Mother's Day
This year has been a difficult Mother's Day.
This year I was able to obtain my Indian adoption paperwork from the Texas court. The ones that my adoptive parents never kept.
This is the year I learn more about who the woman who gave birth to me than I've ever known.
Within the paperwork was an Affidavit from the Indian government that stated I was abandoned. This is what it said:
There is a male minor child 'Anoop' (corrected with pen to Anup) born on [date of birth] to an unmarried girl and hence he was abandoned by his mother, who gave a necessary written declaration to the Institution and, therefore, the Institution has automatically become the legal guardian of the said male minor child Anoop (corrected with pen to Anup) and has a right to give the said child Anoop in adoption.
My entire life determined by my mother's marital status.
My mind constantly focuses on her description.
An "unmarried girl."
A "girl."
How old she was that it states she was a girl. And if true, how much anguish did she face because of all this?
How did her parents react? And what role did they play in it?
The way my adoption has played out feels like I'm in a perpetual cycle of ambiguous loss.
I don't know if I'll ever get all the answers I seek.
Will I ever know more about my mother than one sentence in an affidavit?
The struggle with Mother's Day this year is that as I scrolled through social media and read through all the dedications people were writing about their mothers, biological and/or adoptive, it was a reminder that I know nothing about my biological mother. The woman who I bonded with for 9 months, and then promptly was denied a relationship with.
It was also a reminder that I have nothing to say about my adoptive mother.
An Indian adoptee friend of mine, Ujaala, shared two things with me that day. Here's the first:
Before I knew I was adopted, and even now knowing that I am, I would get this same feeling. I missed my mom. I missed holidays with my family. But it was only the idea of it that I missed. Just like the text in this image.I have felt this way for years. Even when I lived in the same house, I missed the idea of what a family could be. I've been estranged from my parents when I lived with my parents.
I find myself wondering how much of that was because I was adopted. How much does being adopted, and/or keeping it a secret factor into the abuse that I received?
I'm going to end this with this YouTube video. The second thing that Ujaala shared.