I want to share a recent experience because right now, it's bothering me. This is really personal, so I put it under a read more. This is long. I'm sorry about that.
Recently a major crisis occurred in our house. Crises are a regular thing when you're living below the poverty line, and I called my mother up to cry. I'm in my thirties: I shouldn't be so reliant on my mother, but I needed the comfort of having somebody I trusted to talk to.
My mother has a bad habit of remaining neutral in arguments that involve her children. I don't personally believe that there can be any neutrality in these arguments. When a little boy told my daughter to stop what she was doing because he didn't like it, and she went right on doing it so he screamed in her face, I took her side. And I will take her side every single time until the day that I die.
I will correct her when she does wrong, but she will always know I have her back!
So I was on the phone with my mother, and I was upset and crying and needing comfort and possibly somewhere to rest my head for a few days in order to regroup after a particularly difficult day with my husband (absence does, after all, make the heart grow fonder) and then she did the absolute unthinkable.
My mother, the woman who raised me for nineteen years and whose heart I broke when I moved to England -- My mother told me to call my other mother.
And maybe I'm wrong in how I interpreted this, but I called the woman who raised me. The one who I've spent a lifetime fighting with, laughing with, and crying with. I called the woman I trusted to carry me through rough times because she loved me enough to keep me.
We adoptees often here about how we are chosen by somebody.
I didn't feel chosen that night.
Worse, I knew that if I'd called my bio mom she would have taken my side.
That's what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to call somebody who understood.
And that, dear friends, is nature vs. nurture. My biomom would have understood, because we think so alike. She would have had words of comfort and encouragement.
They're both my moms. Both of them. I call them both Mom. I love them both dearly. They talk to one another and it's not like having two families, it's like having one big blended family.
But my mom, the one who raised me? She'll always be my mom, even when she makes me feel like crap.
Total rant. This wasn't meant to mean anything. I'm sorry. It's been an emotional and stressful day. I've done a lot of crying. In a good way.
Something that has been wound tight in me for about a month is starting to uncoil.
