Mother One, Mother Two 
Jeremy Harding
To think back at all is to fall quickly, almost instinctively, on two names – Colin, the name of my adoptive father, and Maureen, the name of my adoptive mother – and on the significant word ‘adopted’, which has the weight of a name. Appended to this little trio of terms, like an intake of breath at the end of a short annoucement, is the nameless presence of the ‘birth mother’, as she’s mostly called by adoption experts: the first mother, that’s to say, also the eternal mother-in-waiting. But you wouldn’t – I wouldn’t – really want to say ‘my mother’ about either of these mothers, even though I do. Then there’s adoption. ‘My adoption’? It sounds like an affliction, or a misfortune, though it was far from being either.
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Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His versions of Rimbaud’s poetry are published by Penguin along with John Sturrock’s translation of the letters.
Other articles by this contributor:
Kosovo’s Big Men · Jeremy Harding talks to KLA officers and an ‘official government source’ in Kosovo
Sarko, Ségo & Co. · The Banlieues Go to the Polls
Call me Ahab · Moby-Dick
Europe’s War · Kosovo
At the Royal Academy · Botticelli
At Quai Branly · Jacques Chirac’s museum
A Man or a Girl’s Blouse? · Serbia after Karadzic
At the Barbican · Pilger pictures
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