When I was a kid and thought about my life as a grown-up, basically my entire dream for the future consisted of having kids. Which was, hopefully, pretty obvious in my origin story. I did have more or less vague thoughts about my future career, as well, but becoming a parent was priority #1. I imagined blissful, joyous days of arts and crafts and games, traveling together, and homeschooling. In fact, I put them all together in this dream of buying an RV and taking a year-long trip around the United States, studying science and history and math and geography and writing and reading and communicating our adventures together through blogs and vlogs and whatever other technology had cropped up by that point. (If it still wasn't clear yet, I have wanderlust and stability issues.) So...I anticipated some things that did happen, a lot of things that haven't (yet) come to pass, and I also expected things that will likely never become reality. Because what I didn't expect so much - or, you know, at all - was that I might speak an entirely different language from my future kids - both figuratively and literally.
I was a huge fan of The Crow when I was in high school. (Don't worry, the subject change will make sense in a minute, I promise.) Like, obsessed. My bedroom had kind of an interesting shape because I had a dormer window that kind of jutted out, and then there was one wall that had this sloped section before it met the ceiling, and that sloped area was covered in posters from the various movies. My favorite was the straight-to-video The Crow: Salvation with Eric Mabius and Kirsten Dunst. I wrote to Eric Mabius to get an autograph, and he sent back an autographed headshot, which was up there, as well. We had stray cats that wandered onto our 12-acre property and when one of them gave birth to kittens, I named one of the kittens Mabius and another one Cro (it was edgier without the 'w', obviously). When I was about 14, I came across a book series based on the Crow storyline, where various authors had basically written their own versions, and I think I ended up owning pretty much all of them. There was also a TV series that came out around the same time, and, yes, I was on top of that schedule. There were just so many great, angsty things for a teen to love about The Crow, but hands down my favorite part was the line in the original where Eric Draven is confronting Darla about her heroin addiction and failure to be a decent mom to Sarah, and he says, "Mother is the name for god on the lips and hearts of all children." That was such a profound line to me, because...what a responsibility, and what a calling. My own mom perfectly embodied that sentiment to me as a child, as well, and it really felt like she had this endless reserve of patience and kindness with us, which I just assumed must have been natural to motherhood - at least, in my genetic line. So I also might have had some high expectations of myself and the type of (patient, kind, loving, caring, creative, nurturing, organized, prepared, involved) parent I would be when the time came.
As I grew into adulthood and started reading up on and looking seriously into foster care and supervised independent living, I began to think about the type of relationship I might have with the youth who came into our home and became part of our family, even temporarily. When you're only parenting biological kids, it's virtually a no-brainer: The kids are going to call you some form of "Mom" or "Dad", typically. In same-sex families, perhaps there's a bit more thought put into it to differentiate between the two parents, and some families encourage everyone to call everyone else by first name, so it's not a universally simple situation, but it's been my experience in the wider world that most parents go by a form of these two titles, and certainly we didn't put an inordinate amount of thought into it. T-Rox, if I recall correctly, was sort of like, "Eh, I'm gonna be 'Dad', I guess," when I asked him if he had a preference on what his kids called him. Because I'm weird and overthink things, I did put some thought into what I wanted to be called, and I was really stuck on 'Mama'. I liked - and still like, as you'll note from my handle - the feeling/image it conjures up for me of cuddling up all cozy with my little babies. So, when Kiddo came into our lives at 2 weeks shy of 18, when I was about 7 or 8 weeks pregnant with Froggy, I had kind of a title dichotomy in my head: I was going to be 'Mama' to whoever this little being inside of me turned out to be, and to this teenager, I was going to be...what? I'd done all of this reading and thinking and considering and planning - for teenagers, no less - and I hadn't actually been prepared at all to identify myself as anything in particular to these kids. I'd kind of just expected to be...well, me.
About a week, maybe, into his eventually 13-month stay with us, Kiddo came up to me and sort of awkwardly/apologetically/goofily-in-that-way-that-people-are-when-they're-nervous-they're-asking-something-stupid-and-about-to-be-rejected asked me in his somewhat broken English if he could call me 'Mom'.
Now, picture this: He had come up to me as we were about to walk out the door somewhere. This felt entirely out of the blue. His mom was alive and well back in his home country. His relationship with her had been strained and he had some hard feelings toward her, but he did have someone he already called 'Mom', and his status was such that we couldn't adopt him even if we had been prepared to offer that option to him. I did feel that it would be inappropriate to have foster kids - who had parents and ideally would be returning to them eventually - call us 'Mom' and 'Dad', but refugee youths in supervised independent living was a little more of a gray area, and my assumption had been that anyone who came to live with us would just go with calling us by our names. At a week in, we were still getting to know each other. He was basically an adult, legally speaking, and I was only 8 years further into adulthood than he was. I can't say that I hadn't imagined a foster kid/SIL youth possibly wanting to call me 'Mom', but in the actual moment, it became abruptly crystal clear that parenthood was not necessarily going to be any of the fantasies I had conjured up in my childhood and adolescent imaginings; it was actually going to be weird moments like this one, and now I had to navigate what was really in a name without inadvertently embarrassing/alienating this kid who was in a new home with new people and trying just as awkwardly as we were to figure out how all of our pieces fit together. And so, while my heart did a little flutter at being asked to be 'Mom', my mouth said, gently and apologetically, "No, I don't think so." And he immediately kind of laughed it off in an 'of course not, that would be weird' sort of way, and we moved on, and I don't recall that it ever came up again.
And ever since, I've been thinking anew with every kid who joins our shifting, flowing family of what's in that name that I am called, that I call myself.
Is it 'god', on the lips of my children? Almost certainly it is for Froggy. For all of my deep and terrible flaws as a mother in reality, when it really sank in for her one night a couple of weeks ago that someday I will die and she will not have me in the world with her anymore, she cried that no other mom could take care of her and love her like I do. Sometimes it feels like no matter how much time we spend together, it isn't enough for her. And sometimes it feels like I could do or say just about anything to her and she would still love me and worship me, and that is the most frightening feeling I have ever experienced in my life. Who am I, this mortal human being who loses her patience and yells too often and has had dark thoughts in hard moments of lashing out at her own children (though I never, never have), to have such enormous power over this child (or any others)? When it comes down to it, very little except excellent circumstances (financial, emotional, physical) and a supportive, trauma-free childhood, both of which provide strong protective factors, separates me as a parent from the parents whose children might eventually come to me through state intervention. I have resources and supports and education behind me - an entire network, always growing, of people in similarly healthy circumstances whom I can reach out to when things feel hard or overwhelming or hopeless. I have had standing mom dates, and T-Rox and I trade two nights per week - one for me and one for him - as our parenting nights "off", when the evening routine is handled by the other parent while the "off-duty" parent gets time to themselves. Our parents, though they don't live close, are good for babysitting, particularly overnights, and as we had stable childhoods, we trust them to take good care of their grandbabies, as well. We have good, stable jobs that provide the means for stable housing, reliable transportation, and consistently-stocked pantry and fridge shelves, as well as excellent health insurance that provides the means to take care of both our physical and mental health as needed. We can provide, as our parents did, an excellent model of how a healthy family functions. And even with all of this positive goodness in my life, and for all of the good that I egotistically think I might be able to do for traumatized kids who share my path for any amount of time, I know that for countless numbers of children who wind up in the child welfare system due to unsafe parenting of some form or another, 'mother' is still the name for 'god', and that mother/god is not me. It is the god who can, whatever her flaws and failings, only take care of them and love them like their own mother can.
So what's in a name? The world, the universe...and then the reality of a fantasy turned a little sideways. My biological kids stopped calling me 'Mama' when they were each about 2 years old, opting to shorten it to just 'Mom', so for all of my intentions to name myself, they have been the ones to name me. Butterfly, Kiddo, and Blue all called me by my name (and so did Froggy for a time, which was actually okay with me). Some of my students sometimes refer to me as 'Mom' as well as my teacher name; in that context, it's endearment rather than anything deep, reminding me that sometimes, what's in a name is as simple as affection and even respect. Stargazer calls me by my name, but she's flexible under her own conditions. She sometimes calls me 'Mom' when referring to me to Froggy and Bean. She has called me 'Mom' to my face once when she was trying to get my attention by yelling for me from upstairs while I was in the middle of something else downstairs. In her planner under the "if found please return to" sections are her name and then my name with 'mom' in parentheses. When she's on the phone with her friends (and, as she's reported to me when I asked her how she would want to refer to me when she's at school, when she's talking to friends or teachers there), she refers to me as 'my mom'. Because her biological mom isn't in the picture and wasn't involved in her childhood even before she ended up as a state ward, and because we are in the process of adopting her and legally making her our child, and because she has expressed so much joy about that, this feels like a benediction at the same time that it also feels like a title of convenience for the sake of not having to clarify the situation to everyone. And, I'll admit, it then kind of makes me want to clarify the situation to everyone! "Well, her adoptive mom, because she had a mom before me, and her mom did the best she thought she could at the time, and I'm just kind of stepping in now because our paths came together and we bonded and adoption was on the table and I've always wanted to adopt a kid, and..." To apologize for the joy I feel at being called 'mom' by someone else's child, because that feels like the height of parental hubris, and because I am just a regular old person after all, not the god of kindness and generosity and warmth and patience that I imagined when I imagined myself as a mother. And because there was another woman who came before me who had a child and was, maybe, for a little while, her god.
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