Intrigued by the idea of a book tour and want to read more about The Mistress’s Daughter? Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Tour by visiting the master list in the post above. Want to come along for the next tour? Sign up begins today for tour #12 (Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen) and all are welcome to join along (see the post above to sign up). All you need is a book and blog.

I read the bulk of The Mistress’s Daughter this past fall when I was waiting for the Wolvog to emerge from an appointment and it seemed fitting–here I was in the act of waiting and I was reading about someone who spent so many years waiting for information. I grew up and still live in Maryland, frequent Politics and Prose and know my way around Potomac and Chevy Chase. Reading the book made me feel as if I was literally walking alongside AM Homes in each scene, meeting these relatives. The mark of a powerful book.

Why do you think the author’s biological father went through the DNA testing if he was still going to go along pretending she didn’t exist? How did you react to that emotionally as the reader?

I’d like to believe that he had good intentions and poor follow-through. I think, similar to AM, he was gathering information. I think, dissimilar to AM, he didn’t see the importance of using the information gathered–learning from it, making sense of it. It was hard to judge him because you never hear his side–why he does what he does, what he’s going through emotionally–but, to be fair to the author, he also forfeited including that side of the story by not letting her in and holding her at arms length.

Reading the book encouraged me to think of my own family “secrets.” For example, most members of my extended family want to hush up any discussion of IF, as though it’s a contagious disease. Do you think that secrets strengthen a family or tear it apart and, how does your family process secrets?

It’s an interesting question. I think secrets definitely have the ability to go either way. I know secrets that I hold for others and ones they hold for me and how information can bind two people completely. I think the difference is when some people hold information and others sense it exists but don’t have access to it (especially when they are affected by that information) vs. when all parties share a piece of information with each other yet keep it within the family and not share it with the outside world (who would never be affected by the information).

There are several instances in the early chapters where AM is struck by references to her arrival in her adopted family as a “gift” or a “present” one that’s wrapped in pink ribbon at that. As an adoptee, I too have felt somewhat commodified in my adopted parents’ retelling of my arrival into the family. We waited and waited and then you were handed to us… And this is something I worry about when I think about sharing origin stories with our (hopefully, someday, maybe) child. Will they feel like they were a commodity? More so than other children? What are your thoughts on this?

I wonder if it’s not the message of a “gift” that creates a feeling of being commodified because I think even naturally-conceived children are given the image of a gift. Is it something more then–a combination of the message and something else. Actions? Other words? Circumstances colouring the message?

Certainly, I think it’s a message many of us in the IF world tell our kids. I would think that some children take it and draw a lot of self-esteem from the message. And then other children take it and draw discomfort from the message. But it’s impossible to know how the child will react.

It’s a really fine line to walk: letting the child know how special they are and how much love you have for them and not overwhelming them with a feeling of being a saviour. I only worry when we start examining things that we say to naturally-conceived, assisted conception, or adopted children and have too many self-conscious moments. I would find it difficult to believe that non-IF parents worry about letting a child know how wanted they were or think about the damaging side effects. I think every child regardless of how they came into a family has the potential to view their origin as a commodity (or a burden or selfish or joyous or divinely-stated). But is every parent worrying about it and should they? Will it make us self-conscious if we weigh our accolades and messages of love? Will it start creating space between parent and child? I think we need to be circumspect with our words but I also think it’s impossible to know how words of love will be taken and processed by another person. I don’t know–the question gives a lot of food for thought.

Looking for the first list of The Mistress’s Daughter bloggers? It’s right below this post. Click here to jump there immediately. But wait, don’t you want to read the author’s thoughts? And if you’re intrigued, know that another group of bloggers will go up this evening (including my own post) and you can start signing up for the next book in the book club, Water for Elephants.

The first AM Homes book I ever read was Jack and I bought it while in high school. I remember being unsure whether the author was male or female. The initials threw me off. There was a male protagonist, but a feminine hand moving the story. It was my first experience feeling as if the author was probably just as interesting as the characters themselves.

I was drawn to The Mistresses’s Daughter because of the backstory about genealogy. I too am a keeper of family trees and in my case, it is merely an exercise in cataloging and organizing. I do it automatically, hording information. Gathering it wherever I can. I had never looked at the bigger picture, tracing roots, trying to find meaning within family. I think that is the mark of a good book–it can take the commonplace–the well-worn paths–and make them look as if they have just been presented for the first time.

Talented sums up AM Homes with a single thought. She is beyond talented with words–one of the great writers of our generation. But what The Mistresses’s Daughter shows (and never tells) is how we are so much more than single words–mother, daughter, writer, friend. We are these hugely complicated beings that defy definition and we are elusive–ever-changing–as new information is introduced into our world. I thought this book was so important because it unwraps this period of her life like a gift, revealing these small nooks and crannies of her being and reminding us that we can never have someone completely figured out–an important lesson to keep in mind always.

AM Homes and I sat down in the figurative sense (in other words, via an email exchange) at the Virtual Lushary and she answered these questions that I gathered from other members of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade.

Mel: Thank you, AM, for talking with us today. Would you say that for you, Knowing (no matter what that was) was absolutely preferable to Not Knowing? Is there anything you might have found about your biological parents that you would rather have not known?

AM: I think there is danger in holding off information, it takes enormous energy to deny what you already half know. So knowing that someone was looking for me—and then deciding not to find out who they were would have taken a lot of effort for many years. As much as folks say knowledge is power, I can also recognize that information can be painful and hard to deal with—but I’m all about not running from what is hard to deal with. And in the end, yes I found out who my biological parents were, but there’s an enormous amount about their lives, their histories, personalities and relationship that I’ll never know.

Mel: What did your journey to wholeness — shining light on your genetic origins as well as researching your cultural lines — what did this knowing of yourself have to do with your decision to become a parent, and to the type of mom you are?

AM: It had nothing to do with my deciding to become a parent. I grew up always wanting children—and knowing I would have them—either biologically or through adoption. A lot of people mistakenly think that for adopted people the desire to become a parent is somehow different than it would be for someone who grew up in their biological family-and I’m never sure why that is.

Yes, being a parent and having a child is complex for adopted people, but it is for everyone. It stirs issues about intimacy and attachment as well as feelings of what we did or didn’t get from our own parents.

Mel: We were interested in the part where you saw your ass on your father’s body. One of our book club members is an adoptive mom. She said, “I look into my daughter’s face and wonder what it would be like to see my own features there (at the same time, I am not wishing she were any different). It feels like an insidious thought of betrayal. I am ashamed of these feelings and want to squash them, hide them, lest she ever sense them. Yet your book spoke to me about the importance that openness, Light and Knowing have for an adoptee. If my daughter ever asks me an LA Law-type question such as, ‘did you ever look at me and wonder about the daughter you didn’t have?’ should I tell her of my feelings? (I know there is no blanket answer, but I would appreciate your thoughts on how you would have liked your mother to handle).”

AM: First—the good news–as a adoptive parent, you’re conscious of your feelings and the complexity of them. The difficulty is being able to hold contradicting emotions at the same time. It’s ok to love your adopted daughter and also wonder what a biological daughter would be like—there are differences, and yes we all know a biological child can be very different from its parent—but there are for sure links, hardware and software that echo the history of many generations. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your feelings—they’re entirely legit. And if your daughter ever asks the question, you can try and tease the two prongs apart—ie tell her, I look at you and am amazed at what a wonderful person you are, but yes there are times I am sad that I didn’t or wasn’t able to have biological children. And ask her—do you think when you grow up you’ll have adopted or biological children or both. It’s an ongoing conversation—and a complex one on both sides. The most important thing is to allow yourself and your daughter to have the full range of feelings—there are no right and wrong emotions about adoption. There are hopes and dreams and, yes, pain and grief as well.

Mel: Have you continued your genealogical research, and if so, how far back have you been able to trace your ancestors?

AM: No. I’ve stopped searching for now. The last straw was when I made the plan to meet one of the relatives—and at the very last minute he canceled on me. It hurt a lot and I realized I’d had enough for a while.

Mel: Towards the end of the book you briefly mention infertility treatments & two miscarriages before the birth of your daughter. What kind of an impact has this had on your life?

AM: The good news is that the impact—ie the stress, difficulty, sadness is mitigated the fact that I now have a happy, healthy child. So I feel very lucky, and mindful of how lucky I am. And I guess given my background I’ve always been VERY aware of how complex and ever changing life is—ie how horrible things can/do happen to people and it keeps me very humble.

Mel: When you started wri
ting the book, did you consider changing names/”protecting the innocent,” putting in some sort of disclaimer, or was it the absolute catharsis of naming names and drawing those lineal connections in black and white that you needed most?

AM: Yes. When I was first writing the book—in the section that appeared in The New Yorker, I used “other” names for my biological mother and father. But as I did the geneological research, I realized that to change all of the names, going back more than 100 years would be to change history, and also/importantly, that by changing the names I was somehow colluding with the idea that there was something to be ashamed of. And so it seemed important that despite the potential pain—it was key to use everyone’s “real” name. There should be no shame in having had a child and given it up for adoption—nor should there be shame in having adopted a child, or in being that child. It’s time for all the “shame” about adoption to be put behind us.

Mel: Even though it is not their story to tell (it is yours) and the book is about you piecing together the origins of your identity, how did your adopted family feel about all of this? Did you have to prepare them for its publication?

AM: My adoptive family read the book long before it came out—and despite that I’ve written numerous novels and short stories this is the book they are proudest of. They know how painful it was/is and how honest the book is. I wasn’t sure that would be their response, so it’s a deep relief. I felt it was important to tell the story truthfully and as much as I didn’t want to hurt feelings that was a risk I had to take.

Mel: You state several times that you had felt like a replacement or a consolation prize for your parents loosing Bruce. Is this feeling something that was reinforced by your parents or others, consciously or not, during your childhood? Was it exacerbated by your feelings about being adopted, or do you think you would’ve felt the same way had you been born to your adopted mother six months (or nine months, or a year) after Bruce’s death? Do you still believe that now that you have a daughter yourself?

AM: I think there was no escaping the complexity and grief associated with the death of my mother’s first child. Bruce lived for nine years and was sick much of the time, so it was a huge ongoing event. And while my mother I think tried to shield us from her grief—it was there, also strange things like my birth mother never signing the papers to give me up—added to the stress—my adoptive mother feared she might lose me as well for the first year which didn’t help her attachment. I think one has to be mindful of history, and the ways in which we play out our history on our children, adopted or biological, it’s all about allowing yourself to have your feelings and learning to tolerate complex feelings that may be in opposition to each other.

Mel: Throughout most of the book I felt that you were hiding a big piece of the picture from us by not talking about your thoughts on starting a family of your own, and I was grateful to read about your daughter in the last chapter. Your brief description of how and why she came to be, besides making me happy for you, seemed to me a validation of my earlier feelings of the incompleteness of the story. Why did you make the decision to talk about your daughter only in the last chapter rather than in the chronology of events as they were unfolding? Do you think that knowing this piece about your story illuminates your relationships with your parents and you as a person forming and changing those relationships at the particular time described in the book?

AM: Thanks for this question, I have a couple of brief responses. I always wanted to have children, I love them, admire kids for their freedom their imaginations, their very intuitive intellect. The adoption story and my deciding to start a family are not as connected as people want them to be. I didn’t want to write a lot about my daughter, mostly because the events in the book happened long before she was born and aren’t about her. Also, I feel she is entitled to her private life and I’m not going to write/talk a lot about her, we’ll save that for her to do later.

Mel: The book is short on the descriptions of your childhood, and some of the memories and reconstructions presented in the early part of the book do not paint the picture of a particularly happy one. How did you make the decision on how much of your childhood memories and the description of the family dynamics to include? Does the shift to highlighting more of your positive family experiences later on in the book indicative of your increasing level of comfort with claiming your adopted family as your own, an indicator of the prevailing winds, so to speak, or a coincidence?

AM: As the author I don’t have the same perspective as a reader, so this is a hard one to answer. When I was a kid, I was angry, I felt I’d been rejected by my mother—and very much like an outsider. I also think my family dynamic was complicated by having an older brother who had died. I don’t know that my childhood was so happy or unhappy—it simply was and honestly compared to some friends who had REALLY lousy childhoods, I feel lucky. I had lots of fun adventures, I had a grandmother who I adored, and I was able to get a lot from her and I grew up learning lots about art, music, books etc. The kinds of things my parents introduced to me as a kid fed me and clearly had a lot to do with the person I’ve become. I look at my life now, at my daughter, at my family and think—after so much rebellion I’ve become EXACTLY the person my adoptive parents wanted me to be—deeply responsible, hard working, socially conscious and there I am dragging my kid to museums every weekend just like my parents did with me. But I do feel I am NOT just my adoptive parents child but really an amalgam of all of my parents and all of their histories…

Mel: Thank you so much, AM, for answering our questions. For everyone else, join the Barren Bitches Book Brigade in order to ask authors your questions and chat about books with a kick-ass group of women and men. All from the comfort of your living room.

Welcome to the eleventh tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade–a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Book: The Mistress’s Daughter
Author: AM Homes
Start Date: March 5
Post Dates: April 14 and 15
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about all upcoming tours and book events.)

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (click on any of the links below to take you to a stop on this book tour. Jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on The Mistress’s Daughter. We’ve broken down the current tour into two groups. A new list will be posted tomorrow).

Group A:

The Annex (Josh)
The Road Less Travelled (Loribeth)
Everyday Stranger (Helen)
Weebles Wobblog (Lori)
Candy’s Land (Candy)
Sell Crazy Someplace Else (Jendeis)
Fertility Notes (Gabrielle)

Even if haven’t read The Mistress’s Daughter, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else’s critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The next book for book tour #12 is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. The author will be participating too. According to Wikipedia: “Water for Elephants is a historical novel by Sara Gruen. The novel centers on Jacob Jankowski and his experiences in a travelling circus called The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.” It was a New York Times bestseller AND a Booksense #1 Pick.

The Details: Tour #12 will start April 16. Participants will read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. On Wednesday, May 21st everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to me. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you on May 23rd. You can also send along any questions you have directly for Sara Gruen. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on May 27 and 28 (we will break up into two or three smaller groups and you can choose which day works best for you when the date gets closer). Each day of the tour, I’ll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #12, leave a comment below or send me an email. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you’d like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn’t have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you’re a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour’s participant list. The next few tours are always listed on the new upcoming and past tours list. Happy reading.

I am currently vomiting. By which I don’t mean I am writing and vomiting at the same time, but I am taking breaks to throw up. The sane person wouldn’t finish writing the roundup when she has the stomach flu. Maybe I’m not sane. But something does have to give so I won’t have the Lost & Found up tomorrow–at least, not the full version. It will be a skinnier version of stuff that was already on the calendar. I am taking the weekend to kick this thing and hopefully make an IKEA run as well as meet up with the Order of the Plastic Uterus.

If I didn’t have the stomach flu, I would have made a little icon for Fess Up Week. I never pass up an opportunity to use Microsoft Paint.

I wasn’t going to blog about Thomas Beatie, the pregnant man, even though his story touches on so many aspects of infertility–a wife with endometriosis and a hysterectomy, donor insemination, assisted conception. Even as all of the other bloggers tackled the topic, I sat back thinking: where is the story? Two people want to add to their family and they do so. The end. But the convergence of Pesach cleaning and citrus fruit made me think about how this story is the new orange on the seder plate.

For those unfamiliar with the idea, many Jews place an orange on their seder plate during the Pesach meal.

In the early 1980s, while speaking at Oberlin College Hillel, Susannah Heschel was introduced to an early feminist Haggadah that suggested adding a crust of bread on the seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians (there’s as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate). Heschel felt that to put bread on the seder plate would be to accept that Jewish lesbians and gay men violate Judaism like chametz violates Passover. So, at her next seder, she chose an orange as a symbol of inclusion of gays and lesbians and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community. She offered the orange as a symbol of the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life. In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spit out–a gesture of spitting out, repudiating the homophobia of Judaism.

It’s actually an interesting story–this was the original idea behind the orange on the seder plate, though the retelling of the lecture changed over time like an enormous game of telephone and by now, if you ask a Jew why they place an orange on the seder table, they will most likely answer in solidarity of women. Heschel herself is upset by this fact and says that the retelling and changing erases the point and underlines the problem–that we are so uncomfortable discussing homosexuality (and I’m going to add here for the sake of this discussion, transgenderism) that we just circumvent symbols and change them into something more accessible. Everyone can talk comfortably about female empowerment. Not everyone can talk comfortably about homophobia.

Talking about Thomas Beatie means making a lot of assumptions. Who can say what type of parent a person will be without knowing them? Who can say how children will turn out until they’ve turned out? We can only comment on what we see and right now, I’m seeing a couple who want a child and used assisted conception to achieve that. Not so different from my own path.

On my own seder plate this year, I’m placing an apple–the original fruit that gave birth to all questions–representing reproductive rights for all people because truthfully, just as the changed story of Heschel’s speech has a man shouting about women belonging on the bimah as much as an orange belongs on the seder plate, empty symbolic gestures do not have a space at my table. It is apples and oranges; I am taking back the fruit. If I believe in reproductive rights for myself–and believe me, I want my reproductive rights well-covered–I need to believe in reproductive rights for all who act out of love or my shouting for myself becomes merely symbolic, self-serving, meaningless.

Mother Jones, in August 2006, ran a survey of fertility clinic directors. Only 59% believed everyone has a right to a child. 48% said they would likely turn away a gay couple seeking a surrogate. 20% would turn away a single woman. 17% would turn away a lesbian couple. If you want reproductive rights for yourself–and I’m fairly certain that no fertility clinic director would wish to be told that they cannot or must have a child–we should be concerned about others. Because I’m not just talking about those experiencing infertility who need to utilize assisted conception when I speak about reproductive rights–every single person on this earth should be in control of whether or not they reproduce or parent. Put an apple on the seder plate for that.

I’ve been reading the blogger’s response to Thomas Beatie’s story both in the infertility world and the greater blogosphere. Julia from I Won’t Fear Love wrote to the producers at Verdict with Dan Abrams.

I was extremely disappointed with yesterday’s segment on the pregnant man. The host declared that he didn’t know where to begin with this story. How about “a man and a woman marry and want to start a family. Unfortunately, due to prior medical condition, the woman had a hysterectomy some years ago. Luckily, the man happened to have the necessary biological machinery to conceive and carry their child.”?

Or Kymberli at I’m a Smart One’s post who cheers on anyone who wishes to mindfully add to their family: “More power to you and your wife. Who am I to criticize how someone chooses to live their lives and build their families? I love it, and I’m glad they had the balls to step up and go public with it. Thomas said, ‘Love builds a family.’ You’re damned right.”

Mombian said it best at the end of her coverage of this story: “As I see it? Loving parents are normal. Everything else is variable.”

Perhaps, if that was what 59% of the fertility directors were looking for, I wouldn’t be so disturbed by the figure. If we were actually looking at love, there would be no discussion concerning Thomas Beatie and his wife. If we wanted everyone else to have what we want for ourselves, we wouldn’t need to place so many damn apples on the table this spring.

No one else may understand it this year, but on April 19th, set an apple on your table.

Reproductive rights for every man or woman who acts out of love