Today has been a difficult one for me. Feeling under the weather, a balmy 75 today, expected to become a blustery 40 tomorrow, is just one small portion of the scenario though. Loss, and the losses we face as mothers, any kind of mothers, is yet another difficulty on my mind today.

Today is the birthday of my little nephew who passed away in 2000. He would have been 10 years old. His loss has me thinking about how mothers deal with the loss of a child be it through, death, or adoption, or the unrealized dream of that imagined child because of infertility. Are any of these women to be less categorized as mothers, and is one type of loss just not as important as another? This discussion has been making its way around the blogosphere again, and perhaps it stuck with me because today is such a hard, hard day of loss here.

If a woman losses a child through death, she is still a mother. Some people have difficulty with acknowledging an early miscarriage as a loss of a child, but the mother who lost that child knows. She feels the pain, she grieves the child, even if she never saw or held that child, or knew if it was a son or daughter. The loss is still very real.

The woman who losses a child through an adoption placement is still a mother. She carried her child, she made parenting decisions for her child before that child was even born. If people do not see her parenting a child, people might like to assume she is not a mother, but she is. She grieves. The loss is real.

Now here comes the hardest for people to swallow, the woman who never conceived a child, yet somehow feels compelled to mourn a loss of her hoped for child. Is she a mother?

More people will argue that she is not I am sure, but as I have been that mother grieving the loss of a child I never met, like perhaps a mother who miscarried at 6 weeks, or one placed a newborn without seeing or holding her child. I grieved for that lost child long before I ever adopted the children who call me mom today. I was a mother to the child I tried so hard to bring into the world, and I felt the loss of that child just as intensely as any mother would.

I hate it when people assume that I could not conceive, so therefore I should not be acknowledged as worthy of grieving that loss on the same level as another mother. One comment I read, about the loss of a child through infertility said that it was really no big deal, not worthy of anything more than a big ‘oh well, life just did not go like I planned.’ To me that is the equivalent of telling a mother whose child died, that she can just try to have another, or a mother who placed a baby for adoption, that she should just ‘get over it’ and move on with her life.

When the finality hit, the realization that I would never bring the child I tried so hard to conceive into the world, I was a grieving mother. Hours of wracking, gut wrenching sobs, totally inconsolable by anything, I was a mother who lost her child.

I know that I went on to mother children through adopting. Adoption however is not a cure for infertility. I still grieve the child I never knew, I imagine that I always will. The children who I parent today, I love with all my heart and soul, but as with any loss of a child, they do not replace the one that I never held. When you add into the mix having to confront the losses that their first mothers must face because of our open relationships, it is hard to believe that I ever have the strength to get out of bed some mornings.

Today I don’t, so I am going back.


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