I hold close to my heart first mothers. My mom was 15 when she was pregnant with me, and I was once a pregnant teenager with a baby to raise alone, or place for adoption. I hold close to my heart adoptive mothers because for 14 years I was an adoptive mother to a son, and the only reason I’m not still his mother is because he died. And for seven years I was the mother of a daughter who came to me from foster care at age 10. We adopted her when she was 12, and at age 17 she decided that she did not want to be adopted, and decided to go her own way. She was able to carve out a good life for herself in the adult world, without me, which is why I hold adoptees who have had hard journeys close to my heart.
They say that the oldest child has the worst of it in most families, suffering from all the mistakes his or her parents don’t have enough experience to avoid. It struck me in later years that my oldest daughter had many rookie mothers to contend with; her first mother, followed with numerous foster mothers and then she had to start out all over again with me for those last seven years.
While I was busy planning out the kind of life, I hoped we would lead together, she had her own hopes and dreams.
This is yet another reason why I wish more adoptive parents would show more respect, more compassion to adoptees who hold strong opinions. Because after all, what if their child grows up and has something he or she wants to voice. Won’t those parents someday want their own adult son or daughter to be spoken to kindly, treated with benevolence?
When I hear the word mother, I know that even when they are dividing us with a motherhood label to describe us, the one common thread that is embedded in all of us, in first mothers, adoptive mothers, and in all mothers worldwide, is that we want our sons and daughters to be treated with kindness.
For me, the word mother is an identifier best describing the sacred clan of us who link our own personal identity and have journeyed into the realm of motherhood in one form or another. It is made up of women like me whose children live within our current lives, or are alive within our heart.
First published in Adoption and Fostering Parenting Today.
Books by Terra Trevor
University of Nebraska Press
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in their Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how the end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
University of Nebraska Press, Birchbark Books, Harvard Book Store, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Amazon
"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story."
—Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education