What Should I Call My Birth Mother?

Before I began searching for my birth mom, she was just ‘Mother’ to me.  I know it sounds distant and impersonal, but it was all I had to work with. She was my womb, a woman who ‘wasn’t’, ‘didn’t want’ or ‘couldn’t be’ in my life. Mother was a private label, a pet name if you will. I called her this in my thoughts and in the journals I kept.

In 2011, the Illinois adoption statues changed.  It became legal to request the information on a sealed OBR (original birth record- see Adoption Terms & Language Quick Reference Guide). The redacted birth certificate I occasionally pulled out to renew my passport, had the names of my adoptive parents.  All evidence of my other parent set had been stricken, hidden in some dusty file cabinet in the basement of the Illinois Dept. of Vital Records.

During this time period, I was three years deep into a search for my birth mom. I had located her through Midwest Adoption’s Confidential Intermediary Program.  She had denied contact with my sister and I but would later change her mind. When I received my OBR, I already knew that the neat cursive signature on the OBR was an alias. My birth mom had been in my life for over a year. I was no longer calling her ‘Mother’. My sister and I had decided to call her by her first name.  

I never considered calling my biological mother: Mom. ‘Mom’ was reserved for someone else, the woman that nurtured me into adulthood. Mom was the soother of midnight tears, owned the cure for constipation, and dished out ‘the talk’ when I was eleven. She cheered all of my successes and mourned my daily hurts, helped me think through the problems of the day and set me straight on a moral course. Mom was my adoptive mom/mother and A-mom.  She was my ‘psychological’ mother.

‘Birth mom or birth mother’ was the label I used when talking to others about the mysterious stranger who carried my twin sister and I to full term and left us in the care of Catholic Charities in Chicago in 1959. Often this mother has other titles: biological mom, bio-mom, B-mom, first mother, other mother, natural mother.

I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the controversial designation of ‘real’ mom.  There is much discussion as to who is the ‘real’ mother, the adoptive mother who raises her adopted child or the biological mother who gave birth to that child.  My inclination is to proclaim that they are both real, because they both play a role in giving an adoptee the gift of life. In the end it is a personal opinion. One may feel more real than the other given your adoption situation.

So when you are thinking about what to call the woman from whom you were separated through adoption, I urge you to consider it carefully. Read what the literature advises (see my Resources page). Consult other adoptees and advisors like a social worker or counselor. See what feels right as it rolls off your tongue.  Whatever you decide is the correct name for this special person.