I refer to both my real mother and my adoptive mother as Mom. I use “real” and “adoptive” to differentiate when necessary for clarity, but most of the time, when I say, “Mom this or that”, I could be talking about either one of them. It drives my husband a bit crazy sometimes. But today, I am talking about my real mom because her birthday looms.

Because I never got the chance to meet her, all things to do with her are grounded in the secondhand history that substitutes, poorly, for having a relationship with her. I don’t know how she felt about her birthday although according to my cousin (an incredibly unreliable narrator), she loved the cake part of it. So each year when her birthday rolls around, I am left wondering if I should mark the day. What would she have done? What would she have liked? Would she even care?

My brother, who she raised, has made a habit of decorating her grave for Christmas. He tidies it and puts up a wreath. He allowed me to participate one year. I sent him a couple of ornaments to put on the wreath, but it made him uncomfortable though he was too polite to say so. He has his rituals where mom is concerned, and I intruded on that particular one, so I haven’t asked to share that activity since.

I tried cake a couple of times. Bought a cake one year. Made a cake another year. I like cake. No idea if she’d have liked my choices. It felt weird. Like putting urns on a mantle piece or coffee table kind of weird, so I haven’t done that again either.

The truth is I am not sure what to do with my mom. Either mom, but that’s a blog for another day.

Last year, for my own birthday, which is very close to mom’s, I got myself a ring with her birthstone, mine, and my daughter’s. It’s beautiful. It doesn’t make her birthday anything more than a day to m,e but it made her a bit more tangible than she has ever been.

Mom is just not real real. That’s the issue.

She’s pictures and stories. She’s facts I have gathered on Ancestry. But she’s also gone. A literal ghost.

Maybe this year I should start writing that book about her and me, and the whole fucked up story of how we came to be separated. As it turned out, forever. It’s a story I’ve told a lot over the past 6 years, but I have never written it down.Not because it bothers me to tell it, but it’s mine, and once you’ve written something down, it runs the risk of becoming a thing of its own. A narrative that others can use.

November is adoption month in the United States, and I’ve seen some stomach churning adoptee stories being sold as heartwarming, which is just about the last thing I would want for her or for myself.

Adoption,as it’s practised in the U.S. is human trafficking, dressing itself up with language that is better left to rescue pets because it’s not as offensive when one is talking about homeless cats and dogs.

Our story, mom’s and mine, is not a Hallmark movie. Maybe that’s why her birthday is so hard to define?

She’d be 80 years old. She’d probably have cake.I don’t know that we’d be sharing that cake, and I guess that’s the issue.