For my first mom
n July and August, editor-in-chief Jozefien Daelemans and Editor-in-Chief Anouk Torbeyns alternate weekly in a new series of summer columns. This week: Anouk who wants to reflect on her first mom on this second Mother's Day. Photo: Sarah Van Looy
Today the mothers are celebrated in the province, more specifically in the diocese, Antwerp. While we always look at the people of Antwerp with a crooked eye because they can't just do 'normal' and celebrate Mother's Day in May like all the rest, a Mother's Day on Our Lady of Ascension actually seems more logical. People then commemorate and celebrate Mary, the primeval mother – at least in Catholic culture – the mother of mothers.
As an Antwerp immigrant with a mother who does not live on the territory, I still celebrated Mother's Day in May in recent years and I did nothing special on August 15. I want to change that starting this year. I want to use this second Mother's Day to honor my first, popularly called 'organic', mother. Because no matter how unconditional the care and love of my adoptive mom is, my first mother never really got a prominent place in my personal adoption story. Wrongly, I now know.
“My first mother never really got a prominent place in my adoption story. Wrongly, I now know.”
When I look back on it now, I was taught from an early age to subtly distance myself from my birth mother because, for whatever reason, she gave me up too. Not entirely illogical, of course. With an adoption, your environment tries to do everything possible so that you attach yourself to your new environment and family as quickly as possible. Everyone has done their best to create a warm nest, to receive me with open arms and to make me feel at home, blood ties or not. I don't suspect anyone of bad intentions. Today, however, I dare to doubt whether it was the best approach.
As an adoptee, I often heard that “it doesn't matter that your parents are not your 'biological' parents. It's not about who gave birth to you, but who raised you." Again: well-intentioned, but it does matter who gave birth to me. There is a woman who carried me close to her for at least nine months and brought me into the world. I wouldn't dare say that it doesn't matter, that giving birth to a child is a piece of cake and there is no emotion involved. Saying that my adoptive parents are my real parents makes sense, but somehow it dishonors my first parents.
Another sentence that appears at the top of the adoption lexicon: “You are now just a Belgian, a real Fleming. You may have a different skin color, but you are very Flemish, hey!” In today's times it is a real privilege if someone with a migration background is considered a real Belgian or Fleming, albeit a bittersweet privilege. After all, it implies that you have been completely retrained, assimilated and 'reculturalised'.
For too long it has also been thought within adoption that if children with migration roots are young enough, you can completely erase their cultural background. That they arrive here as a tabula rasa, that you can shape them to your heart's content and that they know your Flemish canon by heart today. That if you shower them with love and luxury, they will embrace Western culture without hesitation.
“The older I get, the harder my roots start to pull on me.”
But you gradually learn about a history full of colonialism and imperialism. About warped north-south relations, about a rarely beautiful history of intercountry adoption. About fraud where parents and other family were lied to, they were told that their child would temporarily stay somewhere else, not knowing that they would sign that their child was permanently taken away from them. That is an uncomfortable but harsh reality that no Western opulence can match.
Although I was taught that a blood tie is not everything, the blood still crawls where it can't go. The older I get, the harder my roots begin to pull on me and the more I realize that I was not a blank slate when I arrived in Belgium and therefore perhaps I am not 'perfect' Flemish. I have not yet checked my own adoption file and I have not yet started looking for my roots and first family, but such a fraud story is a truth that I have to take into account with a scared heart.
Whatever the case may be, chances are I'll never go looking and chances are I'll never unravel the full truth behind my adoption history. But it is a history, a background. And she matters. Just as the woman matters who brought me into the world and in that way shaped me right away, contributed her first bit to the development into the person I am today. Even though I don't know anything about her, I still feel her love coursing through my body somewhere. I'm lucky enough to have two mommies who now each have their Mother's Day to be celebrated.
Happy Mother's day!
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