What makes a mother?

Is it the nine-month gestation culminating in the several hours of pain and bloodshed of childbirth? Is it marked by the passing on of physical characteristics and talents, such as brown eyes, a great singing voice or the offbeat talent of curling your tongue?

Or is it the simple acts of unconditional love and undying devotion?

On this day of greeting cards, bouquets of flowers and lunches in crowded restaurants, I find myself sorting out the various puzzle pieces that make up the picture of motherhood.

I’m reminded of the movie, “Fly Away Home,” my favorite inspiration for motherhood.

The movie stars Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin as a father and daughter reunited after a long separation and the death of Daniels’s ex-wife.

Paquin discovers a cache of abandoned goose eggs and secretly incubates them in a dresser drawer. When the eggs hatch, the goslings cast their eyes upon the 13-year-old girl, whom they instantly designate as their mother. The process is known as imprinting, and it forges a bond that cannot be broken.

The goslings don’t care that the girl doesn’t have wings or a beak or any sense of how to raise them. She wants to do it and that’s the defining moment.

Through trial and error and some experimentation with aviation, the father and daughter teach the geese, literally, how to fly from the nest.

This warm, fuzzy story has always reminded me of motherhood in the truest sense. Its bonds can be formed in the most unexpected ways.

Consider adoptive motherhood. However it comes about, it’s not about giving life but ensuring a future. It isn’t about looking alike but about sharing love, providing stability and forging new bonds and traditions.

Like making a baby, making an adoption plan has its own set of painful challenges and obstacles.

As a prospective adoptive parent, I must crack open my life and let all the delicate insides spill out for inspection. Every detail is open to scrutiny by the state child welfare agency and the federal government, including the FBI, homeland security and immigration services. Don’t forget the foreign nation I’m petitioning, which has its own set of standards and tests to put me through as well.

As the biological mother of an 11-year-old daughter, I know about the pain of childbirth. I also know that the pain washed away the instant my newborn was placed in my waiting arms.

I’m sure the frustration of adoption paperwork and bureaucracy will melt away soon after I united with my future child. Or at least when she trusts me enough to smile back.

And it’s the little things like a smile breaking through a face wet with tears that best defines the joy of motherhood, no matter how it comes about.

I still have a single dandelion bloom my once-toddler daughter gave to me on my second official Mother’s Day. It was part of a bouquet she’d picked and held in her chubby fist. I sealed it in a plastic bag and taped it to her memory book.

That dried-out weed is more precious to me than any store-bought card or gift.

I’m learning from others that bonding and attachment with children adopted from orphanages, as mine will be, isn’t as instantaneous as with a biological child or a flock of goslings. It will take more work and, I’m sure, more pain.

I’m willing to risk that for another bouquet of hand-picked flowers.

Happy Mother’s Day and here’s to all the endless ways in which women, men and children come together to be a family.

Shirley Sillars is a copy editor for the Daily Tribune. She can be reached at s.sillars@excite.com.
Content originally published in The Daily Tribune on May 8, 2005.