The Real Mommy

Standing on line at the grocery store today, I saw this:

I have no idea what the article inside says, but the headline, “Who’s the Real Mommy?” is enough.  I don’t read that particular magazine, so maybe their goal is to offend people buying groceries all across the nation.  If so, goal accomplished, National Enquirer.  Kudos.

In my twenties, I was an ovum donor for two couples who had exhausted all other possibilities to have children, short of adoption.  The road they traveled to get to that place – where they needed my donated eggs – was long and difficult, not to mention expensive.  And even with my help, there was no guarantee that the embryos, implanted via IVF, would result in successful pregnancies or, eventually, the births of babies they had spent years trying to conceive.

I saw that magazine and immediately thought of those two women, now mothers of children they carried inside their wombs and have nurtured and mothered and loved, for so many years, and it hurt me – deeply hurt me – to imagine them standing on line at their own grocery stores and being smacked in the face by such a horrid headline.

“Who’s the Real Mommy?”

To suggest that I am the “Real Mommy” of those children is beyond my comprehension.  I did the injections, grew the eggs, and went through extraction, but the moment they left my body they were no longer mine.  The children they came to be contain my DNA, my genetics, and may even look like me, but I am not their “Real Mommy”.  I never have been, and I never will be.

Their Real Mommy is the one who wanted them so badly that she went to the ends of the Earth to have them.  Their Real Mommy is the one that went through years of disappointment and was finally able to carry them, birth them, and love them in a way that only she could.  Their Real Mommy is the one who held them in the first moments of life, who looked at their little newborn faces and knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that they were hers – not mine.

Their Real Mommy is the one who cried tears of joy as she rocked them to sleep in those first few months, nursed them through countless illnesses and kissed their first skinned knees.  Their Real Mommy brings cupcakes to school on their birthdays and reads their favorites stories a thousand times.  Their Real Mommy knows how to make them laugh, dries their tears, tucks them into bed at night, and loves them to the moon and back, because they are hers – not mine. 

I can foolishly hope that neither of those women will go to the grocery store this week.  Unfortunately, though, even without the idiot media publishing hurtful headlines, I know those women – those mothers –  have dealt with plenty of ignorant people who have that kind of attitude.  I deal with them, too – the people who think I’m crazy for giving away “my” children.  But they’re not my children. 

And they are the greatest gifts I have ever given.