My mother left our visitors in the kitchen, took me up to her bedroom, got a new picture book from the bottom drawer of her dresser, and sat down to read it. Needless to say, I was very puzzled.
...Can you imagine how much my mother, who wanted a dainty little girl, disliked my being surrounded by boys and dirt, and reveling in it?
...People look at pictures of me when I was young, and think my hair was lovely. But it was actually the single biggest bone of contention between me and my mother. And I had no control over it!
...My mother had no training in looking after children. Only a Dr. Spock book and a few friends she could go to for advice. Except she’d have trouble doing that. So when I was little, and testing the boundaries, she struggled to make me do as I was told.
...My parents had enjoyed having a happy, healthy new baby. But neither of them were prepared to look after a walking, talking toddler with a mind of her own.
...“My life has been shaped by the decision two people made over 24 years ago. They decided to adopt a child. They got me, and I got a chance at the kind of life all children deserve.”-Karen Fowler, Reflections on Motherhood The wait was almost overAs I mentioned last week, I’m sure waiting for my …
“There may be no secrets in small towns, but there are no strangers either.”-R. A. Mathis My new parents lived in Indian Head, a pretty prairie town about 40 minutes east of Regina, Saskatchewan. Surrounded by flat wheat fields, the town was visible from a distance because of a dozen tall, white elevators filled with grain …
“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.” -Anthony Brand On the stairway leading to our second floor, I have two photos of each of my four sons. The smaller pictures were taken at the hospital the day each one was born. Below each birth picture …
“Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.”-Martha Beck, O Magazine, “Growing Wings,” January 2004 Have you ever been in a room filled with adults when someone walks in with a newborn baby?Most of the people …
Growing up, I related to Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Ugly Duckling,” because for unknown reasons, I always felt different from the people around me.
...Click here if you haven’t read Part 1 or Part 2 At some point, the unwed mothers of Canada’s Baby Boom (1945 to the early 1970s) went to a local hospital to deliver their babies. Going to the Hospital Most of the women Anne Petrie interviewed, including some young girls, had no idea what was …
If you haven’t read Part 1, please click here. Thirty years after she was a resident at a home for unwed mothers, Anne Petrie interviewed a number of other women from across Canada. In addition to telling her own story, Anne profiles six other birth mothers in detail and also mentions comments from other interviews …
A couple of years ago, I had a character in one of the novels “go to her aunt’s” when she was young. I’d heard the phrase somewhere along the way and remembered it was a common cover story for young, unmarried women who were pregnant. In my novel, the woman is old, and she’d “gone …
If you haven’t read part 1 of this post, click here. 6. In the years from 1945 to 1973, closed adoption was virtually a given for most unwed young women. Prior to 1945, illegitimate children were usually given to a family member or someone the family knew—either to be raised as their own, or until …
When I was four years old, my mother told me I was adopted. I said something along the lines of “Okay.” And that was, essentially, that. Forty-four years later, I met my birth mother. But even after meeting her, I really didn’t think much about it. I wasn’t angry or upset that I’d been adopted. …
After deciding I wanted to learn more about what it was like for a woman in Canada’s prairies to be an unwed mother in the late 1940s to the late 1960s, I was pleased to discover our local library had a book written by a woman who grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1968, I …
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