Reply to Christmas gift ideas for my kids' bio-mom...? HELP!!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow, I'm disgusted at a lot of the responses on this post, and astounded at how little a lot of you seem to know about family dynamics and children who grow up in abusive households and/or houses with mental illness and addiction.

None of you should be telling OP what role she plays in her family, from what it sounds like, she has been the ONLY mom in the kids for the last 3 year, likely more given what she's said about the addiction and mental health issues. As a family therapist, I see this dynamic ALL THE TIME, and there is NOTHING wrong with it.

Just because there isn't an adoption does NOT mean that she isn't "100% their mom," or that a woman is deserving of the title because she birthed the kids. The mom is the one who is a mother to the kids. End of story.[/quote]

I’m sorry that you are a family therapist if you believe that the children’s mother is not truly their mother simply because she is mentally ill and has an addiction.  It is such a disturbing, misogynistic view of motherhood that we most continue to eat out title, day in day out, by the ceaseless performance of parenting.  Does a mother stop being a child’s mother if she dies in childbirth?  Or at the children’s age 3?

No.  Their mother is their mother.  She is sick, addicted, and does not have the capacity to parent them.  But she is their mother.  Their stepmother is their mother, too, as she parents then daily.  The title “bonus mother” is sweet.  It is lovely that OP’s children acknowledge her as their mother, too, and that he is dependable and reliable in a wat their first mother is not.  It doesn’t erase the existence of their first mother.

Similar to how death does not erase the motherhood of a first mother, even if another mother does the parenting in later years, neither should adoption.  It doesn’t in any way diminish the parenting of an adoptive mother to acknowledge that a child’s first mother is a mother forever, I even if she doesn’t have the capacity to parent.  Even if she loses custody.  Even if she is addicted.  Even if she is flawed.  She is still their mother.  Imperfect, flawed, sick, whatever.  Still their mother.  The erasure of mothers who are considered “disqualified” by illness, poverty, or other circumstances  is really troubling and can cause real problems for both the children and the women stripped of their titles of mother.  (I say this as a mother and as the daughter of a mother who relinquished two children to adoption.)[/quote]

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