brain aneurysm.
I learned she was like me, fashionable, outgoing, fun-loving, spoke her mind, had a fiery temper but would soon forgive and forget.
Even to this day, 43 years post-reunion with my first family, I still wish I could have met her but have no doubt she loved me. I learned from her husband that they met a few weeks after I was born, and since she had a father for me, when they tried to get me back, Social Services turned them away. I would languish in a foster home for another 3 months. Her husband told me she cried herself to sleep grieving for me every night until she died, just as I never stopped grieving the daughter I relinquished 50 years ago, even though we have been in reunion now for 32 years.
My daughter did get wonderful parents. Pat and Tim sent her out from Michigan in 1991 to meet me for her 18th birthday. It was a dream come true for both of us. She too was just like me, "a bull in a China shop," strong-willed, loved fashion, was outgoing, and nearly my spitting image.
For a long time, I didn't realize the word "real" could be so nuanced. The dictionary makes it seem so clear: "being an actual thing; having objective existence; not imaginary." Mama was my real mother, just as Pat was Mary's real mother.
But I had another real mother. She was the mom who carried me in her womb, whose voice I heard in utero, who had labor pains and loved me enough to give me what she thought would be a better life. Didn't that make her real, too? Wasn't I real to have done the same? How could carrying my daughter for nine months, imagining every milestone, and missing her for eighteen years make me anything but an actual being with objective existence—not imaginary?
I grieve Mama today just as I have for the last four years and will for the rest of my life. Our relationship wasn't perfect, but that never lessened the love I've had for her.
For over forty years, I've had an orange bumper sticker stuck to my ALMA search binder. It perfectly expresses my thoughts: "Adoptees Have Mothers Too." Both of them are real.
