I started this post in 2016, the first Mother’s Day post discovery. Each year since, as Mother’s Day approached I have reviewed this post, made some edits…. and never actually posted it. Now I am going to do that – post my 3 years old thoughts jumbled with edits each year. I don’t suppose it is important to tease out what came when. Enjoy.
I am delighted by my mother. She is smart and sweet and a joy to be around.
My mother who raised me is dead, and is long past these remembrances, but I like to think that over the years I celebrated her and was joyful with her, every day but especially on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. I wish I could remember all the components of the ‘Atomic Cake’ our local bakery made that she loved on these special occasions. It was a strange mish-mosh of different types of cakes, whipped cream, pistachios, different kinds of fruit including maraschino cherries on the top, and other assorted things that I cannot recall. Sometimes instead I’d make her a German Chocolate cake in all its pecan coconut goodness.
I miss the simple pleasure of a lifetime’s knowledge of the little joys I could echo for my mother today… but here it is Mother’s Day and I want to say to my biological mother: I feel, at least, the currents of our genetic ties move in me. I have only known you, consciously, for half a year (a year and a half, two years and a half, three years and a half) but it’s Mother’s Day and you’re my mother and I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate that. Truly celebrate it, even though I am only still learning all the little joys I can utilize and give you what little happiness they can! Because I am so much like you, and the ways I am like you make me happy and relieved. (I don’t think anyone who isn’t an LDA can even begin to grasp what that means.)
So I go to the store and I look at the cards and they talk about things that don’t work in my particular situation. I feel a pang of loss for the mother that raised me, accompanied now by a residual sting of deceit. Then I feel a pang of loss for the time when I didn’t know about the deceit. Ah, ignorance is bliss, is it not? No, not really… but it is at least a place one can reminisce about. Not ignorance about the reality of my adoption, but ignorance about the fact that I was deceived by people I trusted implicitly.
But back to the cards. Greeting cards have not generally worked for me. My adoptive father and I had what could be graciously described as a challenging relationship, so every year on Father’s Day I struggled to find a card that wasn’t entirely hypocritical or just plain inaccurate. But my adoptive mother and I enjoyed a good and close bond, one that pains me to recollect in the new perspective that underpinning our good relationship was an essential lie.
I choose a card for my biological mother that has a minimal inscription, and it strikes me that I often chose such a card for my adoptive father. But the feelings beneath the choice could not be more different. In my adoptive father’s case, hell to the NO he was not a guiding, supportive figure in my life. In my biological mother’s case, we have only just met.
We are years now beyond ‘only just met’ and of course neither of us can insert memories/guidance/support in the years we lost. But we have grown together, or perhaps simply grown to accept the bond between us as a simple indelible truth.
I have found an odd yearning – I wish the mother that raised me could know the mother that gave birth to me. I see us together in some fantasy plane – simply joined, layers of an atomic cake that might seem odd, but somehow together form a delightful whole.