A BOOK REVIEW HONORING AMY SEEK & ALL BIRTHMOTHERS
"I had the impulse to say ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ but my imagination cycled through potential worst-case scenarios… Our motherhoods were like optical illusions where you are going up stairs and down stairs—but it’s impossible for your brain to comprehend both at once. Would this day be hers or mine? It wasn’t for me to decide.”
By Patricia Knight Meyer
A Mother's Day Adoption Memoir Book Review:
On past Mother’s Days, I have dedicated posts to my many mothers. This year, I honor Amy Seek, by sharing my thoughts on her adoption memoir, GOD AND JETFIRE, CONFESSIONS OF A BIRTH MOTHER.
This adoption-memoir book review is dedicated to Amy Seek, who I admire for her talent as a writer and for the courageous act of letting the world peer into her heart-wrenching world of relinquishment, via her truly raw and poetic memoir about the reality that awaits the mother who chooses open-adoption.
I picked up Amy’s book in March at the Untangling Our Roots Conference held this past Spring in Louisville, Kentucky. Words do a poor job of describing what a mind-blowing experience the conference was, and I can say the same for this book. Though I passed Amy’s table many times at the event, I am bummed to say I grabbed a copy while she was away, and sent her payment via Venmo. I left the conference with half a dozen books to dive into, knowing I wanted to read one written by a birth mother first. I knew whichever book I chose it wasn’t going to be an easy read. I expected to feel things unfelt before, trip over untapped trauma, re-experience my adoptee loss on the flip side of a birth mother’s retelling of hers. I expected to be taken on a difficult ride, one that would teach me something hard and humbling, true and triggering, but stuff I knew would be good for my soul.
A book about an open adoption, my version of birth mother literature training wheels, or so I naively thought. The New York Times’ appraisal on the cover describing the book as “[A] piercing memoir… Very beautiful and very sad” encouraged me. You can’t get around sad, I knew that. The “beautiful” part had lured me in. And boy was it beautiful, and sad, and lyrical, and real, and gut-wrenching, and all those adjectives that pack a punch, and like the conference mind-blowing.” Not even a third of the way in, my training wheels flew off the page, and I found myself tumbling down a San Francisco-sized hill long before Amy did the same.
BRACING FOR A BUMPY RIDE
A day after the conference, just before my training wheels flew off, I DM’d Amy from the airport, telling her I’d started the book and was loving it, so excited to “know” the author (if “know” means you saw her sitting at a table and had swapped a few text messages). She wrote back a kind text about connecting again, and I smiled, making a mental note to bring the book for her to autograph when and if that good fortune should ever happen.
The month following the conference flew by. A new job, a podcast interview, and a road trip to support a seriously ill family member each bid for my attention. But I carried the book along, highlighting passages, reading some of it out loud to my daughter between New Orleans and Austin, and dog-earring pages along the way. I knew I wanted to share it here on my blog. Even if it was published eight years ago, and already covered by The New York Times, Vogue, and the Boston Globe, it was my turn by GOD and JETFIRE.
So here it is, my tiny takeaway of a book that blew my mind and tore my heart open, and gave me a new understanding of birth mothers and the one-foot-in, one-foot-out world of navigating open adoption. I was surprised at the similar types of pain and grief adoptees and birth mothers share. The grief of the “what might have been,” society’s expectations that we should be grateful for adoptive parents “saving us” from our sorry situation, the distancing of our emotions so we never bond in such a way to experience such profound loss again, the thoughts of the parallel universes we might have inhabited. The birthdays and holidays we spent yearning for our missing piece.
VIVID AND VISCERAL
First off, Amy’s visceral descriptions of her emotions around relinquishment reduced me to a puddle. I can only hope expectant mothers and fathers will read this book if they are considering relinquishment. Amy’s account demonstrates that the “open adoption” model is bereft with its own dark and debilitating emotional hurdles. In many ways, to this adoptee, it seems harder than a closed adoption. All the tip-toeing and walking on eggshells, at the mercy of the adoptive parents with zero power to call the shots. The being there but not there. The never ending fear of rejection, blame and shame.
Furthermore, Amy bravely lets us witness her pain, as she describes the time with her son leading up to signing the papers. Amy writes, “I had seventy-two hours to sleep next to my son and smell him. To show him the sunset and the view over the treetops in the park across the street. To swaddle him close and watch him discover his length. Seventy-two hours to be a mother. I wanted all of them.”
On signing the papers, she says, “I wanted my own body, still bleeding, to tremble the pen out of my hand before it could renounce my motherhood.” And on the pressure to sign, she confides, “…I was rethinking the whole plan. I would make enemies of everyone who had supported me: my entire scaffolding would be ripped away… Everything happened with order and intention as if it wasn’t against nature at all.”
MEMORABLE METAPHORS
Having just spent five years working on my own adoption memoir with an editor, I can still see the red ink in the margins, noting how precarious it is to use an analogy, metaphor or simile, and that if you can accomplish that feat astoundingly well, it is still best to do so sparingly. Amy does them so well, I am tempted to send you know who a copy of Amy’s book, with the following excerpts highlighted:
- On the pressure to relinquish: “I was a ripple in a swelling tide.”
- On feeling her baby inside her: “When I moved, my muscles gently tightened around it, the weight of certainty, the early seed of a lifelong grief.”
- On holding her son for the first time: “He was a satellite creature of myself. His return gaze closed our systems. He folded easily into my new hollow.”
- On the birth father holding his newborn son: “He held him in a nest of tangled elbows and wrists, bending acutely… as if the father’s job was to hold his son completely still until the glue dried.”
- On navigating open adoption with the adoptive mother: “We were two pieces in a puzzle that were negotiating the exact shape of the cut that would at once connect and divide us.”
TOUCHING & PERSONAL
Along the margins of my copy of GOD and JETFIRE, sprawl a tangle of scribbles, underlines and exclamation points, each noting the times my personal story crossed paths with Amy’s. At one point, she wrote, “I found I couldn’t prioritize my family, even in those important moments, over architecture school, because I had prioritized architecture school over my son.”
This hit home, as her story, “the college girl with the unsupportive family who had to relinquish so she could get a college degree”, was my birth mother’s story. Well, it was the story I grew up believing. As I recently shared in Part 1 of my podcast interview with Janeice Garrad, when I met my birth mother, I learned that was not her story, it was just a popular story told back in the day. But I had spent my life believing I had been traded for a college education.
Amy endured pressure from her family, who used her need for an education and inability to provide as the reasons she should relinquish. So I understood this drive Amy had to get her degree no matter what, lest the whole sacrifice be deemed in vain. When I met my non-degreed birth mother for the first time, I was let down, confused, left wondering why I’d been given away if college wasn’t that important after all. Of course, those stories were used as smoke and mirrors, a vice to coerce young women to let their babies go, and to convince adoptees that a birth mother’s love isn’t enough to enable her to raise a child unless she has a man and/or a college education.
Like Amy, I also related to the tendency to place adoptive parents on a pedestal. “People were always impressed with Paula and Erik’s generosity,” Amy writes about the adoptive parents she chose. “It was as if I should just pull a blanket of gratitude over all the loss, but recognizing their generosity undermined my own.”
Until reading this, it had never occurred to me that, like adoptees, birth mothers are also expected to be grateful to the adoptive parents. Nor did I fully understand the origins of my tendency to put my adoptive parents on a pedestal. Referring to the adoptive parents she chose, Amy writes, “…maybe I see them as great, because if they aren’t somehow great, then that makes this whole thing tragic.”
I too had put my adoptive parents on a pedestal, when clearly I had a less than perfect, often dysfunctional home. When my birth mother called my adoptive parents out, I became angry and defensive. Several years later, I cried in my birth father’s arms, accepting that my adoptive parents were flawed people, they were not godly saviors, and I didn’t have to be grateful for everything they did. It doesn’t have to be black and white, and there is plenty of room for the gray.
@myadoptedlife This #MothersDay #adoption #memoir #bookreview is dedicated to @amyseek, who I admire for her talent as a writer and for the courageous act of letting the world peer into her heart-wrenching world of relinquishment, via her truly raw and poetic memoir about the reality that awaits the mother who chooses #openadoption. I picked up Amy’s book in March at the Untangling Our Roots Conference held this past Spring in Louisville, Kentucky. Words do a poor job of describing what a mind-blowing experience the conference was, and I can say the same for this book. Read my review at https://myadoptedlife.com/adoption-memoir-book-review-on.../ #adoption #birthmother #booktok #booktoker #adoptionjourney #adoptionbooks #adoptee ♬ Surrender - Ramol
A SPECIAL TITLE
I won’t spoil the goods by sharing how Amy chose the title GOD AND JETFIRE, but I will say that nugget alone is certainly worth the read. I will conclude by underscoring what a gifted writer she is, and noting that I was awed by her love of architecture and how it found its way onto the page via the precise descriptions she drew in my mind’s eye. Built on the bones of her loss, she has erected a compelling narrative, structured toward a better understanding of the sacrifices inherent in open adoption, and drafted an arc into my heart, building a story this adoptee could not put down.
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