Being Good or Being Perfect?

The other day, I listened to a podcast about *NPEs. The woman being interviewed said she started her own podcast because she wanted to take away her mom’s shame. This hit hard for me. Since I’ve gone public with my story, I’ve had this underlying defensive feeling that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. What I was feeling suddenly made sense to me.

The shaming of our mothers needs to stop.

People have asked me, “How did you feel about your mother after you found out?” My answer has always been that judging her for having an affair just wasn’t important to me. It happened. I’m here. What good is judging someone over something she couldn’t take back? I didn’t have the strength to start pointing fingers when I was dealing with the trauma over the realization that I didn’t know who I was anymore. For me, moral judgement on how I got here seemed ridiculous at this point.

I can see a few people are visibly holding back the judgment on Mom’s character when they hear my story. But interestingly, I haven’t seen any judgment towards my biological father, who did exactly the same thing. In fact, the term “ladies’ man” has been bantered around a few times. That’s an unfair double standard.

Mom was a good person. How you interpret the word “good” is up to you, I guess. To me, being “good” doesn’t equate to being “perfect.” She was flawed, just like every other human being on the planet. She made plenty of mistakes in her life, I’m sure. But I don’t consider myself a mistake. When you are silently shaming her, you are unintentionally trying to shame me into feeling I am not worthy to have been born.

I’m not ashamed for being born. I’m pretty happy about it, actually. My mother and biological father made me. That’s a fact that doesn’t change. Neither one of them was perfect. But they were both good people.

Mom didn’t know how badly I was struggling emotionally with this discovery. I hid that from her. That was my choice. She was ill and I knew she needed my forgiveness more than anything else before she died. She felt shame. I didn’t believe she deserved to feel that that way.

When Mom passed away on December 29, 2017, she was just one month shy of her 90th birthday. It had been eleven months from when she confirmed who my biological father was, and two years after I discovered the truth.

Back on the road to my journey, I was now free to share with my brothers and sisters what I was dreading. This was going to be the most difficult conversation of all.

*The term NPE is a term for those of us who have discovered one of our parents isn’t who we thought they were – Not Parent Expected.

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This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you to start at my first post of the series HERE.