Imagine you’re married, and one day your husband says, “Honey, I love you very much, but the love that I feel for you just isn’t the same as the love I felt for my first wife. It’s different. I’m trying really hard, but it’s just really difficult to love you.”
How would you feel?
Now, picture your mother sitting you down after a family gathering and saying, “Son, I love you deeply, but my feelings for you and your sister aren’t the same. I’ve tried, but my love for her is different—stronger.”
What would that do to you?
In a movie scene, a newborn lies in his crib, wailing. Nearby, a woman stands with her arms folded, watching him with arms folded, watching him with detached indifference. We hear her thoughts: “I don’t feel attached to you. Your crying doesn’t move me. I feel more like your babysitter than your mother.”
Would you trust her to care for your child?
This is not fiction—these words come directly from adoptive mothers’ blogs and forums. For some, this is their reality: a cruel emotional detachment openly acknowledged.
jim crow love: separate, but not equal
There exists a heartbreaking reality for some adopted children—a love deemed “different” by the very people meant to nurture them. I recently read a blog post where a mother of both biological and adopted children confessed that her love for them lacked the same instinctive, overwhelming connection. Her blatant lack of empathy for her adopted children disturbed me.
This mindset is what I call Jim Crow Love—a “separate but equal” doctrine applied to the most intimate relationship of all: mother and child. It implies that the love of an adoptive mother is somehow lesser—less natural, less real, and ultimately less valid than the love a mother feels for her biological child. Yet this belief contradicts everything I know to be true about motherhood.
Love transcends biology.
Jim Crow love is adoption under the lie of equality—where ‘different’ love becomes a lesser one.
the third eve
I read that adoption blog and felt outrage. My immediate, knee-jerk reaction was titled, “I’m a freak,” where I questioned if my love for my children was unusual—because for me, it is utterly and entirely the same.
I’ve brought children into the world and nourished them at my breast; I’ve crossed oceans—twice—to adopt children and bring them home. If I’m an expert in anything, it’s my own experience of motherhood. The love I feel for my children is unwavering, whether they entered my life through marriage, birth, or adoption.
I am not alone in this. Many mothers I know—who have both biological and adopted children—never saw adoption as a ‘second-best’ choice. Curious, I asked several of them directly: ‘Tell me, how do you feel about your adopted children compared to your biological children?’ Each one laughed, as if the answer was obvious, and replied, ‘The same, of course! You know that. Why do you ask?’”
The truth is simple: some mothers love their children wholly, with a love that is unconditional, reliable, and real. They are real mothers because they are real lovers.
every child deserves authentic love
Love—the most fundamental human right—should never be intellectualized. No child should have to earn a mother’s affection. They should never feel their existence is a burden, nor their presence unnatural.
Authentic love is the birthright of every child. When circumstances separate a child from their first mother—whether by necessity or inability—this need for love does not disappear. If that foundational bond cannot be sustained, then by all that’s holy, it must be given by the parents who step in to raise them. A child should never feel like an outsider in their own family, never be expected to settle for something ‘less.’ This is what I feel most deeply about love and adoption.
jim crow moms
I deleted my knee-jerk reaction to the Jim Crow adoptive mother because reactions rarely serve the truth. But as I read post after post from adoptive mothers openly admitting that their love for their biological and adopted children was different, I began to wonder—was I the outlier? Was my unwavering love for all my children, regardless of how they entered my family, unusual? For me, that love is instinctive. It’s normal. And my children deserve nothing less.
The true tragedy isn’t the struggle—it’s the resignation that follows. Many of these mothers weren’t searching for ways to deepen their love; they were seeking validation for its limits, reinforcing one another’s detachment instead of challenging it. Instead of pursuing growth—the kind that transforms how we love—they settled for reassurance.
One mother described her experience bluntly: while she felt an instant, overwhelming love for her biological daughter, she had to learn to love her adopted babies, a process she found “very, very difficult.” She recalled moments when their cries frustrated her, when guilt crept in, when she had to rationalize her emotions before she could truly feel them—and when, in the process of trying to love her adopted children, she found herself merely pretending that she did.
While her honesty about this struggle may have resonated with other adoptive parents, the deeper concern lies in what this meant for the children themselves. A child should never have to wait to be loved fully, nor should they grow up knowing they were cherished in a way that felt lesser. When a parent fails to give the love a child deserves, it’s the child who suffers for it.
But don’t worry—there’s a happy ending.
She finally learned to love them.
It’s just a different kind of love.
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