Today I’m posting a review of another memoir I read recently, Missing Mothers, by Martha Birkett Bordwell. Martha is an adoptive mother from Minnesota who reached out to me to read her book, which I was honored and happy to do. I love that we mothers strive to express our truths. As I wrote to Martha, we learn from one another. Martha and her husband adopted their son and daughter from South Korea and Guatemala in the late 1970s, early 1980s, so she writes from the perspective of long experience. Below is the review I posted on Amazon with a link to order here. I recommend!
An intense, introspective meditation
Missing Mothers is an intense, introspective meditation on motherhood, infertility, transracial adoption, and family. Martha Bordwell’s mother died in childbirth when Bordwell was six years old, a tragedy that marked Bordwell for the rest of her life. Bordwell’s beloved, hardworking father of three remarried, and Bordwell’s relationship with her stepmother / second mother, Myra, was fraught from the beginning. In clean, crisp, and descriptive prose, Bordwell reveals her despair at not being able to hold a pregnancy, and her gradual acceptance of motherhood through adoption to a son from S. Korea and daughter from Guatemala.
As an adoptive mother myself, I empathized with challenges Bordwell faced while rearing two children from two different cultures with two different sets of needs, when international adoption was not as widespread as it later became—the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bordwell and her husband clearly love their children, and Bordwell traces the kids’ trajectory from babyhood to healthy adulthood in short chapters that are absorbing. The reader cheers for her son’s marriage to a young woman he meets in S. Korea and hopes for a bright future for Bordwell’s daughter.
The final scenes where Bordwell discovers a Love Bird pin cherished (but never used) by stepmother Myra and a silver thimble left behind by Bordwell’s mother are almost unbearably sad. But the book ends on an optimistic note, demonstrating how Bordwell’s early, hard loss enabled her to deeply empathize with her children’s losses while creating her own unique family.
I recommend Missing Mothers to readers interested or involved in adoption, and to anyone looking for an engrossing, heartfelt memoir.
Missing Mothers is available on Indie Bound, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.