Make Me a Mother: A Memoir

A writer based in Bellingham, Wash., Antonetta (A Mind Apart) reflects thoughtfully on the many important functions of adoption as gleaned from her own experience adopting a baby boy from South Korea in 1997. Antonetta and her longtime husband, Bruce, gave up trying to conceive after an initial miscarriage: Antonetta, who came of age in the early 1970s, had bipolar disorder, and suspected mental illness in other members of the family as well as alcoholism. Having first looked at adoption of a girl from China, the couple was referred to Jin, a four-month-old Korean child whose parents (“Birth mother: heart-shaped tattoo, waitress. Birth father: good at math”) were probably very young. Alternating her journal of Jin’s flourishing development through adolescence within the family’s deepening bonds is Antonetta’s musings on the historical uses of adoption, such as its prevalence during Roman times and in Oceania, for example. Moreover, becoming a mother allowed the author to rework the thorny issues between her rather withholding mother and critical father, now aged and infirm and living in New Jersey. Antonetta’s generous, humbling take on adoption adds another layer to today’s vastly “changing landscape of family,” where couples seeking adoption don’t necessarily have infertility issues and ethnic make-up tends more toward the richly diverse. (Feb.)