Found (25 page)

Helpful is keeping children within their own culture and empowering the people of those lands with resources, food, medicine, and water. Helpful is helping children to grieve and move forward in their lives with dignity. It is not helpful to take a child, in the midst of a crisis, from her land and her people.

Nor is it helpful, within our boundaries, to take a child from a mother due to her economic struggles, her age, or even her education. It is helpful to offer support, education, and solutions.

We can fund wars and build bombs, but we cannot empower mothers to keep and care for their children?

Yes, much thought and much conversation are needed on adoption.

The high instances of mental health disturbance in adoptive children and grown adoptees are stunning, and yet, there is little to no recognition of why. I once listened to a high-level government official and lawyer (who is an adoptive mother as well) explain that she felt there were higher instances of mental health issues in adoptees due to poor reporting—prior to placement—by birth parents.

Her comments held no recognition of the practical and welldocumented evidence that shows trauma occurs in a baby at the time of separation from the birth mother.

This gap in the conversation needs to be straddled and I hope we, in future generations, can recognize that displaced children have legacies, genetics, and lineages that predate placement in their adoptive homes.

Think of this practically. If you or I found a small child in the aisles of a grocery store—lost and crying for her mother—would we snap the child up, strap her into our car, and drive away while admonishing her to “forget that mommy, I’m your mommy now”? Of course not. That would be kidnapping. Yet this is exactly what we do when we adopt and somehow this is legal.

Adoption, in an open situation, is humane.

Adoption where the baby is given a time of physical proximity
to the birth mother is also more enlightened as it allows a more healthy development of the child’s brain.

Reunion, at some point in the adoptee life, is vital.

I do not have answers for how to structure adoption to make these scenarios manageable.

I do believe women, especially the educated women of the West, have the power to heal this world. I also believe that in honoring and empowering women worldwide, we will certainly come to the obvious conclusion that our future is our children. To create generations of children nurtured by their mother’s touch and care will make this a world worth living in.

I suggest more conversation, more compassion, much more common sense, and much better thinking. I also suggest we place children not last but first.

 

 

EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER we took a break from the reunion, Catherine and I spoke again and reinitiated our reunion process. In our time apart, we had both entered support groups and have now agreed to know each other with care and caution. We may never find our way fully home to each other. Perhaps sometimes, it’s enough to just try.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING IS A MOST personal journey, but to bring a book to the world is a collective endeavor. This story may not have been written, and certainly would not have been published, had it not been for the conviction, insight, and perseverance of my agent, Anne Edelstein. Thank you, Anne, for your high standards in craft and storytelling. Thank you for telling me, again and again, what this story was truly about.

Thank you to Seal Press and my editor Brooke Warner. It is an honor to work with fearless women who are ready to take on the tough issues of our time.

Thank you to Nancy Verrier. I am quite certain no one else could have pressed me to take that final step in the journey and to finally find my mother.

Thank you Rogelio, the kids, and of course, Steve. It’s not easy to live with a writer or to understand her ways. My family bends around me and I am blessed.

Thank you to my beloved friend Anne Gudger for listening to each revision with such interest and insight.

Thank you to my mentor, Dinah Lenney, and to the Rainier Writing Workshop as well as Stan Rubin and Judith Kitchen.

And great enduring thanks to my spiritual teachers: H.H., Rinpoche, Jetsuma, Anne Klein of Dawn Mountain, and Joanna Macy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JENNIFER LAUCK HAS WRITTEN THREE MEMOIRS and a collection of essays, including the
New York Times
bestselling
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found
. She has her MFA in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University, her BA in journalism from Montana State, and was an award winning investigative TV reporter.

Lauck has studied Tibetan Buddhism for nearly ten years, is a dedicated meditation student, and has received teachings from many great masters including the H.H. Dalai Lama, Lama Adzom Rinpoche, and Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy.

Lauck teaches writing in area high schools for Literary Arts, conducts private seminars on her technique known as Transformative Writing, and speaks nationally on issues of adoption, motherhood, transcendence, happiness, and writing as a way to heal. She is at work on a novel and makes her home in Portland, Oregon, where she is happily married and raising her son, Spencer and her daughter, Josephine.

Learn more about Lauck, her teachings, and her writing at
www.jenniferlauck.com
.

SELECTED TITLES FROM SEAL PRESS

For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books.
By women. For women.

 

 

A THOUSAND SISTERS: MY JOURNEY INTO THE WORST PLACE ON EARTH TO BE A WOMAN, by Lisa Shannon, foreword by Zainab Salbi. $24.95, 978-1-58005-296-2. Through her inspiring story of turning what started as a solo 30-mile run to raise money for Congolese women into a national organization, Run for Congo Women, Lisa Shannon sounds a deeply moving call to action for each person to find in them the thing that brings meaning to a wounded world.

 

 

THE CHELSEA WHISTLE: A MEMOIR, by Michelle Tea. $15.95, 978-1-58005-239-9. In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts—Boston’s ugly, scrappy little sister and a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse.

 

 

SWEET CHARLOTTE’S SEVENTH MISTAKE, Cori Crooks. $18.95, 978-1-58005-249-8. In this stunning visual memoir, Cori Crooks searches for her identity among the old photographs, diary entries, and letters left behind by her delinquent family.

 

 

MAMALITA: AN ADOPTION MEMOIR, by Jessica O’Dwyer. $16.95, 978-1-58005-334-1. A harrowing, heartbreaking, and inspiring memoir detailing an ordinary American woman’s quest to adopt a baby girl from Guatemala in the face of overwhelming adversity.

 

 

THE QUARTER-ACRE FARM: HOW I KEPT THE PATIO, LOST THE LAWN, AND FED MY FAMILY FOR A YEAR, by Spring Warren. $16.95, 978-1-58005-340-2. Spring Warren’s warm, witty, beautifully-illustrated account of deciding—despite all resistance—to get her hands dirty, create a garden in her suburban yard, and grow 75 percent of all the food her family consumed for one year.

 

 

WANDERLUST: A LOVE AFFAIR WITH FIVE CONTINENTS, by Elisabeth Eaves. $16.95, 978-1-58005-311-2. Documents Elisabeth Eaves’s insatiable hunger for the rush of the unfamiliar and the experience of encountering new people and cultures as a young woman traveling the world.

 

 

FIND SEAL PRESS ONLINE
www.SealPress.com
www.Facebook.com/SealPress
Twitter: @ SealPress

FOUND

A MEMOIR

Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Lauck

 

 

Published by
Seal Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, California

 

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

 

Lauck, Jennifer.
Found : a memoir / Jennifer Lauck.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-580-05406-5

1. Lauck, Jennifer. 2. Adoptees—United States—Biography. 3. Abandoned
children—United States—Biography. 4. Birthparents—United States. 5. Iden-
tity (Psychology) I. Title.
HV874.82.L378A3 2011
362.734092—dc22
2010038734

 

 

 

 

The author has changed some names, places, and recognizable details to protect the privacy of people mentioned in the book.