Today is Mother's Day...and I'm writing.
I wanted to write yesterday, but I thought, I don't want to be a Debbie Downer on Mother's Day Weekend. You know, now is the time that people are posting pictures with their mothers on Facebook and social media. The pictures are either happy ones or sad ones where they are grieving their mother.
It made me think about my thought's and feelings about mother's day. How just a week ago, a person shared with my daughter, "She's not your mother." I wish I could say this was the first time I've heard such talk like this, but it isn't. The first time was in a dream before marrying my husband....the kids said in the dream, You're not my mother. The next time was from my husband's ex-wife (this has been going on for years) and now this latest time was from a family member of my adopted children.
It had me thinking about this unspoken duty to be kind and nice to people who purposefully try to hurt you or even worse manipulate your children. Welp, enough is enough.
Let me say this and set the record straight once and for all.
Mothers are not just people who have physically birthed children.
Here are the various definitions of the word, mother:
: to give birth to (a child) : to be or act as mother to (someone) : to care for or protect (someone) like a mother: a term of address for a female parent or a woman having or regarded as having the status, function, or authority of a female parent. a term of familiar address for an old or elderly woman.
Again, mothers are not just people who have physically birthed children. So people when you decide to say, "she's not your mother," to women who have laid down their lives to improve the lives of their children, HAVE SEVERAL SEATS.
I was a mother long before birthing a child as I parented five children before birthing my own. I'm in a super blended family (inherited 3, adopted 2, birthed 1)....and though I know step- parents get a bad rap...I mean we even have the story of Cinderella and wicked step mother.... there are PLENTY of parents who love all of their children (biological and non-biological) and are doing the work. There are people all across the land parenting and mothering children that they didn't birth.
I refuse to believe that mothering is just limited to a biological connection. I will no longer tolerate being subjected to this false thinking or this social construct.
I, as a mother in a blended family, am not less than because I didn't birth all of my children. We are not invisible. We are mother's too.
