I became a mother in the back of a taxi cab.
No sit-com cliché, this: no crusty driver inducing me to push, no traffic jams impeding the cab's progress, no baby brought into the world amidst back seat detritus. Were I to have such a story, I imagine its telling would become legion among my mother-friends, who, when we gather, enjoy competing with each other for the best pregnancy and labor narrative. These discussions about birth generally follow a well-trod trajectory: pregnant woman describes her recent symptoms, of fatigue and bloating and kicking. Someone else remembers her own pregnancy, with more debilitating fatigue, gassier bloating, a sure-footed fetus kicking her uterus walls. And so it goes, a tournament of maternal fitness in which competitors fight to show who the strongest mom is. Sides are quickly taken in the battle, between the naturalists and those who opt for medicinal pain control. The one-upping stories turns to debate, about what it means to be a real mom, about whether being given anesthesia means giving in.
Meanwhile, in the midst of my friends' birth narrative battles, I remain silent: despite the fact that I am a mother of two beautiful boys, despite my own compelling stories of becoming a mother. My story is of a different sort, as is my entry into motherhood, and for some reason, my narrative has little cachet amongst most women. Both my sons are adopted. So, yes, I became a mother in a taxi cab; after eleven months of an adoption process, after signing all the paperwork, after spending several hours at my first son's orphanage, the orphanage director handed my child to me through the taxi cab window, and I was transformed to mother. But sometimes, I think, my own transformation to motherhood matters little to others, or at least to those who believe I have no "real" birth narratives to share.
Before I entered the sisterhood of motherhood, I did not know how significant these birthing narratives were, did not know that when in groups, women enjoy not only sharing their stories of birth, but also use those stories to prove themselves worthy: as if refusing an epidural or choosing to induce somehow indicates a woman's value to her own children or to society. Now that I have become a mother, birth stories seem everywhere—my friends are not the only ones competing to spin the best pregnancy yarn. Bookstore shelves bend under the weight of pregnancy stories: essay collections about women's birthing experiences, manifestos about the spiritual beauty of natural birth, memoirs describing one or another woman's powerful labor and delivery. Television series, like The Learning Channel's Birth Stories, use each episode to trace the development and then birth of one child, showing the mother in all her queasy, fatigued, exuberant, bloody and sweaty glory. Blogs and chat rooms allow women cross-globally to boast of their tremendous -- and unmatchable -- experiences becoming mothers, providing forums as well for mothers to assert the supremacy of one delivery method over all others.
Birthing narratives are powerful, to be sure. Despite their seeming differences, differences exploited by the women telling their tales, the similarities within birth narratives draw women together across cultures, across time; in the least, the stories offer the same denouement, a child entering the world. Such stories celebrate the inexplicable miracle of being, the still-unfathomable process that gives us presence, that gives us life. I understand this significance of telling, of describing for others the most profound moment in many women's lives. So profound, in fact, that birthing stories are an integral part of mythology, of literature, of religious texts. The Bible has at its center a delivery story that is remembered and celebrated each year, and we can easily imagine Mary's birthing tale following the advent of Christ: "And you thought your experience was bad. I had to give birth to Jesus in a manure-filled manger. If that wasn't bad enough, all these people came around to gawk."
The ubiquity of birthing stories is not troubling, in and of itself. I would be a cruel woman indeed were I to begrudge others the opportunity to publicly narrate the most extraordinary moments in their lives. Still, I'm annoyed by the competitive approach to storytelling, the sense that each woman's story needs to be more profound -- the pregnancy more difficult, the labor more, well, laborious -- than all others. And, more, I find that the rite of telling such narratives sometimes serve to marginalize those mothers, like me, who lack good birthing tales. I don't have the "right" narrative to make emblematic that first maternal sacrifice leading to a million more. Although I have two sons, I don't have a labor story to share, don't have the ritualized wounds of pregnancy and birth that show my initiation into motherhood. For there is a message that these labor narratives implicitly acknowledge: a nine month pregnancy, followed by a vaginal birth (or, a Caesarian section, but only if necessary) is the truest, the most real, form of becoming a mother.
Of course, most people would probably deny this belief. Much of contemporary society has endeavored to embrace adoption as another viable way to build a family, giving lip service (at least) to the beauty of adoption. But ask any adoptive parent about the comments she has received, and it becomes clear in the rhetorical choices alone that adoption is not often considered as legitimate as biological parenting. For example, a friend once said, "Melanie, you're lucky you don't have children, so you don't have to deal with all the physical symptoms that follow giving birth." I had children, my two sons, but that was apparently beside the point. Others have asked whether I "have my own children," as if my sons were not mine; or have wondered if my sons were "really brothers," as if blood alone defined their sibling relationship.
Alternative journeys to parenthood
For those who have not given birth, any gathered retelling of birthing stories serves to remind them of their marginalized status in the mothering community. I imagine this is especially true for those women who have struggled or who are struggling with infertility, and whose longing to birth a child is heightened by the narratives of others who successfully delivered. This is not true for me, as my husband and I decided adoption was a legitimate path to a family, and we did not pursue biological parenting; I honestly never felt an acute need to be pregnant or to give birth. But my connections to the adoption community, where up to 80 percent of parents first tried biological conception, have reminded me of the enormous sadness infertile women feel when they cannot give birth. Groups of mothers bragging about their labor experiences only serve to remind these women of their presumed failures; or reinforce their sense that they are not fully mothers, or even fully female, because they could not carry children to term. Too often, others' birthing narratives condemn these women to silence, even though they have their own stories to tell -- about pain and loss and, many times, about an alternative journey to parenthood.
These alternative journeys to parenthood can be extraordinary, I know: the adoptions of my two sons were defining moments in my life, even though I was not a part of their births. But there are few forums in which mothers can tell their adoption stories and receive the same kind of affirmation as birthing stories receive; for example, several online mothering magazines feature readers' birth stories, but have no place for adoption narratives. Most of my mothering friends, too, have not asked to hear my entire adoption stories, even as I have heard my friends' labor tales several times over, and can tell with certainty who had an epidural and who did not.
In some ways, I do not fault them for failing to ask me -- most people lack the context to know what to ask, or to even know how remarkable an adoption experience can be. But if pain and suffering indicate maternal fitness, many adoptive parents might have their own harrowing stories to tell, given the opportunity. I know I do. For while my first son's adoption from Viet Nam, at seven months old, proceeded relatively smoothly, my second son's adoption, from India, did not. Problems with our agency and our son's orphanage resulted in a nearly two year adoption process, and the child we assumed would be younger than two when we brought him home was actually over three. Jokes about being an expectant mother for twenty months served to cover the emotional strain of waiting for a son we knew only by a picture and a scant medical report -- a report that hinted at cerebral palsy and malnutrition. When we finally met our son, at an orphanage in Mumbai, he screamed in terror for hours and refused to let my husband hold him, traumatized by the big white strangers who had arrived to take him away.
Parenting in a foreign hotel can often be difficult, and our week in India processing paperwork was made more complicated by an infection that swelled shut both my eyes and a son who insisted on being held. On the thirty hour plane ride home, my husband contracted a food-borne illness, and I spent the entire trip trying to entertain a frightened, impulsive, active toddler by myself. By the time we reached Portland, delivering our child to the safety of home, we were all exhausted, and while a nice hospital stay, and a nurse to look after me, sounded lovely, there was no resting: still with eyes swollen by infection, I began mothering two three-year-old sons, one who spoke no English, was on Indian time, and could not stand separation from me.
If given the opportunity, this is the story I would tell: about my son's miraculous entrance into my family, and about the psychic and physical pain that accompanied his arrival. Too, my first son's adoption -- while not as draining -- had its share of long plane rides, hotel room parenting, and emotional exhaustion, an exhaustion intensified because we were first time parents, trying to divine the needs of an infant long use to the ebb and flow of his orphanage life. Although I do no know the pain of giving birth, although I have never really sensed the mayhem of a hormone-addled body, my adoption narratives might still be considered good competition for a maternal fitness award: if only I had the chance to tell them, if only others might see my own lack of a birthing story not as a deficit, as an indication that I am not a real mom.
And still: even my sons' adoption stories are not really about them, for their birth narratives are different, unique, unknowable to me or to them. This is where some of my sadness about birth story rituals resides, that my sons do not know anyone who can bear witness to their beginning, even as they quite obviously came to being through the miracle of their first mothers' labor and delivery. And so, while I long to tell the narratives about my sons' adoptions, I assume there might be another mother somewhere, in India, in Viet Nam, longing to tell her own story about my sons' births. I wonder sometimes whether each mother has the space to share her story, given the circumstances of her labor, the cultural stigma of unwanted pregnancy, the grief she may feel about leaving her child. How does each woman feel when she is in a group, listening to others share their own birthing experiences? Does she feel silenced, as I do? Most significantly, in my attempt to argue for the merit of my adoption stories, I worry that I somehow compromise the value of each mother's own stories, and of the tremendous sacrifice each made to allow me my greatest gifts.
In a sense, this is what birth stories do: in many cases, they serve to undermine the value of other women's stories, of other women's experiences. I suppose that birth stories might have the power to bind women together, creating communities who have a shared experience of labor and delivering -- or not, as the case may be. Yet too often, the competitiveness of birth narrations challenge this possibility of community. Instead, the stories become self-focused, as their narration -- both those of birth and of adoption -- affirm for ourselves and others the rites of passage that attest to our maternity. By asserting that our own entry into motherhood was the hardest, bloodiest, most exhausting, we nearly condemn those who chose another path toward motherhood.
In the process, we attempt to confirm what it means to be a "real" mother, and our focus is obscured from the real center of motherhood: our children. After all, the delivery of children into our lives takes hours, maybe days; when we are blessed, our children remain ours for a lifetime. And over the course of a lifetime, we make many choices as mothers that are just as good, as fulfilling, as painful, as harrowing, as those first choices about pregnancy, about delivery -- even about infertility and adoption.
Giving birth to a child makes someone a real mother, no matter how that birth happens. Adopting a child makes someone a real mother, no matter what others say about the virtue of blood. But what matters most -- the fact we all know, even as birth narratives suggest otherwise -- is being present to our children each day after their birth. So although we need to develop the grace to listen to all stories of labor and delivery and transformation, from biological and adoptive mothers alike, we also need to recognize the really significant narratives about the lifetime of mothering we do. Those stories about mothering -- the good, the bad, the challenging, the exhilarating -- are the ones we should be telling each other, for these are the stories celebrating what makes us real.
- mmo -
Melanie Springer Mock is mother to two sons, one adopted from Viet Nam in 2002, and one from India in 2005. She is an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Literature at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon, and has been published in Adoptive Families, Literary Mama, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Brain, Child, among other places. |