Mother's Day 2020: Dear Birthmother

Dear Birthmother,

I believed that maybe I could earn you back through hard work. And I believed that it must have been an incredibly tough decision to abandon me.

Now I know better. And even though I know I am valuable and loved because my existence makes it so. I still feel at times that I am not enough because I always felt you didn't want me.

Now I know better. Communist China did not give you a choice. Whether the vehicle for my separation was the corrupt local officials, the corrupt police, the human trafficking scandal, or any number of other possibilities, I realize that free will was not a factor.

I see so many adoptees hurting today, hanging on to simplistic beliefs about Chinese culture, gender, and norms. They do not know what I have learned this past year. They haven't dug very far into the dark. They haven't done their research, passed the layer of lies you find on the surface.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
- Elm by Sylvia Plath

So I know this now, more than I ever did. Even though my parents always told me you loved me, in my heart I never fully believed it. I know this now that my separation from you, in an environment which bred fear, distrust, agony, terror, and pain, was a trauma for you too. I often thought of you, as a great decider, a judge overlooking my value as an infant. I am a woman now, and woman to woman, I think of you and what you must have gone through differently.

The One Child Policy was an atrocity that wounded so many families. The love of my parents now can't fix that pain, like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. It isn't the magnitude, but the shape. It is a different torture and I understand now that you were a woman, a human of flesh and blood too. And my separation from you, must have hurt you too.

So today, on mother's day, I celebrate all the strong women in my life, including those no longer with us. I don't make a distinction between you, Mama, and my own mother here. Because you are both everything to me and will be on my mind the exact moment that I die. It's not about choosing one above the other, and I'm not disappointed in you for doing the best that you could do, under circumstances that made it impossible for me to be with you.

I imagine that you look like me, and that I look like you, more and more, with each passing year. I want you to love me and tell me that you've always loved me and that you're proud of the woman I am today. I want you to know you don't have to feel guilty for a situation you could not control. I want you to know that I love you with all my heart. And I want to hear the truth, from your lips. What happened that night when I was born? Or the night I was taken from you? Or the night you had to place me down upon the ground, before the shops opened in the morning? I want to know who my siblings are and what my name is and what my birthday is. And I want to know you.

Even if DNA could bring us together, I understand you cannot be what I need in a mother, and that's okay. I understand you can't bring back the dead. I hope for a relationship with you, as a woman to a woman.

Happy Mother's Day.
I love you.

Love Always,
Your Daughter