Birth Mother’s Day, held on the second Saturday in May, is a day to honor and remember the motherhood experience of birth mothers, women who have lost or placed a child in adoption.
Birth Mother’s Day was started in 1990 by birth mothers, who shared the recognition that Mother’s Day is for them one of the most painful days of the year- second only to the birthday of the children to whom they gave birth. Any woman, of any age, who has conceived a child is a mother. Her entire existence is transformed during pregnancy in a way that cannot be reversed or denied, no matter how many years pass, whether their child is grown, absent, or no longer living.
Birth mothers feel that they have been shut out of the traditional celebration and remembrances of the Mother’s Day celebrations. They are not recognized as “mothers”, except among other birth mothers, a few of the adoptive parents in the early years of the adoption, and, occasionally, their own family members. Historically, women who have lost a child through abortion, miscarriage, still birth, or adoption have not been acknowledged or supported in their life-long grief, as if the relationship of those weeks or months of pregnancy are not real because the women did not see, hold, or feed the baby. They are somehow expected to “get over” the loss and “go on” with their lives, while persons who experience the death or loss of a family member under other circumstances are supported with rituals, prayers, and support for years.
Birth mothers have written that “Society” treats the motherhood of the birth mother as a momentary event that fades quickly from the collective memory. The invisibility and silence that comes from this perspective gives adopted children and adults the message they are forgotten by their birth mothers soon after birth and that, they, too, have no place for expressing their feelings, thoughts or questions about the woman who gave the gift of life. The reality is that the birth mother’s motherhood, like that of any mother who has been able to raise her children, lasts a lifetime. It does not fade.
As more birth mothers write and speak to their reality, I hope people grow to understand that all the celebrations associated with Mother’s Day bring the birth mothers’ carefully hidden feelings and memories from the depths of their hearts. Then, maybe, we will grow in compassion and begin openly acknowledging their motherhood and their life-long contribution in the lives of their children, displacing the isolation, invisibility, silence and secret grief they endure now.
