I Never Stopped Wanting a Mother

In 2009 my adoptive mother had been gone for nearly ten years. I had learned how to live without her, but not how to stop wanting a mother.

I was living in New York City in an apartment with a radiator that ticked all hours of the day. I’d been sitting at my kitchen table, looking up at the clock above the stove blinking 12:00 a.m., when I realized it had been a decade since she’d been gone. Her death awakened the ache I had carried inside me since childhood — and it only grew sharper. That night, I was reflecting on the trip I took to Los Angeles soon after she passed away to reconnect with my biological sister and meet my birth mother for the first time since I was 5 years old. It was like buying a ticket to a life I had imagined, but never lived.

I entered my adoptive parents’ house at 18 months old. There are no photographs of me younger than that. My baby book skips like a scratched record — suddenly there I am, upright, wobbling, mid-step into existence.

My adoptive parents were loving. But at 14, I lost my father to cancer and, in a way, the grief consumed my mother to the point where it felt like I lost her too. I loved her deeply, even though she often seemed emotionally distant — I missed her even while she was still there. The emptiness that began in childhood softened over time, but it never went away.

When I was younger, the story my adoptive mother had shared with me about my parents of origin was that  my biological father was abusive and my birth mother was gentle and shy, a sweet young woman full of love, but undone by circumstance. I kept that version of her tucked away in the back of my mind for years, a tender ghost onto which I could hold.

When my adoptive parents passed away, I began to wonder about my birth parents — what, if any of it, was true? The version my parents had shared protected me from my past, but it was not the whole story. I needed to meet the woman who had given me life.

As the plane to Los Angeles lifted through clouds, I watched the wing slice the gray sky, trying to imagine the encounter that awaited me. What would it be like to meet this woman? Would we have anything in common? Would we recognize something in one another? I would find out several days later when my sister drove us down a palm-lined freeway on a 15-minute ride that felt like a lifetime. We parked in front of a low-rise apartment building with peeling paint. I could hear a television humming through an open window, as I clasped my damp hands  against my dress.

When Bernice, my birth mother, opened the door, she offered her hand. No smile, no hesitation, just a firm, perfunctory handshake that lingered until I decided what to do with it. Her skin was rough, her grip unyielding. When she let go, I drew a breath I had not realized I was holding. So, this is her, I thought. The mother I have been waiting for.

Inside her apartment, the paint on the walls faded into an off-white and the air was heavy with dust. The sofa’s plastic covering squeaked when I sat. A weak floor lamp flattened the room into one weary tone. Bernice moved restlessly, her mind flickering from one topic to the next. Waves of voluminous dark hair curtained her lined face.

I had imagined her as warm and steady, the kind of woman who would impulsively reach for me. But she perched on the edge of the sofa, leaving a stretch of fabric between us.

“I love opera,” she said brightly. “You?” When she grew animated, her hands rose as if conducting an invisible orchestra. Her laugh was sudden and coarse, filling the room and then vanishing.

“Do you remember what I was like?” I asked, my voice trembling.

She paused, her eyes flicking toward the television. “Quiet,” she said at last.

The word hit like a closing door. My sister chatted from across the room as if this were an ordinary day, but inside me something folded in on itself. I had grown up holding onto my adoptive mother’s story, believing that my birth mother was kind and gentle. But the woman in front of me was nothing like that. I simmered with rage for feeling deflated — was I so insignificant to her?

Later, I would learn she had 12 other biological children. Maybe I was just one of many who had passed through her life, just as the foster babies had passed through my adoptive mother’s. Still, I noticed small reflections of myself in her: the curve of her smile, the sharp cheekbones, the way her hand pressed a cup against the counter when she was thinking. Across from her, I recognized something else: a restlessness I had always tried to bury.

The shock wore off, but my disappointment remained. I had flown across the country expecting to be made whole and instead met a woman who could not, or would not, let me in. I wanted her to rescue me from the ache I carried, and she couldn’t. Why had I expected her to?

After a few slow and exhausting hours, I rose to leave. Bernice reached out and took my hand, holding it for a long moment. There was no hug or kiss, but the gesture meant something to me. It was not everything I had come for, but it was something.

Healing, I realized later, would have to come from me.

On my flight back to New York, I reflected on the way much of my mothering had been built from absence, patched together from stories. If the perfect mother was not coming, I could learn to mother myself, however imperfectly.

Weeks later, a letter arrived in the mail. Bernice’s handwriting was round like mine; the letters pressed hard into the envelope. Inside was a copy of a letter she had once sent to family court asking for information about me. Proof, she said, that she had tried to find me.

At that moment, something inside me shifted. The woman who could not meet my gaze that day had once reached for me through the only system that allowed her to do so. It didn’t erase the years apart or the ache of what never was, but it gave me a different kind of truth to hold.

Empathy slowly replaced anger. Naming her as my birth mother did not erase the one who raised me; it widened the circle.

We spoke on the phone a few times after that, short and scattered conversations that never went especially deep. Then, about a year later, my sister called to tell me Bernice had been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. She died within weeks.

I stood in my kitchen, phone to my ear, counting the years that had separated us, and cried for her — and for us. After some time, my grief transformed into the understanding that I had survived what I once thought would break me.

The circle I thought reunion would complete did not close; it made room for two mothers, one who could not raise me and one who did. Both were flawed, both human. Love, I learned, does not require perfection. It only requires acceptance.

People sometimes tell me I was lucky to be adopted. I nod because it is easier than explaining. But luck wasn’t it.

Once I found my birth mother, I stopped feeling like there were missing pieces. Maybe there never really were. I no longer felt unfinished.

Looking back now, I see that reunion was never meant to fix me. It was meant to show me where to begin again.

I felt seen, and although imperfect, having lost and found both mothers, and the person I could be for myself, I was finally whole.