Who are birth mothers?

What a tough topic... I am sure I will not do it justice but after countless conversations with many people I think it is time to address! Jason and I have not been able to meet our birth mother yet. The plan is to meet here sometime in the next month. The relationship with a birth mother whether you meet or not is difficult. This is my true, hard to write and hard to say feelings. The whole aspect of adoption feels like a competition in all the wrong ways sometimes. You want your book to get chosen while at the same time you know this means other friends, wonderful couples that are in the process are not getting chosen. If you think about it too much, it can destroy you. The other part is saying you are the best mother. No mother or father are the best, you are just hopefully the best you can be. It is hard to proceed through adoption and know other people are constantly comparing this family with that family. 
Birth Mothers are amazing women. They are mothers just like I will be a mother. She is not any more or less a "real" mother than I will be. As we have went through the adoption process, I follow adoption blogs as well as birth mother blogs. One of the major blogs getting a lot of attention is Musings of the Lame. This is a blog written from a birth mother prospective. It is a heart wrenching story that she tells. Here is what I have gathered so far about my feelings about who birth mothers are...
1. Courageous... and not because they are making an adoption plan for their child but because they wake up every day and deal with their feelings head on. This is something majority of us we will never have the courage to do.
2. Intelligent. It is such a misconception that education dictates who raises a child. Education comes in multiple different ways. My great grandmother completed I think 3 years of formal education and she was a very intelligent woman. She assisted in raising my mother and she turned out beautifully. Intelligence is dictated by who you are. Never assume a birth mother is not intelligent.  
3. All different ages. People are constantly asking us, Is your birth mother young? I am not sure what they mean. There are birth mother of a variety of ages. Again, age does not dictate who is a birth mother. Everyone has a picture of a 16 year old that had a baby with their high school sweet heart. This is a scenario that can occur but there are a lot of different scenarios, keep your mind open. 
4. Sacred. As adoptive families we need remember and celebrate the scared the relationship with a birth family. Maintain open relationships and lines of communication whenever it is safe for your child. Even though, yeah it is the scariest thing ever for me as an adoptive mother to share the love my life, my son. I know that it is what he deserves. The more the merrier sound cliche but my son having two mothers and two fathers will never change how much he loves us it will only grow his heart larger and teach him how to love more deeply.  
5. Mothers. I hope my son will know his birth family in some aspect. I continue to refer to them as birth family but I truly believe they are as much of a family as we are. It is up to our son to decide his relationship with them but I will support him through whatever he chooses. From now on, I am going to try to refer to Baby W's birth mother as Mother S. The Musings of the Lame has a wonderful article about the pros and cons of the use of the term birth mother. 

I hope this helps give a better view of birth mothers for those people around me. I know it is not politically correct and their are a lot of holes I forgot to fill but I hope that this blog and topic show where I am at right now. I am learning and I hope together we can all learn more about respect for all types of mothers. I will leave you with this final thought that has kept me awake at night on occasion... What has a greater stigma in our society, a woman who has an abortion or a woman that creates an adoption plan for their child? ( this is not a pro life, pro choice debate (I literally have no education or opinion), this is a think about how it feels to be a (birth)mother debate)