Omma Odiya: Where are you, Mom?

Dear Omma,

Every Mother’s Day in the US, I wonder where you are.

Often my musing is filled with guilt and grief. Guilt that I am thinking about a different mother than my third adoptive one. Am I betraying her love and commitment to raising me by thinking about the one who gave me life and then away? Grief that I celebrate for one mother, but not another.

My search for you has left me more and more curious as each year goes by.

While growing up away from you, in a foreign country than that of my birth, I suffered greatly from the hands of those who would call themselves ‘mother’. Although I believe that you probably had good intentions by giving me away, I’m afraid that your idealistic fantasy wasn’t quite my reality. By forcing me to be raised by other mothers and taking away my birthright to know my own Omma, I never wanted to be one myself. The suffering of our female bloodline ends with me, or at least, that is what I believe.

Sometimes, I think I see your face and the faces of women from our ancestral line in my meditations or dreams. Most of the time, I brush these images aside telling myself it’s just wistful thinking that I can conjure up a sense of you from an infantile memory in the deep recesses of my mind.

However, you remain a mystery. The name you put onto my paperwork is not you, is it? Why did you need to hide your identity? Did you know somehow that I would search for you and fear the truth coming back to you? Did you know the family whose name that you used? Or, were you a victim as much as me by the system and wonder yourself what happened to me?

It’s not yet the 44th Mother’s Day to celebrate without you, but with its approach and the timing upon when I chose not to become a teen one myself, I find myself again wondering, Omma — odiya?