Books
A Beautiful View by Debbie Ceresa
A chance meeting with a fortune teller flings Debbie back into the past, to her husband, Jerry, and a year full of cancer doctors, tests, and treatments, and an unforgettable journey marked by despair and hope.
Stow Away by Dr. Lee Campbell
They told me to forget. And I did. Now my memory has mutiny in mind.
Cast Off by Dr. Lee Campbell
They called us dangerous women. So we organized and proved them right.
The Spirit of Open Adoption by Jim Gritter, LMSW
An outspoken and ardent advocate for openness in adoption, James Gritter writes of the need for members of the adoption triad to emphasize services that first and foremost benefit adoptees. Open adoption serves children first by reversing the traditional hierarchy — by treating adoptive families as resources for birthfamilies. Adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees come together in a spirit of extended family that helps them replace the fear, pain, shame, and loss of adoption with honor, respect, and reverence. Drawing on the profound insights of contemporary thinkers in the fields of adoption, theology, philosophy, and literature, Gritter guides the reader along a spiritual journey that explores the candor, commitment, community, and cooperation that define successful open adoptions.
Hospitious Adoption by Jim Gritter, LMSW
Jim Gritter examines the next step after open adoption. Building on his previous books, which promote the inclusion of birthparents, Gritter takes the approach that practicing goodwill, respect, and courage within the realm of adoption makes the process move smoother and enriches children’s lives.
Lifegivers by Jim Gritter, LMSW
Framing the Birthparent Experience in Open Adoption
Taking Down the Wall by Christine Murphy
The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler
The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
Why be Happy When you can be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother.
I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s.
Born with Teeth: A Memoir by Kate Mulgrew
By turns irreverent and soulful, laugh-out-loud funny and heart-piercingly sad, Born With Teeth is the breathtaking memoir of a woman who dares to live life to the fullest, on her own terms.
My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem—writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leader—now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of her life as a traveler, a listener, and a catalyst for change.
(Publishing Date: October 27, 2015)
Walking Distance: Pilgrimage, Parenthood, Grief, and Home Repairs by David Hlavsa
Walking Distance is, simply put, stunning, lovely, compelling, impossible to put down, a glorious love story, and a truth telling treatise that should be required of every couple entering commitment. On David and Lisa’s pilgrimage, you are transported into a devastating, yet, beautiful landscape of grief and traumatic loss. Then, you are taken into the last story of redemption and rebirth ~ literally. I assigned the author’s story – which first appeared in the “Modern Love” column of The New York Times – to my graduate seminar in Grief and Loss. All the students said afterwards how it changed their lives and brought the lived experience of grief and resilience into sharp focus. We are fortunate that the author went the distance to write a book that contributes to the literature of grief and loss in a most profound way. (Amazon Review by Dr. Sharon E.R. Taylor)
Films
Film suggestions from Secret Sons and Daughters website – adoptee tales from the sealed record era.
A Girl Like Her
A Girl Like Her reveals the hidden history of over a million young women who became pregnant in the 1950s and 1960s, and who were then banished to maternity homes to give birth, surrender their children, and return home alone. They were told to keep their secret, move on and to forget. But, does a woman ever forget her child? That’s one of the many thought-provoking questions author, adoptee, and filmmaker, Ann Fessler, poses in this moving story, which is told through the voices of several women from that time. Check the website for current domestic and international screening dates. Watching this film—and having the opportunity to hear Ann Fessler talk about the creation of it—gave us a whole new understanding of what our birth mothers must have endured.
Adopted For The Life of Me
Adopted For The Life of Me, an award-winning documentary shown at the 2013 American Adoption Conference and can be found on local PBS stations (see website). In the words of the filmmaker, the film is “about secrets, and what secrets cost people when they’re imposed over an entire lifetime.”
Philomena
See Dr. Lee Campbell article and review. Philomena is the true story of one mother’s search for her lost son.
Words I Love
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”—Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird
“Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story — of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you — and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.
That isn’t of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.
Whatever adoption is, it isn’t an instant family — not with the adoptive parents, and not with the rediscovered parents. … Adoption is so many things at once. And it is everything and nothing.
—Jeanette Winterson, How can you be Happy, When you can be Normal?
Words from Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse.”
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.”
“Women been gittin’ pregnant ever since Eve ate that apple.”
“I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss”
Words from Thomas Lynch,
a Michigan funeral director and poet
“Mourning is romance in reverse. If you love, you grieve, and there are no exceptions, only those who do it well and those who don’t.”
“I am Catholic in the way that you can’t not be a Catholic once you are. I describe myself as a devoutly lapsed Catholic because I have so many questions, but the questions wouldn’t even form unless I’d been given this language of Catholicism, which is an advantage.”
Remorse Hits the Road
by Lisa Rappaport
I want my remorse on a road trip, a wanderjahr
of self-discovery. Hitchhiking through some verdant
hills, it got a ride with a long-distance trucker.
They ate cheeseburgers and fries at an all-night diner
and talked about failed relationships. My remorse
said it never stopped thinking about water
under the bridge,
and who was the bridge,
and who was the water. The trucker confided
that he Googled his exes from time to time.
Together, they regretted their dismal meal
as they sped down the black macadam in the black
night with their black thoughts. After what felt
like a very short time my remorse returned home,
wanderlust sated, grateful for the new sorrows
it had acquired. I thought it had gained weight
but tactfully I said nothing.
Photos & Illustrations
Websites
Concerned United Birthparents was founded in 1975 by Lee Campbell and other birthmothers who surrendered children to adoption.
American Adoption Congress
American Adoption Congress created in 1978 as a support organization for adoption search and reform.
Secret Sons and Daughters
Adoptee tales from the sealed record era.
Brain Pickings
A poignant and smart weekly gift to myself.