Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey

First, the book is NOT a biography; it is, however, a memoir and I challenge anyone to recall with perfection every occurrence in his or her lives. In addition, yes, this book is indeed a journey. It is a journey through the nonlinear realm of memories. It is a journey through the expansion and compression of time. The expansion and compression that goes on in our minds and hearts as we recall, or attempt to recall, those instances in our past that framed our future. It is indeed a bumpy ride that McElmurray takes us on through those oscillations. However, it is truly a marvelous work and I compliment the author not only her bravery but for her creative ability to take us on this "journey" for redemption, on this "journey" for closure and ultimately to the beginning of a new "journey" for the author. The "journey" for her and her son to come to terms with all that has happened. A beautifully written book it is more like poetry than prose. Like a hushed cry, it will call you into the memories and will hold on to you until the very end.

This is an important book for all interested in adoption and especially the birthmother experience to read. The writing is far superior to the usual adoption memoir; liquid,lyrical, poignant, vivid and emotionally true. The poetic stream of consciousness style is perfect to convey the ambiguity, pain, guilt, and clouded memory of a mother who gives up a child, especially the aftermath suffered alone in secrecy and self-loathing. The author's skill in making specific sights, sounds, smells stand out like objects coming into focus through a thick fog is especially effective in anchoring the narrative in reality while the very nature of that remembered reality is questioned. This is not an easy book to read, especially for one like myself who also surrendered a child, under different circumstances and coming out of a blessedly more normal childhood, but so many of my unspeakable feelings were captured by Ms. McElmurray that at times I was not sure if I was reading the book or writing it. The more I read, the more I fell into the black hole of the years surrounding the birth and surrender of my firstborn son, when I was a college student in the late 60s. What this book captures so well is not a specific, literal linear story, moving from childhood to pregnancy to surrender to eventual reunion, but the shifting,viscuous nature of time and memory, how it is all happening all the time, back and forth and around and around, in the mind and heart of the surrendering mother. The unreliability of memory, the fluid nature of time, and the endless private retelling and restructuring the story that Ms McElmurray portrays so well are also very familiar to me, the constant rumination over what really happened, and why, and who was to blame, the endless shades of misty grey, where it would be so much easier to make it all black and white and clear, as most such narratives do. Those who are looking for the usual adoption reform saga will be frustrated; there are no evil social workers, greedy adoptive parents, cruel grandparents forcing surrender. There is only a very young mother at barely 16 making her own choice to save her son from the abused and pain-filled childhood she has known, and never forgetting or recovering from the awful echoes of that choice. She is forever alone, forever standing at the edge of some high mountain road with the choice to jump or fall, as the years and ghosts swirl beneath her feet. The author's voice is clearly Southern, the way she endures and prevails worthy of a Faulkner heroine, but this poetic narrative is both particular and universal, the anguished cry of a mother who could not keep her son, and could not, in her heart and soul, ever let him go. I especially loved her modest depiction of their eventual reunion, letting the reader fill in what that was, so reminiscent of my own reunion with my adult son, for which there really are no words. This book is disturbing, painful, and achingly beautiful. It is filled with

She was barely fifteen. She was scared and full of Jesus and her baby. She had faith in the sacrament of marriage but that let her down. She was raised by a germophobiac Appalachian mother who surely thought cleanliness was next to godliness. In that way, her mother tried to save her daughter. After that, her daughter saved her son by giving him up for adoptiion in a system of adoption that was still relatively safe. She never gave up thought of him and, mericifully, the Red Sea of Government finally parted for this mother and her son to be reunited. Karen McElmurray is an enormously gifted writer with a heart larger than essential to anyone who would dare to claim the valor of motherhood. This book is a celebration of birth, voice, recovery. It also stands as a shame to a country still divided on both sides of the "issue" by the "disposability" of the "misbegotten." Read this book to know honesty, acceptance of responsibility, and how, if it's not too late, we can all find our way back to the womb.

Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey is an astounding work of creative nonfiction. Rather than starting at the focal point of the story, her teenage pregnancy and subsequent choice to give her son up for adoption, McElmurray continuously moves backward as well as forward. In lyrical passages where the language is as beautiful as the story is difficult, she winds us through her childhood and adolescence. Maybe this meandering is what renders the characters so starkly authentic, for isn't that the way memory truly works, each moment connected as much to the moments preceding it as to the ones that follow? Surrendered Child is the moving story of a young mother's haunting choice. But this book goes beyond the story it tells, the narrative is a leaping off point and the water below contains the challenge to see what it means to be wonderfully, painfully, alive. As I finished the book I was reminded of the end lines of Adrienne Rich's great poem, The Novel. Rich writes, "You knew the end was coming / You knew beyond the ending lay / your own, unwritten life."

The gripping story of a woman who, coerced into losing her son to adoption, struggles for emotional survival and ultimately searches for the child she lost. Don't pass this book up!