After a two-year hiatus, my husband Tim and I are thrilled to host our annual gathering of San Francisco Bay Area Guatadopt families tomorrow, Sunday May 29. The party will be completely outdoors and the forecast is for clear skies. My sister Deanna and her family, visiting from Boston, will co-host. Today De helped with the Costco run–always more fun with my little sister. Can’t wait to see friends after too, too long!
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Before we started our adoption process in Guatemala, we had filled out paperwork to adopt a baby from Latvia through an agency in Ohio called European Adoption Consultants. The director was named Margaret Cole and today I read Margaret Cole has been sentenced to federal prison for “schemes to corruptly and fraudulently procure adoptions …through bribing officials and defrauding U.S. adoptive parents.”
I can’t remember the exact reason why we left European Adoption Consultants back in 2002–the tipping point–except that dealing with the agency and its players made me uneasy. Soon after, we switched to Guatemala, which of course closed adoptions to the US in December 2007, also due to corruption and irregularity.
One of the final scenes in my memoir, Mamalita, describes my watching an episode of Dateline NBC titled “The Baby Broker” and seeing our facilitator filmed in the shadowy hallway of the Camino Real, one of Guatemala’s so-called baby hotels, where adoptive parents like us met their children and then spent weeks and months trying to sort out complicated adoptions. Ultimately, I rented a small house in Antigua, Guatemala and moved there with my daughter, where I was immersed deeply into the world of intercountry adoption—the players, the practices, the regulations, the deals. Everything that went on was impossible to avoid.
Sometimes I ask myself why I’ve spent the past 20 years thinking and writing about adoption—thinking and writing about adoption and virtually nothing else–and then I read that Margaret Cole is going to federal prison and I know why. The experience of becoming a mother through international adoption changed me.
I’m still trying to make sense of it.
I’m not on Instagram but my children are and on Mother’s Day they each posted photographs which they forwarded to me.
The pictures warmed my heart, so I’m sharing them with you.
Happy belated!
I’ve kept a journal for 54 years and have filled 39 notebooks. What I learned from reading them surprised me.
You can listen to and read my Perspectives for KQED-FM here.
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I’m grateful to my MFA buddy and friend, Diane Gottlieb, for placing this interview with me in The Bookends Review. The piece was published on April 13, 2022, but I’m a little behind in everything. An excerpt:
After you wrote Mamalita, you switched to fiction and wrote your first novel, Mother Mother. What was behind that decision?
After Mamalita was published, I realized there was more to say about family, belonging, identity and marriage. I’d already told our story. The story I wanted to tell—needed to tell—was broader and deeper. The only way to get my arms around it was through fiction.
You tell the story through two protagonists: Julie, the white adoptive mother, and Rosalba, the indigenous Ixil Maya mother of Juan, the boy Julie adopts. How did you create the voice of a woman whose life is so different from your own?
Imagining other lives is the work of a fiction writer. That said, I did a ton of research. First, from visiting Guatemala every year and knowing my kids’ birth mothers as well as many other women in Guatemala. Second, from witnessing testimonials of survivors of Guatemala’s civil war. Third, I read everything I could get my hands on— Straight up political histories of Guatemala, diaries and letters in translation, guides for midwives and Peace Corps volunteers. I immersed myself in Guatemala and absorbed the information into my body, almost as an actor might. Then I sat down and put it on the page.
Thanks for reading the entire interview here. xoxo
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