One of the pastors I work with dropped by my office today to ask how the book was coming along. I told him that I'm looking forward to meeting an agent at a writers workshop on October 2 and that I submitted my query to her yesterday. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? To have an appointment with an agent? The truth is that sometimes agents are paid by authors for "pitch" meetings, which this is. But I think the $25 will be worth it - to have 10-15 minutes of uninterrupted time with an agent who won't be able to just throw me in a pile or her trash can. In the meantime I've been working on getting everything ready for her – in case she wants to see more. I've got seven sample pages ready - and I hope that she'll take seven because the scene just takes that long. And then there's the synopsis. I've read somewhere that a synopsis is like a Table of Contents with complete sentences. I think those three elements should cover it for now.
I'm struggling with which sample pages to include, and I hope you'll be willing to help me. I'm going to put here a small sample from the opening chapter - and see what you think. Then in a couple of days I'll give another sample, one from a more climactic scene and see which one you think is the better one. Thanks - I appreciate your help.
Being born is messy business. It’s hard work, it hurts, and being pushed and squeezed all slimy and shivering into this frigid world is nothing short of cruel. It’s that unforgettable first cry of the newborn that breaks the tension, bringing the kisses and the tears, and spinning the wheel of life one more time.
Mama looks like she’s been to hell and back, but then her baby, resting on her chest, is soothed by her voice and lulled by the familiar beat of her heart. Daddy announces to the friends and relatives in the waiting room that the baby is here. They toss cheers and prayers into the air like confetti in celebration of someone new to love. When the baby is brought to the nursery window, the search for familiar features begins.
“She looks just like her mother,” someone suggests.
“I think she has Grandma’s eyes,” another corrects.
Once Grandpa spots his name on her tiny hospital bracelet, the newborn is claimed and with her birth comes the promise of connection, a connection called family.
I wonder sometimes what my birth was like. I looked it up once. I was born on a Saturday. My birth certificate says I was born at eight in the morning, which means my mother was alone through a long and cold Colorado night in March of 1959. I can just see the nurse, in a white dress and cap, padding quietly into the room to check my mother’s pulse, her level of pain, the timing of the contractions. I imagine the obstetrician speaking quietly and professionally, but never quite saying what he must have been thinking. Fathers weren’t allowed in the delivery room back then, but it didn’t really matter since there was no husband to hold her hand, to kiss her, or to deliver my statistics to anyone in the waiting room, “She’s 6 pounds, 2 oz., 18 inches long, and perfect in every way.” Nobody looked in the nursery window. There was no soothing voice, no familiar heartbeat, and there was definitely no hospital bracelet bearing my father’s name. For six days I was called Baby Girl Sullivan. No one claimed me. No one promised me anything. There was no connection called family.
When I was small, the man who would become my father often told me that I had been found as snug as a bug in a rug. I’d imagine myself a six-day-old, roly-poly bug balled up in the beige carpet of the dining room. That was the day that man and his wife became my parents. They adopted me. They claimed me. They gave me a connection, a connection called family. As their daughter I would embrace their stories as my own.
Don’t we all love to hear them – those stories from when we were too young to remember? My Aunt Annabelle still tells me about the time I giggled at her during a diaper change. And apparently I mumbled so badly as a toddler that my mother worried no one would ever be able to understand a word I said. I love those stories, and I crave those stories, because I’ve never actually seen anyone that looks like me. Instead of sharing family features with my parents or my siblings, I share their stories.
I have a hunch that most people don’t even think about their birth stories, so seamless was their connection to family, but I think about mine. I think about my stories because they are missing. The stories from the first six days of my life, and any stories from before I was born, simply do not exist. Who fed me and changed my diapers? Did my mother hold me? Was she ever allowed to see me? And the most important story would explain why: why she left me there. Why she couldn’t promise me a connection called family.
I thought about those questions for a long, long time, but I always knew there would be no answers. My stories aren’t just missing, you see. My stories are secrets.
When I was born, adoptions were closed, the documents sealed, guaranteeing a birthmother’s right to privacy and giving adoptive parents the freedom to raise their children without interference. Of course, that also meant that adoption records were closed to the people most affected by them. The people responsible for my life: my birthmother, my adoptive parents and a judge in his chambers made the decision for adoption on my behalf. To tell the truth, I’ve never thought it was about me at all. It’s what they wanted: to have a child or not to have a child. Adopted children couldn’t be consulted about what we wanted, and even as adults we’ve had no rights to the information that would tell us who we were.
My senior year in high school Alex Haley’s book Roots: the Saga of an American Family started a genealogical revolution. The subsequent television mini-series captivated us as Haley’s lineage was traced through nine generations. Suddenly everyone wanted to know their roots, and if they were persistent, they would find them. Of course that was if they had the right to look. "In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we come from,” Haley once said. My parents were no exception. Once they retired, they set out in their RV to look for what Cousin Jackie called the “dead relatives.” When I was invited to join them, I tasted for the first time the excitement of the search, the anticipation of acceptance or rejection, and the euphoric liberation of finally hearing the stories. Haley also described what happens when, for whatever reason, we are denied the stories of our selves, “Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is a vacuum and emptiness and a most disquieting loneliness."
Yet the day did come when the secrets could be told. Lawmakers in Colorado were finally convinced that adoptees should have the same rights to our personal information as anyone else. Three weeks after my 30th birthday, the governor signed the bill that created a system that would allow a confidential intermediary to contact my birthmother and, if she agreed, to arrange a meeting between us.
No comments:
Post a Comment