Happy Mother's Day

My daughter made me a mother.  

My mother never thought so.  The Mother's Day after my son was born, when I called my mother to wish her a happy Mother's Day, she returned the greeting, saying, "You're a mother, too!"  She sounded so happy for me.

It's always been a complicated, and difficult dance.  "I've been a mother," I responded.  "Yes," she answered, irritably, "but now you're really a mother.  

So the prior four years hadn't been real.

And so it has always been, and continues to be.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother said to me, "Can you believe that your sister is a grandmother? and she's the same age as you?"  Yes, I am a twin.  "Well, I am also a grandmother," I answered, resisting the urge to say I have been for longer.  "Yes, but that's different."

Obviously, there's a back story here.  My daughter is adopted; she was an "older" adopted child.  I never had the opportunity to rock my daughter, as a baby, to sleep, or to nurse her, feed her baby food, see her roll over for the first time, take her first steps, hear her first words.  I also didn't get to prevent her first, second or umpteenth assault at the hands of caretakers who were supposed to love her.  I wasn't there when she was ripped, literally, from the arms of her biological mother, by police officers who were trying to protect her from the abuse she'd already suffered in her young life.

I was there when she screamed every time she saw a police car, or a police officer in uniform.  I was there when she, hesitantly, started to reveal bits and pieces of what had happened to her.

I was there during what was euphemistically called her "rocky" adolescence, when she had to deal with what her early childhood trauma had meant to her, and what it meant to her future ... if she could envision one.  Mostly, she could not.

My daughter and I have been through a lot ... together.  We both know it.  It has made us very close.  We laugh about things that no one should laugh about.  We got through it, so it can now be funny.  She IS my daughter, and I AM her mom.  Neither of us has the slightest doubt about it.

When people talk about a "real" parent, biology has little, if anything to do with it.  

Happy Mother's Day, to all the mothers, and to all the children who made their mothers into mothers!