“Where is your real mum?”, is an insensitive question several adoptees are asked and it transcends languages – English, Italian, whatever. This is one of the stereotypes the adoptive parents community is set on fighting against. Real mom implies there’s a fake one. However, occasionally I hear adoptive parents add “There’s is only one mom” or “Mom is the one who keeps you always with her” [this is especially true in Italian language and the term ‘mamma’, but I observed a similar distinction made between ‘mum’ and ‘first/biological mother’ in English too]. When I hear these claims I wonder: what are they meant to protect, the feelings of adoptees or those of adoptive parents?

My first thought goes to first moms and I wonder how they feel when they read something like that. The voices of first mothers are often kept at bay in the world of adoption to make it easier to forget that an adoptive family’s happiness is built on the tragedy of mothers losing a child. Like real mum implies there’s a fake one, saying “the one who keeps you always with her” implies that one has chosen not to. We know that is hardly a choice.

Secondly, I reflect on adoption language and how often adoptive parents obsess about terms we are not entitled to decide upon. I do not believe there’s a ‘right’ way to talk about adoption. I believe every adoptee should be empowered to freely choose the narrative around their own story. We adoptive parents need to remind ourselves we are secondary characters in our children’s stories. We must allow our kids to call ‘mum’ or whatever they wish their first mother, like we should allow them to call us as they wish.

Instead, we often suggest or impose our language. We name the woman who gave life to our child ‘tummy mummy’ or ‘biological mother’, or we do not name her at all. We try to put a distance and maybe, inside our heart, we feel superior. If our children have a complex family history, it makes it easier for us to feel that way. We build a reason to tuck away the past we didn’t feature in. Sometimes we introduce our wording in an attempt to help our children make sense of a fragile story. We try to fill the holes and make it complete. We pick the names for all the characters and doing it for those who are faceless or nameless for us is easy. “Mum” is a word that carries meaning and the weight of our whole childhood. It’s a title we feel we earned and we do not want to share.

However, who decides who earns that title? It’s our kids. Our task as parent is not to feed our children words to talk about their story, but to help them find the words that fit best. Our duty is to follow their lead if one day they’ll decide to change them or rewrite the entire story. We must support them if they’ll need to go and find new elements to add by seeking their roots. We must create and hold space for them to build their story and identity, on their terms. We have to sit by their side when they stumble upon big voids and heavy questions we do not have answer to. We need to hold their hand when they face those silences, resisting the temptation to fill them. We owe our children the truth, even the one that hurts, especially the one that hurts us the most.

It doesn’t matter what age your child was adopted at, even if it happened at birth: as adoptive parents it’s not our place to assign value to the time they spent with their first family. Is there only one mom? It depends. Ask your child and hold space in your heart to welcome their answer, whatever that may be.

Featured Photo by negin bahramii on Unsplash.