There are lots of different ways to be a good mom. There are good moms who parent, good moms who place, and good moms that adopt.
Yet somehow, it seems a good mom rarely feels like that title belongs to her? Because whether they raise a child themselves or if they have to love them from afar, the best moms never feel they’ve done enough, somehow.
So it stands to reason that we need special days for all mothers to remind them why their efforts matter (and why they aren’t ever forgotten.)
To be a good mom
To be a good mom (a really good one, and not just play one on social media), you have to love your child as much as or more than you love yourself.
That ability to separate your own needs from those of the child/ren in your life doesn’t come easy. Everybody knows a mom somewhere who wants a child to fulfill their own dreams, or who needs to live vicariously through their child, or who can’t let their children follow their own dreams. Those are typically the sort of mothers who don’t have healthy relationships with their children or whose expectations of their kids are never really fair.
Becoming a good mom doesn’t require that you had a good mom yourself. Some of the greatest mothers we know learned from the hardest childhoods. Being a wonderful mother doesn’t require wealth or fame, either. It does, however, help to have maturity, stability, and enough life experience and a reliable support system to always put your child’s needs ahead of your own.
Mother, know thyself
At Abrazo, we help mothers who seek to adopt, mothers-to-be who aren’t sure about parenting, and mothers who need to place for reasons that only they can truly decide. We’ve been doing so for 32 years now, so we like to think our adoption agency is blest to know the very best of birthmothers and adoptive mamas.
They’re more alike than they are different, actually. The mothers Abrazo serves have all struggled with some form of loss in life. They are willing to set aside their own comfort to ensure that they’re making the best choices they can about growing a family– or not doing so. They come from all different walks of life, but they typically love fiercely, work hard, and sacrifice greatly, whether they place a child, adopt a child, or parent the child born to them.
(And they tend to be their own sharpest critics, which may explain why so many really good moms never feel they’ve done “enough” for their families?)
Here’s to you, Mom
So whether you celebrate Birthmother’s Day (May 9) or Mother’s Day (May 10), here’s to you, from all of us here at Abrazo.
We honor all the mothers of our adoption community, and their mothers, and the daughters of our Abrazo family who have become mamas themselves over the past three decades. We give thanks for the commitment of our staff and also for the mothers among the Glenny Law office staff. (And we pay tribute, as well, to the mothers-to-be at Abrazo, who are preparing to place or to adopt.)
In the words attributed to Elizabeth Stone: “Motherhood is seeing your heart walk around outside your body and hoping the world is gentle with it.” We know every mother who ever walked through Abrazo’s doors can surely relate, and we hope each of you remember always that you are, too, a good mom and we will vouch for that every single time.
