Make Me a Mother: A Memoir
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A woman unexpectedly finds her best self through a sleepy bundle handed over at the airport in this heartfelt and surprising memoir.
In Make Me a Mother, acclaimed memoirist Susanne Antonetta adopts an infant from Seoul, South Korea. After meeting their six-month-old son, Jin, at the airport—an incident made memorable when Susanne, so eager to meet her son, is chased down by security—Susanne and her husband learn lessons common to all parents, such as the lack of sleep and the worry and joy of loving a child. They also learn lessons particular to their own family: not just how another being can take over your life but how to let an entire culture in, how to discuss birth parents who gave up a child, and the tricky steps required to navigate race in America.
In the end, her relationship with her son teaches Susanne to understand her own troubled childhood and to forgive and care for her own aging parents. Susanne comes to realize how, time and time again, all families have to learn to adopt one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer based in Bellingham, Wash., Antonetta (A Mind Apart) reflects thoughtfully on the many important functions of adoption as gleaned from her own experience adopting a baby boy from South Korea in 1997. Antonetta and her longtime husband, Bruce, gave up trying to conceive after an initial miscarriage: Antonetta, who came of age in the early 1970s, had bipolar disorder, and suspected mental illness in other members of the family as well as alcoholism. Having first looked at adoption of a girl from China, the couple was referred to Jin, a four-month-old Korean child whose parents ("Birth mother: heart-shaped tattoo, waitress. Birth father: good at math") were probably very young. Alternating her journal of Jin's flourishing development through adolescence within the family's deepening bonds is Antonetta's musings on the historical uses of adoption, such as its prevalence during Roman times and in Oceania, for example. Moreover, becoming a mother allowed the author to rework the thorny issues between her rather withholding mother and critical father, now aged and infirm and living in New Jersey. Antonetta's generous, humbling take on adoption adds another layer to today's vastly "changing landscape of family," where couples seeking adoption don't necessarily have infertility issues and ethnic make-up tends more toward the richly diverse.
