I have spent a lifetime chasing down the emotions being adopted was meant to absolve me of—low self-esteem, feelings of unworthiness, deep shame, grief, and a sense of profound loss.
Never has a book trailer affected me so profoundly as this one for Megan Culhane Galbraith’s newly released memoir. Picture a miniature baby doll, the hard plastic type from the Sixties, tumbling toward a bare crib at the hands of a miniature, hard plastic nun. Like a velvet dagger to the heart, the Allegri Miserere Mei, a Medieval ode to penitence, plays in the background. This is the author’s haunting image of her arrival in the world at a home for unwed mothers.
This essay collection is first and foremost about the adoptee’s journey to closure as she reunites with her birth-mother, embarks on motherhood herself, and comes to grips with the lingering emotional trauma that cripples her relationships. Along the way, Galbraith also revisits the history of everything from birth control and abortion to the use of abandoned newborns as human guineau pigs in practice homes at an Ivy League school. In approaching the topic of societal double-standards, she also describes her fantasies alongside those depicted in rare timepieces with automatons designed to titillate.
Anyone who is or loves an adoptee will want to read this artistic gem. It features photo montages and staged dioramas of posed figures that were the basis of a show at the Collar Works Gallery in Troy, NY. Then there’s the writing—honest, poetic, well-researched, and tight. I flipped through the 292 pages in a weekend. Check out both at her website.