Three Women, One Love: Honoring Bio, Foster, and Adoptive Mothers

I’m not an adoption professional. What I am is an expert on how it feels to be adopted. I’m an international adoptee. I hold a wealth of knowledge and understanding about living in the skin of adoption. I was born in England. Not in London, but in a smaller place known as Bury St Edmunds. Bury St Edmunds is a town in West Suffolk on the River Lark. It is of an ancient ruin and is said to have been the site of a Roman villa and later a royal Saxon town. Bury St Edmunds is named for Saint Edmund—king of the East Angles—killed by the Danes around 870, and is buried there. I tell you this not because I’m a historian, but because I hold a deep sense of pride in where I am from and from where I was adopted. My bio mother delivered me into this world on a cold January morning. My bio father wasn’t at the delivery. He didn’t see the tears my mum cried; tears streaked with the heavy emotion of a mother preparing to relinquish her daughter to foster care. I wasn’t taken from my mum there at the little hospital in Bury St Edmunds. No, Mum cared for me for several days after my birth. Imagine, holding your baby, rocking your little one to sleep, touching tender-soft skin, smelling the sweet scent of your new child—all along knowing there would soon be a difficult goodbye. Imagine, feeling the touch of your mother and then having that taken from you. A child remembers these things, from a central and core place within. The severing is never forgotten. From the arms of my bio mother, I was placed into the arms of my foster mother. I have notes from my foster mother that I read to this day. Notes that are written in blue ink, on soft blue paper, neatly folded and placed into matching envelopes. My foster mother wrote of how I didn’t like my baths but loved being outside. She noted that I seemed to be content dressed in the beautiful sweaters and booties that my bio mother had knitted, during the months that I grew inside of her. My foster mother’s role was a temporary one, but also a critical one—offering stability and love to children like me who didn’t yet have a family to call their own. I’m told that she shed a tear when I was taken from her care. I’m told that she said she would miss me. Read full blogpost, here: