Here at Kindred and Co, we believe our stories weave together the nuance and broken pieces of adoption. As a community we desire to create brave spaces for the storytellers in our midsts to rise as we gather around our ever extending table.
For the adoptee, who has no connection with their birthmom.
For the adoptee, who is searching for their birthmother
For the adoptee, who is navigating reunion with their mother.
For the adoptee, who is afraid to mother her own kids.
For the adoptee, who has adopted.
For the adoptee, who is mothering through foster care.
For the adoptee, who never wants to be a mother.
For the adoptee, healing from mother-child trauma
For the adoptee, who is motherless this mother’s day
For the adoptee, who is facing maternal rejection
For the adoptee, who has found liberation through motherhood
For the adoptee, who has first seen their own biology in the cradling of their baby.
The duality of living as an adoptee and mother means for many witnessing the fog dissipate and shedding more light into the deeper layers of unanswered questions, desiring familial connection, & navigating our primal wounds. It is enlightening and heart wrenching while inviting us into a more courageous journey into significant self discovery.
Below our adoptee contributors on the team reflect on their own mothering and the
connection to their adoption story:
Kira McSherry, @kirabug: My adoptedness truly began to glow when I became a mother. The adoption fog unknowingly began to clear as seeing my own unrecognizable DNA for the first time along with my husbands swirling around making up our one and only biological son. Raising a biological son and then a daughter through adoption without remembering what life was like under the wings of my own mother(s).
Feeling the unconditional love streaming through my veins from my birth mother even before I knew her name and the compassion of my adoptive mother as I try to navigate the flows of Motherhood gives me both oxygen yet steals my breath away.
Spending a lifetime always trying to remember the sounds, the smells, the touches, the beauty, the sacred of these women in utero and walking hand in hand through life; also forever allowing the pain, the hurt, the sorrow, the regret that is never without motherhood.
My motherhood is not yours.
It’s not hers.
It’s not theirs.
It’s not without hers.
It’s forever mine, with them locked deep inside of me no matter how far my mothers may be.
Sharday DuFresne, @shardayrenee: Motherhood came unexpectedly for me which left me in denial for the role I was now carrying and seeded fear that I was never imparted “that mothering instinct” simply because I never was mothered by my own. Even six years into this with three littles, I still find my thoughts twirling with insecurities, inadequacy, & trying to build significant means of connections with my own.
Welcoming my daughter earthside three weeks ago and in preparation for her arrival, most of my innermost dialogue has been around the grief of a lost mother- daughter connection while simultaneously navigating reunification with my birth mother. I feel the profound shifts found in this fresh bonding that is rewriting ancestral wounds and generational trauma as I mother my royalty. Mothering and adopteehood continue to hold complex depths of my story that brings forth refining and restoration.“
Brandi Ebersole, @brandi_ebersole: My motherhood will always be laced with the unanswered questions as they echo down the same questions in my own story. It will never be completely clear why we are a family? and the questions will never quiet the grief. But, there is a true and whole strength, I find as each of my children wreak havoc on my identity. So many moments are full of a new sense of self and ever losing of control.
It strengthens my adoptee experience with each year, rounding the corners and reminding me of the places my inner-child will always need mothering. There is a richness in the way the stories being lived are woven together. A collective loss simultaneously lives alongside a communal healing. The shared experience of family with the many birth families and cultures is a new breeding ground for so many hidden discoveries that hold complex and beautiful truth.
Motherhood for me will never be met with ease but will never cease to be lived with loving hard and painfully growing alongside.
