In the Adoptionland, there’s confusion about what a real mother is. At our cores, we know a real mother in when we see one, though. A few archetypal incarnations of good mothers include Mrs. Weasley of the Harry Potter series, Mrs. Cleaver, Olivia Walton, Celie in The Color Purple, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary.
I think that any discussion of authentic mothering must involve the topic of love. While it may sound odd that I’d recommend a book about romantic love for those grappling with adoption issues, I do think that Robert A. Johnson’s book, We provides an excellent overview of our flawed Western view of love, based on the oldest Western romance that we know of, Tristan and Iseult. Johnson writes this about real love:
Love is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is. Human love affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds. Love is the inner god who opens our blind eyes to the beauty, value, and quality of the other person. Love causes us to value that person as a total, individual self, and this means that we accept the negative side as well as the positive, the imperfections as well as the admirable qualities. When one truly loves the human being rather than the projection, one loves the shadow just as one loves the rest. One accepts the other person’s totality.
Robert A. Johnson, We
I’ve written about why, in my way of thinking, it’s wrong for a birth mother to tell her adopted child that if she had it to do over again, she’d choose abortion over adoption. What a terrible thing for an adopted person to hear. Though the adopted adults I know who have heard this from their birth mothers extended grace to them and sympathized with their pain, they later confided how deeply such sentiments had wounded them. They couldn’t emotionally trust their mothers after hearing this. What they wanted to hear is, “I’d do anything I could to keep and raise you, to be there for you and be your mother.”
Adopted people also don’t want to be reminded by their adoptive parents, “You’re my child, you know; I raised you!” They don’t want to be party to the paranoia and fear of adoptive parents who may not have wholeheartedly stepped up to the plate emotionally in the first place, yet who assert their parental rights later, when they are older and more needy. Many such parents know they weren’t very good at it, but want to continue to pretend that they were–proving that they still aren’t very good people.
Whether or not we’ve been injured by separation, what we want is to be loved and seen. We want to know that we, and only we, are reflected in the eye of the beholder. We want to be the apple of Mother’s eye, beamed at by proud parents–to be told that we’re more than enough, blessings beyond measure.
The real mother sees the personhood of her child, and stands in awe.
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