Am I a real Mum yet?

Sarah - 23 Jan 19

Yes, this is how I feel in the earliest of days in 2019, and that’s not a super positive start is it?

I adopted my boys, with my husband two and a half years ago and I keep wondering when I will feel less like a new Mum and not a Parent on Probation.

When my children joined us, there was so much to deal with, the feelings of mine and my husbands were not factored in so much. As it should be, we were settling the kids into their new life. Of course, we, as a couple talked and shared certain aspects of our parenting with our friends and families, but the serious nitty gritty, day to day stuff was not really known yet, let alone discussed.

I am new to the town where we’re raising the children, and I hoped I would make some new friends, with families.  I had made some brilliant friends via the adoption training, but they were not local to me. I had WhatsApp chats with them in the evening, but I’m much more a face to face, cuppa kind of girl. I knew I had to hunt down some kindred spirits at the nursery or school run And during my year on Adoption Leave, I did some friends and thankfully these relationships have grown and developed.

But as that full year had passed, I’d left my pre – kid career and had secured a family friendlier job and was happy to be working again. I loved my new (all female) team and I felt I was in the groove of being a Mum, or so I thought.

Parenthood was all I had wanted for years but I started to notice people behaving differently towards me in comparison to other mums.

I have shared a (limited version) of my children’s history with selected colleagues and Mums I have met along the way and truly am comfortable with that, but I have regretted some of those people (even family) I have trusted! Not because they will blab it about, but because they cannot resist to treat me like a Mum playing dolls. Comment I hear;

• Oh, I keep forgetting, you didn’t do that bit did you?
• You must be getting used to it now?
• You have so much catching up to do, don’t you?
• Do you treat them like your real children?
• At least you didn’t have to do the birth thing.

It was after about a year and a half, I joined the Instagram party, albeit late. I needed a variety of mum friends. A non-parent friend of mine said, ‘I do not know why you aren’t following ‘The Unmummsy Mum, you would love her’. So, I did and hidden on Instagram, I found a new herd of women, to humour me, laugh with and some of them really saved my bacon. Times were low and these ladies spoke the new language I was discovering.

The squares became a like friends and the podcasts and events seemed appealing, yet I noticed stories like mine, were still tucked away. The events didn’t fully relate to me fully and I couldn’t feel like I could join in the gang. I almost felt like an impostor. There are a huge amount of wonderful women talking about morning sickness, breast feeding, births, all the early stuff, but I would never simply never understand that, because I hadn’t done those things!

Maybe I wasn’t and still am not, looking in the right places for those Insta Mums, and some of the things that regularly make me anxious are;

• Writing to the Birth Parents. The gut wrenching moment when you have to share how fabulous your kids are, to another Mummy.
• Craving the baby years when you didn’t know your child, but really wish you did.
• Too preoccupied having empathetic thoughts for the birth Mum to enjoy your child’s birthday.
• Not being able to share your kids photos online. A silly point, some might say, but I long to share my pride for them and include adorable faces but I know I will never be able to do this.
• That cringe like day at school, when your kid is asked to take in a baby photo and we don’t have one.

I suppose the short answer, is Adoption stories will never be discussed as candidly on the internet, TV etc for the absolute best reason, to protect the children. It is that simple, but what kind of hangs aimlessly, is the adoptive parent’s bit of the story, which often might go un – shared and supported.

It can feel solitary, being a Mum, we all know that, but what I have discovered is that an adoptive Mum has less branches to grab when we need them the most and there are days when I just don’t feel Mum enough.

Sarah

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