Suzy Says

Mother’s Day has rolled around again, bringing with it all those complicated emotions.

Since I took over writing all my work’s Facebook posts, maybe a year and a half or a couple of years ago, I have had to surmount challenges like writing something uplifting about domestic violence and teen date rape (I did it!), and this year I had the bright idea of collecting photos of the babies born to our staff over the past couple of years to celebrate these hard-working mothers on Mother’s Day. Looking at the pictures and writing all the cheery captions was a little upsetting to someone whose mother was never all that crazy about her. She never really seemed to love me, or at least not in a way that I could see or feel.

I don’t know if it was me, or because she was abandoned at birth, literally left on the orphanage steps, which has to have a huge psychological effect on anyone. Having said that, her adoptive parents adored her and always told her they chose her out of all the children in all the world, and that parents who gave birth to their own kids just had to take what they got, which is true, and also a great outlook on adoption.

They adopted Mom at the age of three and fostered her before that, so she couldn’t have had many memories before that time, but maybe the feeling (and fact) of abandonment was just hard-wired in her DNA.

Mom never had the slightest interest in her birth parents, but I do. When I got that Ancestry DNA kit from Erica, I have to admit that I was hoping to find that Mom had siblings out there or some kind of relatives that I was unaware of, but nada, nothing, zippo. This was disappointing to me. Our family tree is more like a twig. Mom was an only child, Dad’s sister was mentally challenged or whatever they call it now, and never married or had children. So no uncles or cousins for me, and Megan, Jonathan, and I do not have children, either.

I never wanted to be a mother, and I am perfectly fine with not being one. But Mother’s Day still brings up so much grief. Sadness that my mother never loved me, or at least not that I could tell; sadness for my grandmother, who endured seven miscarriages before adopting Mom; sadness for the girl who felt she had no other option but to leave her newborn on the steps of an orphanage one fine spring day. Whether you are a mother or not, Mother’s Day is never simple.