I see a lot of posts on social media about being a mother. They are generally poignant but often very sentimental. For me, they often fail to capture the breadth of what it means to be a mother (mothers don’t always have male partners, or partners at all and they don’t always give birth) and over-simplify how hard it is (oh the washing and shopping!). I admire my wife every day in different ways and just a small fraction of that is uniquely labeled with ‘mother’.
My children are adopted. We had the good fortune to meet our children’s birth mother. It was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it was some time after the children had been with us, and second, because she wasn’t alone.
I had discussed this with another adopter who was about to go through the same thing. They weren’t looking forward to it. My response was “it’s not about us”. Because it’s not. The way I see it you are doing it for a few reasons:
- To develop your compassion so that you can talk about her/them to your children without anger
- To help you contribute to your kids’ life story
- To help them/her feel better about the adoption and you as adopters
- To get answers to some superficial questions that aren’t in the documents (i.e. Where does a name or middle name come from?)
- To get a blessing from them
So in truth even the ones that you could claim are about you, are partly about your children.
My wife and I were very scared beforehand but found it a hugely beneficial experience. I’m really pleased they didn’t rob us of that. It reinforced that the family seemed thoroughly ill-equipped to manage themselves let alone look after children. It did help a little with the central philosophy I have to parenting — that children really only need ‘good enough’ parenting.
Our experience was positive, despite being very worried about the meeting, I think partly due to our mindset. First, as mentioned above, we didn’t do it for us. If that is why you are doing it, the cons will outweigh the pros. Second, we really tried to understand what had happened. If they can turn up, then they care. Okay, maybe they didn’t care enough to do the things they needed to do to keep their children (although that is probably vastly oversimplifying it), but they care. If they care enough to turn up then they’ve gone through one of the most traumatic things imaginable and deserve, if not your compassion (because you can’t muster that up), at least your pity.
No, you don’t owe them anything. You might be tempted to think that she/they owe you but wouldn’t that imply you don’t get one of the most amazing gifts from their tragedy? Besides if the whole world worked by us only doing things for people we felt deserved it (because we should get to decide right?) then that isn’t a world I want to live in.
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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