- Safe to share
Three Mothers, One Mother’s Day
What Mother's Day Holds for Me as an Adoptee and a New Mom
It’s Mother’s Day and I’ve been sitting with so many feelings around it.
Not just one feeling. All of them at once.
That’s the thing about Mother’s Day as an adoptee. It comes layered – grief and gratitude folded into each other, love sitting right next to loss. And the older I get, the more I’ve stopped trying to untangle them.
This year feels different too. Because I’m also sitting with it as a mother now. And that has opened something in me I didn’t expect.
The Mother I Never Met
A woman whose face I can only imagine from my own reflection. A woman who, for reasons I will never fully know, couldn’t keep me.
When I was young and angry at my adoptive mom, I would crawl into bed and imagine being with her instead. I wasn’t angry at her. I glorified her. She would allow me everything. She was the angel in my adoptee ghost kingdom.*
Today, we have a strong spiritual connection. She supports me when I need encouragement or feel tender. I reach for her in those moments and something comes back – a warmth, a steadiness. I can’t explain it fully. I just know it’s real.
I don’t know if she’s still alive. I don’t know what she carries. I don’t know if she thinks of me. I don’t know if there was grief, relief, shame, love, all of the above. But I hold space for whatever it is – because her story is part of mine, even if the pages are blank.
Becoming a mother myself has made this more real. Now I understand, in my body, what it means to look at a small human and feel so much love I never knew I had inside of me. To see myself reflected in another tiny human. There’s so much confirmation of my own existence in that. And somewhere in that understanding, I’ve softened even more toward her.
Wherever she is – I hope she knows: I am okay. I am more than okay. And I carry her in me.
▼▼▼▼
The Mother Who Stayed
I think about her differently now too.
I grew up with warmth and love. That has always been true. But it was also complicated – as it often is in transracial adoption, where love is real and so is the distance between two people who come from different worlds.
What I am most grateful for is that we kept showing up. We had hard conversations. We didn’t always get it right. But we listened to each other. We repaired.
That repair didn’t happen overnight. It took years of both of us being willing to stay in it – to say the difficult things and then find our way back to each other.
I don’t take that for granted. Not every adoptee gets that. Not every relationship gets there.
She loved me the best she could with what she had. And I’ve learned to let that be enough – not because I’ve buried the complicated parts, but because I’ve been able to hold both.
▼▼▼▼
Mothering Without the Title
I’m also thinking today about everyone who mothers without the title.
The ones who stayed when they didn’t have to. The ones who showed up quietly, consistently, without a lot of recognition. The aunties, the mentors, the community members, the friends who became family.
Mothering isn’t only biological. It isn’t only legal. It’s an act. It’s a choice to protect, to hold, to try again.
I’ve been mothered by so many people across my life – some for a season, some still now. Today I want to name that. And to say: it mattered. You mattered.
▼▼▼▼
My own becoming as a mother
I look at my son and sometimes I just stop. He carries my blood. Something once interrupted in my story continues through him.
For the first time in my life, I see myself reflected back. Not in a mirror that feels foreign. In a face that is unmistakably mine. That confirmation of my own existence – I didn’t know how much I needed it until it was just there, looking up at me.
Motherhood has shown me how much I’m able to feel and love. And how deeply care, safety, and attachment shape a person. How much they shaped me.
Some days mothering him and mothering my inner child happen at the same time. He needs to be held and I feel it in my own body – the memory of needing that, and the relief of finally giving it to someone.
What adoption has taught me – maybe its most unexpected gift – is holding dual truths at once.
Grief and joy. Longing and love. Absence and presence.
My birth mother and my adoptive mother. My wounds and my becoming. The child I was and the mother I am now.
▼▼▼▼
And today, I’m holding all the tenderness that comes with it.
What are you holding this Mother’s Day? If any of this speaks to you, share it with me – I’d love to hear.
Warmly, Sun Mee.
Do you want feel more inner belonging? calm? confident? at peace? resilient? joyful?
If this post landed somewhere real for you, and you’re seeking a safe space to tend to your adoptee self—I’d love for you to know about LIBERATE YOUR ADOPTEE SELF.
An 8-week journey into inner belonging, for adult BIPOC adoptees. Join the early bird waitlist.