In my last blog, I mentioned conversations that have been flying around the blogosphere this spring. I suppose it’s not surprising that in May our thoughts turn to mothers. A heated conversation has arisen among the international adoption community over referring to yourself as “mother” in the language of the child’s birth country.
Adoption catalogs carry catalogs with jewelry, shirts, tote bags, etc. which have the word Mother, and sometimes Father or Grandmother or Grandfather, in the languages of the various countries which send the most adoptees to the U.S. Since my daughters are Korean, I’ll use the Korean word for Mother, which is “Omoni” (often children say “Umma”, just as they say Mommy for Mother).
The controversy arose over whether English-speaking parents should call themselves “Umma”. At first glance, it seems that it makes sense—after all, it’s the same word in a different language. Why wouldn’t you use a word your child would understand?
I’ve written about how I told my one-year-old daughter that I was her umma. She gave me the oddest look. I realized suddenly how ridiculous it seemed. To her, umma was her foster mother, who looked absolutely nothing like me.
I remember thinking how useful it was to have another “mother” word in another language. I had made peace with the idea that my daughter had two other women who were mothers to her. We continued to refer to her foster mother as umma, the name Meg knew her by. I became Mama, then Mommy, then Mom.
We were lucky to know the birthmother’s first name, so we referred to her by that name, although the kids knew that they had grown in her tummy and were familiar with the word “birthmother”.
Many adoptive parents of Korean children wear a necklace or bracelet with the word “omoni” on it. This can be seen as a positive sign of honoring your child’s origins and claiming your role as a parent.
One adoptive mother, though, had this thought: how would she feel about wearing that bracelet in front of her child’s birthmother?
I would probably not wear the bracelet at my first meetings with the birthmother, so as not to rub salt in the wound by emphasizing that I was the mother now.
At the same time, I am the mother who is parenting now. It’s nice to have the luxury of another language, so that the title that the birthmother perhaps dreamed of having for herself is not thrown in her face. It is a lot easier for me to let my children call their foster mother “Umma” than it would be to let them call her “Mom”. “Umma” has become a name to them, or it has come to mean “foster mother” to them.
(Most of the debate I’ve read seems to be about whether the title Omoni should be reserved for the birthmother. Perhaps the foster mother is forgotten in this equation, or perhaps I’m in an unusual spot in that my children were old enough to be using the word “umma’ for their foster mother.)
Missing from the conversation have been the voices of people who’ve adopted domestically, or of Korean people who’ve adopted within their country. People adopted in the same language group don’t have the luxury of a different word for Mother. Birthparents have to get used to hearing their child call someone else “Mom”. (It seems most children in the open adoptions I know of call their birthmother by her first name, although they may refer to her as “my other mother”. A few kids call the birthmother something like “Mama Penny”.)
The parents who now say they would not call themselves Omoni say it is insensitive to appropriate that title for themselves. They think it may be insensitive not only to the birthmother herself, but to others from their child’s country, who may think that the American mother is boasting about being able to raise that child when her birthmother and birth country could not.
I see this point. However, I also think it is important to acknowledge that we are our children’s parents. I don’t think it’s wrong to refer to myself as mother in any language. That someone else has had another mother role does not mean that I don’t have one now.
There is also now an awareness that, while transracial adoptive parents must think of themselves as belonging to a multiracial family, they perhaps should not appropriate their child’s culture themselves, dressing, eating and speaking Korean.
Like many adoption issues—actually, like many parenting issues—there are not necessarily right or wrong answers. The point is to do what works for your family, but with an awareness of why certain things might be painful to some people and a willingness to respect each other.