May 12, 2020
This beautiful post is from a Zoe’s House adoptive mom on Birth Mother’s Day 2020, and is shared with the blessing of both. These two women came to Zoe’s House with heartache and hope, their lives now forever knit together around the love of the boy seen between them.
For them and so many others, Mother’s Day weekend is a mixed bag of emotions filled with the tensions of grief and joy surrounding motherhood. We know that for an adoptive mother, adopting a child doesn’t replace one that was lost or never able to be conceived. For the birth mother, knowing her child is adored by the parents she chose for them, or having other children down the road never replaces the grief for the child she placed for adoption.
Both mothers live in the tension of sorrow and love, the tension between Saturday, Birth Mother’s Day and Sunday, Mother’s Day – back to back days of sacred acknowledgement.
One birth mother expressed it this way:
“The grief that hangs in the shadows for birth parents also hangs in the shadows of adoptive parents, and my guess (though I do not have as much experience on this side), adoptees. What one side is given to experience, the other is not. The moments I grieve are moments cherished by another. There is no complete circle in adoption because each one of us will never have, or experience, what the other is fortunate to have.”
She goes on to say, “Adoption is not a fairy-tale, happy ending, or butterflies and rainbows. It’s complicated relationships full of grief surrounded by individuals who are doing their best to live life, love unconditionally, and educate the masses on the complex emotions that we all battle daily. To my fellow birth mothers, no, to my fellow grief survivors: In light of all that we have lost—time, moments, individuals, relationships, there is so much we have been given and without the absence of what we once held dear, we would not know the sweetness of what we have to hold.”
Gina Crott’s “The Truth Behind National Adoption Awareness Month.
To adoptive mothers, we know that you too are grief survivors, living in the light of loss and the gift of the sweetness of a life given to you. That is why we acknowledge these two days – Birth Mother’s Day and Mother’s Day – pressed next to each other in stark contrast and equal honor. We don’t pretend that adoption or open adoption mends all the wounds, but we have seen how hearts can break open and be remade in the depth of love and relationship.
This season, we honor you both. You both have a place of deep importance in the life of the child you love fiercely and neither of your roles or loves are of less significance than the other. We honor the sacrifices, the losses, the missed experiences and moments that you both have and we honor the determination in your hearts to rise above those places of deep pain and to live and love more fully.
Read part of Brooke’s story of Deacon’s adoption here or watch Brooke, her husband Jesse, and Mikaela all sharing together below.