No Overnight Success

I just published my memoir, Unmoored, How An Adoptee found Her True Identity. I am 72 years old, and I couldn’t have done it a moment sooner. Let me explain.

I’ve always loved stories. As a small child at my grandmother’s farm, I snuggled in bed beside my closest cousin, and we listened to tales where a fairy godmother revealed Cinderella’s true beauty and magic beans fulfilled their promise, allowing foolish Jack to climb their stalk into the clouds and slay a giant. The book I remember best contained lavish illustrations that drew me into the magic world of the story.

Fast forward to high school. Looking for a place to belong, I joined the creative writing club. I think I only wrote one poem, but I clearly recall a club hike to the top of a bald mountain in the Adirondacks. The wind was blowing so hard, I opened my parka, spread its coattails like wings, and leaned into the ferocious current of air, amazed that I didn’t fall over.

Years passed. I worked for a used bookstore, a small publisher, and an advertising department. I taught reading and writing from kindergarten to college. All my jobs were tangential to being an author, but until I became a believer nothing I wrote was ever published. My first short piece was about coming to Jesus. A friend asked me to write her testimony, and it too was published. I discovered small Christian women’s magazines and published several articles. I attended a Christian writers’ conference and joined a critique group.

At the time, I was reading gritty memoirs like Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club, and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. With the memoir boom, I was eager to tell my own story. But what scintillating tale did I have to offer as an adoptee with a sheltered suburban childhood? I read Anne Tyler novels instead and tried my hand at fiction, submitting short stories to secular magazines way out of my league and writing two unfinished novels.

But looking back, that was all preliminary.

When my children had flown the nest, I taught at an “underperforming” middle school. I leaned into that ferocious school, but this time I fell flat on my face. In an effort to dissect my disaster, I wrote initially in my journal, and then published my first creative non-fiction, Teacher Dropout: Finding Grace in an Unjust School.

I’d always thought my adoption was no big deal since the parents who raised me were wonderful. However, while writing Teacher Dropout both my mom and dad passed away, and my husband urged me to search for my biological parents before it was too late. Finding my genetic family brought me face to face with details of their lives I couldn’t have understood as a child. This led me to examine my growing up and coming of age in light of my adoption. I saw a kind of desperation blowing through my life just below the surface for a place to belong and an identity that could never be lost or taken away.

The other night I watched an American Masters documentary on PBS about author, Toni Morrison. She talked about the power of words to take us into the thoughts and experiences of another soul. Because that’s what we really want isn’t it? To connect, to relate, to know we aren’t the only one feeling what we’re feeling. Not the only one whose foolish mistakes have marked them with shame. Not the only one whose thinking and actions were beyond their control? That’s what I’ve tried to portray with both Teacher Dropout and Unmoored knowing that perhaps the reader craves the author’s open heart even more than the dramatic action of the plot. And knowing, from the time I was a little girl, the power of lavish illustrations I tried to paint my story with words.

So, you see I couldn’t have written Unmoored any sooner. It took me 72 years to understand my own life and hone my craft—hoping that as God has spoken his secrets to my soul, my story will whisper them to yours.

But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:31 (NKJV)

Cover photo by Aksel Fristrup on Unsplash