Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for the Adult Adoptee
For adult adoptees, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day rarely feel like simple celebrations. In my work with driven, adopted women, these dates often surface old grief, a loyalty conflict between two families, and questions about identity that never got their own paperwork. This piece looks at why that happens in the body, not just the mind, and offers concrete ways to move through the day itself.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Three Cards in a Parking Lot
- What Is Adoptee Grief?
- The Neurobiology of Preverbal Attachment Loss
- How Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Show Up for Adult Adoptees
- The Loyalty Conflict: Honoring Two Sets of Parents
- Both/And: You Love Your Adoptive Parents and You Grieve Your Biological Ones
- The Systemic Lens: Why Hallmark Holidays Were Built for a Single-Story Family
- How to Get Through Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as an Adult Adoptee
- Frequently Asked Questions
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day carry a distinct emotional complexity for adult adoptees, who may simultaneously hold love, grief, loyalty, and longing for both their adoptive and birth families. These holidays can activate questions about identity, belonging, and the original loss of placement that do not resolve neatly with time or gratitude. The grief of adoption is real and valid, regardless of whether the adoptive family was loving. In my work with driven women, the hardest part around these holidays is usually holding both realities: genuine love for the family they have and genuine grief for what was lost.
In short: Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are emotionally complex for adult adoptees because they surface layered grief, identity questions, and loyalty binds involving both birth and adoptive families simultaneously.
If you're the person in your family line who decided to stop the pattern, my self-paced course Parenting Past the Pattern is the practical work of doing it.
Annie Wright, LMFT, has supported adult adoptees processing identity and grief across more than 15,000 clinical hours, including the specific difficulties these parenting holidays bring. Pauline Boss, PhD, psychologist and originator of the ambiguous loss framework, documents how losses without cultural acknowledgment, such as the loss inherent in adoption, create unresolved grief that resurfaces around significant relational events (Boss 1999).
Three Cards in a Parking Lot
It’s 8:40 on a Saturday morning, the day before Mother’s Day, and Stephanie is sitting in her car in a Whole Foods parking lot with the engine off. She’s 44, runs a mid-size logistics company, and has not moved in eleven minutes. Three cards are fanned across the steering wheel. One is for her adoptive mother, the woman who raised her, whose handwriting she can pick out of a stack of a hundred. One is for her birth mother, found four years ago through a DNA registry, still more acquaintance than parent. The third card she bought on impulse near the register, and it isn’t addressed to anyone. It just says, in the store’s own cursive font, Thinking of you today. She doesn’t know who that one is for yet.
“I have literally negotiated eight-figure contracts without this much indecision,” she told me, the Tuesday after. “I stood in a parking lot for twenty minutes because I couldn’t figure out which mother gets the card that says ‘thank you for everything.’ Both of them get to be true. Neither of them gets to be the whole truth. I don’t know how to hold a pen and mean two things at once.”
Sitting with that image, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to recognize in driven, adopted women: not confusion exactly, but a kind of arithmetic grief, the sense that love has to be rationed because gratitude was never built to be split three ways. What Stephanie was doing in that parking lot wasn’t indecision. It was her nervous system trying to do accounting on something that was never a ledger to begin with.
Across town, in a different kind of quiet, Amanda is standing at her kitchen island on Father’s Day morning with her phone against her ear, keeping her voice light for her adoptive father, who is telling her, for the third time, about the tomatoes he’s staking in his garden. She loves this man. She has never once doubted that he loves her back. And underneath the call, in a register she has learned not to let reach her voice, is a question she has carried since she was nine: somewhere, is there a man staking tomatoes who doesn’t know she exists.
Stephanie and Amanda don’t know each other, but they are living the same holiday from two different rooms. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are marketed as uncomplicated, one card, one bouquet, one uncomplicated feeling. For adult adoptees, the day arrives instead as an emotional minefield with no marked paths, stirring grief, a loyalty conflict between two families, and identity questions that most people outside the adoption community never have to sit with.
These are not two-minute feelings that resolve by the time the cards get mailed. They are part of a longer process of integration, one that adoption researcher Betty Jean Lifton, PhD, spent her career describing as the adoptee’s ongoing work of holding dual parentage without collapsing either parent into a footnote.
This article is a guide through that process. It leans on the work of Nancy Verrier, MFT, whose research on the preverbal attachment injury gives shape to a grief that adoptees often feel long before they have language for it, and it stays close to what I actually see, session after session, in the women who bring this particular ache into my office every May and June.
Whether you recognize yourself in Stephanie’s parking lot or Amanda’s kitchen island, this guide holds space for the whole range of what these two holidays can bring up. You’ll find a look at the neurobiology underneath the feeling, the loyalty conflict at the center of it, and concrete ways to move through the day itself, rather than just survive it.
The reaction in that parking lot is older than the greeting card aisle that triggered it.
What Is Adoptee Grief?
Disenfranchised grief describes a loss that doesn’t get social permission to be grieved openly, because it doesn’t map onto death, divorce, or another widely recognized category of loss. Adoptee grief around family holidays is a common form of this, particularly when the adoptive family is genuinely loving and the grief has nowhere obvious to land.
In plain terms: Your reaction makes sense, because a calendar date, family text, or dinner table can carry years of relational history that nobody else at the table is carrying too.
Adoptee grief doesn’t fit the models most of us were handed for mourning. There’s no funeral, no casserole brigade, no calendar date that marks the loss the way a death anniversary does. It’s ambiguous, layered, and it doesn’t finish on a schedule. Unlike grief after a death, adoptee grief gets tangled up with secrecy, with shame that was never the adoptee’s to carry, and with questions about origin that may never get answered.
Most of this grief centers on the absence, or the unknown presence, of birth parents. I want to be direct about something here, because I watch driven women talk themselves out of this constantly: even an adoptee raised in a genuinely loving home can feel a real ache for a biological connection she never had the chance to experience. That ache isn’t a referendum on the adoptive parents. It’s not about replacing anyone. It’s grief for something that happened before the adoption ever did.
Betty Jean Lifton, PhD, the psychologist and adoptee whose work anchors much of what we now understand about adoptee identity, wrote about this as a lifelong negotiation between two sets of parents, never fully resolved, never meant to be. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day don’t create that negotiation. They just turn the lights up on it.
There’s a particular tension I hear about constantly around these holidays: gratitude and loss occupying the same Tuesday. An adult adoptee can feel genuinely thankful for her adoptive parents and, in the very same breath, grieve a family she never knew. That’s not a contradiction to be resolved. It’s the actual shape of the thing.
Reunion adds another layer entirely. Finding a birth parent, or searching and not finding one, can bring real joy alongside a fresh grief nobody warned the adoptee about: complicated histories, expectations that don’t match reality, sometimes outright rejection from the very person she’d hoped would close the loop.
I think about this every spring, watching clients prepare for these two specific days differently than they prepare for any other holiday on the calendar. Christmas has its own weight for plenty of people, but it isn’t aimed at a single relationship the way Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are. There’s no dodging the target. The whole day is built around the exact category that feels unfinished.
This grief stays unspoken because most people, including well-meaning family members, have never been given a picture of what it actually looks like. It gets overlooked in the mainstream conversation about family and holidays because the mainstream conversation assumes one mother, one father, one uncomplicated story. Naming this grief, out loud, on the record, is the first real step toward doing anything useful with it.
For adult adoptees, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can function as emotional triggers, not because the adoptee is fragile, but because the day reliably reminds her of what was lost alongside what remains. Both are true. Both deserve care, from therapists, from loved ones, and from the adoptee herself.
The Neurobiology of Preverbal Attachment Loss
A preverbal attachment injury is a rupture in the earliest bond between infant and mother that occurs before the infant has language to encode or later recall the event narratively, a concept central to Nancy Verrier, MFT, psychotherapist and author of The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, and her theory of the primal wound in adoption.
In plain terms: Your shoulders, jaw, stomach, sleep, and breath may know the holiday is coming before your thinking mind has decided what to do about it.
I recently reread Nancy Verrier, MFT, psychotherapist and author of The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, and the line that stopped me, again, the way it has stopped me every time I return to her work, was her insistence that the separation from the birth mother constitutes a trauma. Not a difficult transition. Not an adjustment period. A trauma, recorded in a body that has no words yet for what it just lost.
Here’s the clinical layer first. Verrier’s theory holds that the newborn recognizes the biological mother through nine months of shared heartbeat, voice, and biochemistry, and that separation from her, even into an adoptive home that arrives within hours or days, registers as a rupture in the infant’s felt sense of safety. This happens before hippocampal memory comes online, which is why an adult adoptee can feel a grief with no accompanying story to explain it.
Think of it like a smoke detector installed in month one, before the house even had furniture in it. The detector doesn’t know what a house fire actually looks like yet. It only knows that something changed in the air, and it has been wired, ever since, to sound the alarm whenever the air changes again in a similar way. That’s the kitchen-table version of preverbal attachment injury: an alarm system built during a loss the person cannot consciously remember, calibrated to a threshold nobody explained to her.
Which is why, on a Tuesday in early May, an otherwise composed, capable woman can find her chest tightening in a card aisle, her sleep going thin for a week before the actual date, her jaw clenching through a phone call with a parent she genuinely loves. The alarm isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly the job it was built to do in month one, sounding at a frequency her calendar has just triggered again.
What’s changed since Verrier first published in 1993 is that developmental neuroscience has given us better language for what she was describing clinically. The brain’s stress response systems get shaped by the earliest ruptures, well before conscious recall is possible, which is exactly the mechanism Verrier was pointing at without the imaging to prove it yet. For adoptees, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can activate those systems directly, which is why the response often arrives as body sensation first, tight chest, shallow breath, restless sleep, and only becomes a thought several beats later.
This is not a sign of weakness or a character flaw. It’s a nervous system doing precisely what nervous systems are built to do: remembering, at the level of tissue and breath, what the conscious mind never had the chance to record. Therapeutic approaches that address the primal wound directly, including somatic work and attachment-focused therapy, can help an adoptee’s nervous system build new evidence over time, so the alarm eventually recalibrates instead of just getting louder every May.
Of course this feels disproportionate to the actual card in your hand. Of course a Hallmark aisle doesn’t look like it should carry this much weight. It was never about the aisle. It was about what your body learned before you had any language to argue with it.
How Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Show Up for Adult Adoptees
These holidays don’t show up the same way twice, even for the same woman. Some years it’s a low hum in the background. Some years it flattens her. What I’ve come to understand, across the adult adoptees I’ve worked with, is that the intensity has less to do with how good the adoptive family was and more to do with what else is happening in her life that particular spring.
Stephanie’s parking lot morning wasn’t really about the cards. It was the fourth Mother’s Day since she’d found her birth mother through a DNA registry, and the relationship still hadn’t settled into a shape she recognized. “I keep waiting for it to feel normal,” she told me, turning her coffee cup in slow half circles on my office table. “Four years in. I thought by now I’d know what to call her in my head. I still don’t. I call her by her first name and it feels wrong, and I can’t call her Mom because that word already has an owner.” I sat with that for a moment before saying anything. What she was describing wasn’t a failure to adjust. It was a woman trying to build a category in her mind that English never gave her, and doing the work of inventing new language for a relationship nobody had modeled for her growing up.
Amanda’s Father’s Day call, on the surface, looked nothing like Stephanie’s parking lot. No searching, no DNA registry, no second parent recently arrived. Amanda has never located her birth father and, at 41, has mostly stopped looking. But the not-knowing has its own weather. “It’s not that I want him in my life,” she said to me once, twisting the plain gold ring she wears on her right hand, a habit I’ve watched her do in almost every session. “It’s that Father’s Day makes me do math I don’t want to do. Is he alive. Does he know I exist. Did he ever wonder.” The performance of warmth on the phone call with her adoptive father, real warmth, not fabricated, was happening in the same body that was quietly running that math underneath.
Betty Jean Lifton, PhD, wrote extensively about this exact simultaneity, the way adoptees are asked to hold love and grief, presence and absence, belonging and estrangement, all at once, often within a single phone call or a single greeting card. Her clinical observation, which matches almost exactly what I see in my own practice with driven, adopted women, is that the holidays don’t create new feelings so much as force existing, usually well-managed feelings into a smaller room with less air.
Many adult adoptees tell me they feel isolated on these specific days, not because their lives lack support, but because their experience doesn’t match the cultural script everyone else seems to be reading from. A friend posts a Mother’s Day tribute with one photo, one woman, one uncomplicated caption. The adoptee reading it is doing quiet triage between two women and a form of loss that has no photo.
Naming how the day tends to show up for you, specifically, ahead of time, is often the difference between getting blindsided by it and being able to meet it with something like preparation.
I’ve also watched the intensity shift with life stage in ways that surprise my clients. A woman who breezed through her twenties without much reaction to these holidays can find them landing hard in her thirties and forties, often right around the time she becomes a parent herself, or right around the time her adoptive parents start aging in ways that make their mortality real. The holiday didn’t change. What she’s carrying alongside it did.
The Loyalty Conflict: Honoring Two Sets of Parents
“Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves
The loyalty conflict sits at the center of the adoptee experience on these two holidays. It comes from trying to honor two sets of parents at once, without either honoring feeling like a betrayal of the other.
The shape of it, in the room with me, usually looks like a tightrope with no net underneath. On one side stands the adoptive family, the people who fed her, showed up to every school play, sat up with her through fevers. On the other side stands the birth family, the people who gave her the body she’s in and a piece of identity that adoption paperwork never erased, no matter how final the paperwork tried to sound.
Most adoptees I’ve worked with carry a specific fear underneath this conflict: that loving the birth family, even in the smallest way, functions as an insult to the family that raised them. That fear is rarely spoken directly. It shows up instead as exhaustion, as a kind of low-grade dread that arrives every April, as an inability to answer a simple question like “what do you want to do for Mother’s Day” without a full-body calculation first.
I recently went back to Betty Jean Lifton’s Journey of the Adopted Self while I was preparing to write this, and one line kept catching me: she describes the adoptee as living inside “a story with two beginnings,” neither of which the culture around her knows how to hold at the same time. That phrase has stuck with me because it names something I watch happen in session constantly. My clients don’t struggle with the two beginnings existing. They struggle with the fact that everyone around them keeps asking them to pick one.
Betty Jean Lifton’s work is precise about why this duality is a distinct psychological load, not a personal failing. Most people celebrating Mother’s Day or Father’s Day are working from a single, uncontested category. The adoptee is working from two categories that were never reconciled by the culture around her, only by whatever private reconciling she manages to do herself, usually alone, usually without a script.
Stephanie put words to this the same week she brought the three cards inside. “I don’t actually think either of them would be hurt,” she said. “I think I’m the one who decided a long time ago that love only comes in fixed amounts, and I’ve been rationing it like there’s a shortage nobody else can see.” That belief, that love is finite and has to be portioned out carefully, is one of the most common threads I hear in this work, and it rarely traces back to anything either family actually did.
The strategies that help most, in my experience, are specific rather than sweeping: naming the conflict out loud to one trusted person, setting a boundary about which calls happen on which day, building a small private ritual that belongs to no one but her. None of these require choosing a side. That’s the point. The loyalty conflict resolves not by picking a family but by refusing the premise that a choice was ever required.
Working with a therapist who understands adoption specifically, rather than grief in general, tends to speed this process along considerably. There’s a difference between a clinician who nods sympathetically and one who already knows what a reunion anniversary can do to a nervous system in April, or what it costs a woman to sit at two different dinner tables in the same calendar year and perform gratitude at both.
Naming the loyalty conflict for what it is, a structural bind, not a character flaw, tends to loosen its grip. It stops being evidence that something is wrong with her and starts being evidence that she’s carrying something genuinely complicated, which she is.
Both/And: You Love Your Adoptive Parents and You Grieve Your Biological Ones
Ambiguous loss is a concept developed by Pauline Boss, PhD, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota and author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. It describes grief that lacks a clear ending, a shared ritual, or social recognition, the kind of loss that doesn’t get a funeral, a sympathy card, or a day off work.
In plain terms: You may grieve someone who is alive, grieve a family you never fully had, or grieve the version of a holiday everyone else seems to assume exists.
Here’s the truth I want you holding by the end of this section. Loving your adoptive parents completely does not subtract from the grief you carry for your biological ones. Both/and, not either/or. Not a scoreboard where one feeling has to win.
This isn’t a contradiction to smooth over. It’s the actual architecture of adoptee identity, and pretending it’s simpler than that is what makes the holidays harder, not easier.
I’ve noticed that driven women, in particular, want a rule for this. Something like, grief gets forty percent of the day and gratitude gets sixty, or some formula that would let them plan for it the way they plan for everything else. There isn’t a formula. Pauline Boss, PhD, is direct about this in her work on ambiguous loss, and it’s the sentence I come back to most often with clients who want a formula: the goal isn’t managing the proportions correctly. The goal is building enough tolerance for the ambiguity itself that neither feeling has to be suppressed to make room for the other.
What I watch happen, in the adoptees I’ve worked with who eventually find some ease with these two days, is that they stop trying to resolve the duality and start practicing holding it. Gratitude doesn’t have to argue loss out of the room. Grief doesn’t have to argue gratitude out of the room. Both get a seat.
Practically, this often looks like small, private rituals rather than grand gestures: a card sent to each parent that says something true rather than something tidy, a candle lit for the parent who isn’t at the table, five minutes alone before the family gathering starts, just to let both feelings exist before the performance of the day begins.
The proportions shift year to year, and that’s expected, not a setback. Some years, grief takes up more of the room. Other years, gratitude does. This isn’t regression. It’s the ordinary rhythm of carrying something layered across a lifetime.
Adult adoptees who find community with others who understand this specific duality, rather than generic grief support, tend to feel less alone in it. There’s a real difference between a support group that gets grief broadly and one that gets what it means to grieve someone who might still be alive, on a holiday built to celebrate someone else.
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Stephanie eventually found her own version of the both/and. She still doesn’t know exactly what to call her birth mother in her own head, four years in, and she’s stopped treating that as a problem to solve by a deadline. Some relationships, she told me, don’t get a category. They just get lived, imperfectly, one Mother’s Day at a time.
The Systemic Lens: Why Hallmark Holidays Were Built for a Single-Story Family
This isn’t a personal failing, and it isn’t unique to any one family. It’s a pattern, and the pattern has a structural origin. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day were built, commercially and culturally, around a single-story family: one mother, one father, one child, one uncomplicated feeling to sell a card for.
The greeting card industry didn’t invent this model, but it profits from keeping it simple. Idealized, uncomplicated parent-child devotion is what sells. An adoptee’s actual experience, two mothers, two fathers, presence braided with absence, doesn’t fit the aisle. That’s not a flaw in the adoptee. That’s a flaw in the aisle.
Widen the lens and the same pattern shows up in workplace policy, in school assignments that ask kids to draw “your family” inside a single house-shaped outline, in the census forms that still assume one mother and one father per household. None of this was built with malice. It was built for the statistically dominant family shape, and adoptees, along with blended families, foster families, and chosen families of every kind, get treated as the exception that policy forgot to plan for.
The mechanism runs like this: mainstream holiday scripts assume biology and family are the same category, so any family story that separates the two gets treated as an exception rather than a normal variation. Adoptees, then, end up managing not just their own grief but a steady, low-level task of translating their experience for people who’ve never had to think about it.
The holiday is too small for how families actually work. That’s a design flaw in the holiday, not a complexity problem in the adoptee living around it.
Here’s how that inheritance lives on an actual Sunday. It’s the group text where everyone posts a single photo with a single caption, and the adoptee scrolls past trying to figure out which of her two mothers gets the post, or whether either does. It’s the restaurant hostess who asks, cheerfully, if this is a table for “Mom’s side of the family,” with no framework for the answer being more complicated than that. Cultural change toward more inclusive family models is happening, slowly, but most adult adoptees are still building their own rituals largely without a template, because the templates haven’t caught up yet.
Adoptive parents and birth families who understand this structural gap tend to hold these days with more flexibility, which matters. But the adoptee shouldn’t have to wait for the culture to catch up before she’s allowed to build something that actually fits her.
There’s a version of this that shows up specifically for driven women, the ones who run companies and manage large teams and are used to solving problems by working harder at them. The instinct is to treat the loyalty conflict like an operational problem: research it, optimize it, find the right framework, and move on. Amanda told me once that she’d read four books on adoption before her first session with me. “I thought if I understood it well enough, I could think my way out of feeling it,” she said. She couldn’t. Nobody can. The feeling isn’t a comprehension problem. It’s a structural one, built into a holiday that was never designed to hold two families at once.
How to Get Through Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as an Adult Adoptee
Getting through these two days doesn’t require a personality overhaul. It requires a handful of specific moves, applied on purpose, before the day arrives rather than in the middle of it.
Here’s the clinical layer first: what helps most, according to the ambiguous loss framework Pauline Boss, PhD, has spent her career developing, is what she calls building tolerance for the loss rather than resolving it. Ambiguous loss, by her definition, doesn’t have a clean endpoint the way a death does. Because it doesn’t resolve, the work isn’t closure. The work is learning to carry it without it running the whole day.
The kitchen-table version: think of grief that has an ending, like the grief after a death, as a wound that eventually scars over. Ambiguous loss is more like a low-grade weather system that never fully clears, some days sunny, some days a flat gray sky, but always there in the background. You don’t wait for the weather system to leave. You learn to dress for it.
What that looks like on the actual Sunday of Mother’s Day, or the actual Sunday of Father’s Day: you’ve decided in advance which calls you’re making and which you’re not, so you’re not deciding in real time while your chest is already tight. You’ve told one person, in advance, that this day is layered for you, so you’re not performing composure alone. You’ve built one small ritual that belongs only to you, five minutes with a photo, a letter you write and don’t send, a walk before the family gathering starts, so some part of the day answers to nobody but you.
Name what you’re actually feeling without editing it for anyone’s comfort, including your own. Sadness, gratitude, confusion, relief, resentment, all of it is allowed to be true on the same Tuesday. Naming it precisely, out loud or on paper, tends to loosen its grip more than pushing it down ever does.
Set the boundary before you need it, not in the middle of needing it. That might mean a shorter visit than usual, a phone call instead of a full day together, or simply deciding in advance that you won’t answer the extended family group text this year. None of that is a betrayal of anyone. It’s basic maintenance.
Pick your people ahead of time too. Not everyone in your life needs to know the layered version of what this day is for you, and you don’t owe anyone that explanation just because they asked how your weekend was. But one person, a partner, a close friend, a therapist, knowing in advance that this date carries weight can be the difference between white-knuckling through it alone and having a single hand to hold when the chest-tightness shows up in the card aisle.
Build a ritual that’s actually yours. Some of my clients light a candle for the parent who isn’t at the table. Some write letters they never send. Some spend part of the day in a support space built specifically for adoptees, rather than a generic grief forum that doesn’t know the particular shape of this loss.
If the day tends to flatten you most years, working with a therapist who specializes in adoption specifically, not grief in the abstract, tends to make the biggest difference. You can look into therapy with Annie or executive coaching if you’re the kind of driven woman who has been managing this alone for years and is finally ready for support that matches your pace.
Staying connected to people who understand this specific duality helps more than generic reassurance ever will. The newsletter is one low-effort way to stay in that kind of company year-round, not just in May and June.
Holding love for your adoptive parents and grief for your birth parents in the same body, on the same day, without either one canceling the other out, isn’t a compromise. It’s just accurate.
By the time Stephanie brought all three cards inside that Saturday, she still hadn’t fully decided what the third one meant. She ended up giving it to her adoptive mother anyway, tucked behind the one she’d already written, and told me afterward that she didn’t explain it, and her mother didn’t ask. “Maybe it’s for both of us,” she said. “Maybe it’s for the version of me that used to think I had to pick.”
Amanda still twists the gold ring on Father’s Day calls. That hasn’t changed. What has shifted, six months into the work, is that she’s started saying one true sentence out loud to her adoptive father before the tomatoes come up in conversation: “I love you, and some years this day is complicated for reasons that aren’t about you.” He has never once flinched at hearing it. She told me she wasted a decade assuming he would.
Cultural scripts around these two holidays still center biology as the foundation of parental love, and that emphasis will keep leaving adoptees out until the scripts widen to include adoptive and chosen family relationships as equally real.
Neither Stephanie’s parking lot nor Amanda’s kitchen island resolved into something clean. That’s accurate to how this actually goes. Some years the day passes quietly. Some years it reopens something old. Both women are further along than they were a year ago, not because the grief finished, but because they stopped requiring it to.
I don’t know what next May will look like for either of them, and I’ve stopped pretending I do. Stephanie may finally land on what to call her birth mother, or she may carry the question another decade. Amanda may find her birth father through some registry she hasn’t tried yet, or the not-knowing may simply keep being the shape of her Father’s Day for the rest of her life. Both outcomes are survivable. Neither requires her to be someone other than who she already is.
Q: Why do I feel sad on Mother’s Day if I had a good adoptive mother?
A: This is one of the most common things I hear from adoptees with genuinely loving adoptive mothers. The sadness usually traces back to grief for the birth mother, whether she’s known or not, and that grief runs alongside gratitude rather than against it. Loving your adoptive mother fully doesn’t cancel out missing a connection you never had the chance to build. Both feelings can be true on the same Sunday, and naming that out loud tends to make the day easier to sit with.
Q: How do adult adoptees handle Mother’s Day and Father’s Day?
A: There’s no single right way, and I’d be cautious of anyone who tells you there is. Most adult adoptees handle these two days through some mix of gratitude and grief, working through the loyalty conflict between adoptive and birth parents in whatever way fits their specific history. Some build small private rituals honoring both families. Others set firm boundaries around contact for the day. Working with a therapist who knows adoption specifically, or connecting with other adoptees who get the particular shape of this, tends to help more than generic advice.
Q: Is it normal to grieve your birth mother even if you never knew her?
A: It’s entirely normal to grieve your birth mother even if you never knew her. This grief is often rooted in the primal wound of early attachment loss, as explained by Nancy Verrier. The absence of a birth mother can create a sense of loss and longing that persists into adulthood. This grief may surface especially on Mother’s Day, triggering complex emotions. Recognizing this grief as valid and seeking supportive spaces can help adoptees process these feelings and integrate them into their identity.
Q: How do I honor both my adoptive and birth parents on parental holidays?
A: Honoring both sets of parents is possible, though it rarely happens through one tidy gesture. Most adoptees I work with do it through small, separate acts: a card for each parent, a candle lit privately, a memory held without an audience. Clear communication and firm boundaries make this easier to sustain without becoming overwhelmed. A both/and mindset, holding love and grief in the same body without either one erasing the other, tends to work better than trying to pick a side or blend the two into one uncomplicated feeling.
Q: Why does Father’s Day feel complicated for adoptees?
A: Father’s Day tends to layer gratitude for an adoptive father with grief or unanswered questions about a birth father, whether he’s known, unknown, or somewhere in between. The loyalty conflict shows up here too, plus whatever cultural expectations about fatherhood are already floating around the family. Questions about identity and belonging often surface alongside the feeling itself. Understanding why the day carries this much weight, and having a plan for it in advance, tends to help far more than trying to push through it on willpower alone.
If this topic is landing for you, a few other pieces I’ve written go deeper on the pieces around it. On what other calendar dates can stir up: how anniversaries and family ruptures live in the body and how Halloween can surface family-of-origin material in ways nobody warns you about. On the nervous system underneath all of it: a polyvagal map for family gatherings. And if the father relationship specifically is where the ache lives, this piece on the father wound and the complete guide to betrayal trauma both go further into that terrain.
Related Reading
Lifton, Betty Jean. Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness. Basic Books, 1994.
Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Gateway Press, 1993.
Wright, Annie. “Mother’s Day and the Narcissistic Mother.” AnnieWright.com, https://anniewright.com/mothers-day-narcissistic-mother/.
Wright, Annie. “Father’s Day and the Absent or Narcissistic Father.” AnnieWright.com, https://anniewright.com/fathers-day-absent-narcissistic-father/.
References
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves. Vintage, 1982.
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