Why I Now Have a Photo of My Original Mother on My Screen Saver

I had dinner the other night with an adoptive mom, and when she talked about taking her kids back to their country of origin and spoke of their first moms, I tried to check out as much as possible. There were others at the table in this noisy restaurant, so I was able to put a finger in one ear and hum super lightly without being conspicuous. Don’t do it, I was thinking. Don’t say it. But she did it and said it, all the things.

My mother had not talked about my original mother because, conveniently, my mother had forgotten or did not know anything about her. How can you have a conversation about nothing, and so my original mother was a mute point, definitely not dinner conversation with strangers.

Culture speaks for original mothers. Culture tells us original mothers are prostitutes, whores, destitute, drug users, rape victims. Culture says these mothers loved us so much they had to give us away because every baby needs a mother and a father and toys and a house and an Amazon gift card and so on and so forth. When culture tells us these stories, we see babies that need rescuing, and so adoption is a savior’s playground.

You get the picture. You are part of culture, so I don’t need to go on and on about this.

For days after the dinner, I couldn’t get clean. I jumped into the ocean. I took scalding hot showers. I did yoga. I prayed. When someone desecrates your roots, the stem and flower of you also gets filthy. Although this woman had not been talking about my original mother, specifically, she was speaking, knowingly or not, about all original mothers, and therefore mine.

Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao is a world-renowned psychologist and adoption expert, and so when she suggests I do something, I tend to do it. She’d been at the dinner with me and because of her skill set had not put her fingers in her ears or hummed as the other woman talked. Joyce had been able to just be herself, stating her options, etc., none of which I heard because of previously mentioned finger and humming.

A few days after the dinner, Joyce called me. “I had a thought,” she said. She’d heard me talk about my parents and she’d heard me talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, but she had not heard me talk with such broad understanding about my original mother. I’d showed her photo to Joyce, and I’d told her that the picture scared me because my first mother looked angry. I thought she looked ugly, and her ugliness frightened me because I saw it as my legacy. Joyce had studied the photograph and had said my first mother looked as if she was in pain and was trying to smile for the camera. I could see that, and in the new seeing, I was finally able to look at the photo without emotionally backing away.

My original mother died fifteen years ago today. She was sick and had not told her family, and therefore her death took them by surprise. At least that is my understanding of what had happened. I was clumsy and wrong-footed with meeting her other children, and those relationships are underground now, but they had their moment, and in that time I was able to learn a few things.

When my culture asks me to hate, disdain, look away from the body and soul that created me, my culture is asking me to do the same of myself. Joyce said it was important for my own sense of self to (I forget her exact words so I’m inserting my own here) be at peace with my mother’s existence. Part of me was trained to hate her, ignore her, look down on her.

I learned an exercise from Joe Hudson where you are partnered up with another person and, for two or three minutes, you say to that person, using their name, the negative self talk you say to yourself. If I were with Molly, for example, I might say, “Molly, you are a piece of shit. You are a waste of time. You can’t do anything right, Molly…” and on and on until the timer blessedly rang and I could stop berating this innocent, beautiful person with the weapon of my own beliefs.

When we look down on the power that brought us into the world, we are running a race with a broken foot, maybe with two broken feet. Maybe with two broken feet and a broken back. This sort of thing, how we feel about how others feel about our mothers, is personal, and the effects of mother-disregard are as varied as they are deep.

I am getting used to my mother’s face. I often say “thank you” or “I’m sorry” or “hi” when it pops up on the screen. I see myself in her smile, her nose, her cheeks. For one thing, I wrote “mother” above and not “first” or “birth” or “original”. Am I aware of the twist of the knife that might feel to my mother who had adopted me? Yes. Of course I am. I loved her loved her loved her. She was my mother. I still love her. But is that not a knife she herself would be inserting and twisting? Is that knife not truly my problem unless my job was to keep my mother as happy as possible so she would keep me?

I digress.

And this is why writing about adoption can be so challenging. What feels like a digression can actually be the point.