My Two Mothers is the title of a post written by a new blogger that I just discovered. Like Mo, Korean blogger at adoptionblogs.com, she is an adoptee and an adoptive parent as well. Her post "My Two Mothers" is chock full of her insights and observations. The most profound part of this post is this statement:

"If you cannot see my mother in me, then you are not truly seeing me."

In this post, she talks about traditionally birth mothers are so overlooked and ignored. Although some might dispute that now as there are many loud birth mother voices constantly being heard, she is right. Traditionally birth mothers have been dismissed and shuttered away as though they did not matter. Slowly, people, including our own children, are beginning to discover that we do matter.

Of course, as a birth mother, it is always nice to hear an adoptee say that we matter. How much we matter to our children varies of course. For some adoptees, they may feel driven to search and find birth parents. When they find their birth families, many may want to building continuing relationships with some members of their birth families.

Sometimes I am amused because it seems that some people, including some adoptive parents, expect that birth parents have a strong desire for their children to be tormented and/or bothered by adoption issues. In most cases, parents want their children to be happy. For those birth parents in closed adoptions, birth parents genuinely hope that their children have had satisfying and happy lives. After all, placing a child for adoption is often done in hopes of a better life for a child.

Most birth parents are pleased if the children that they meet at reunion do not appear badly scarred by adoption and/or relinguishment. However, we do appreciate knowing that it did affect our children, and that we matter to them. That seems quite normal to me for any parent to want to matter to their child.