Giving Away Simone

Rating:
Summary: Giving Away Simone
Review: I commend the author for her diligence in creating a relationship with her child. It is good reading for adoptive parents, particularly those involved in open adoption.

Rating:
Summary: Giving Away Simone
Review: I commend the author for her diligence in creating a relationship with her child. It is good reading for adoptive parents, particularly those involved in open adoption.

Rating:
Summary: Refreshing first-hand account of adoption
Review: Reading Waldron's touching memoir, Giving Away Simone, one will find not a typical story of teen pregnancy and adoption, but the story of a woman who unravels a legacy of abandonment and subsequent emotional distress. Her daughter Simone (renamed Rebecca by her adoptive parents), she learns later in life, is the fifth generation of a line of women who have abandoned their daughters. Knowing this gives a sharper perspective to Waldron's story as she relates her own sanitary childhood and attempts to explain why abandonment happens.

When Waldron writes of her parents, it is sad to know that such a family existed without hugs and kisses and little things that make a family whole. Most of Waldron's warmth is channeled instead to anecdotes of her domineering grandmother Altie, a church matron who spent her own years of adoptive motherhood both impressed with and perplexed by Sara's peculiar nature.

The second stage of Giving Away Simone involves Jan's reunion with Rebecca eleven years after mother gave daughter away. Through touching narrative and tense, dramatic correspondence, Waldron relates her "reintegration" into Rebecca's life and her experiences in establishing a relationship with Rebecca without taking anything away from the adoptive family (Waldron calls herself the "birthmother," which, she relates, does not always fulfill the requirements of a true mother.) As expected, Waldron is sympathetic to those who have given up children for adoption, and through baring her own soul she proves that while there may be regrets, there need not be blame when the welfare of a child is at stake.

Rating:
Summary: A must for those in open adoptions!
Review: This book is an essential read for birth and adoptive parents in open adoption, for those preparing to open an adoption and for anyone needing to learn more about relationship in adoption.Giving Away Simone is an insightful, painful and wonderfully well-written description of a reunion process. the reunion between Jan Waldron and her birth daughter Rebecca, takes years to become comfortable and the ups and downs, approaches and retreats of the relationship are incredibly well described. Although the first half of the book covers pre-reunion events, for me, as an adoptive mother, the heart of the book is the second half, which describes the evolving relationship between Jan and her daughter.

There is an interesting twist to the title of this book. Giving away Simone appears to refer to Jan Waldron's placement of her baby for adoption. However, as Rebecca grows older and her loving but apparently increasingly busy adoptive parents seem to withdraw somewhat, it begins to feel as if this child is emotionally given away again,at least in part. This significantly affects the reunion process and the lessons for birth and adoptive parents are huge. For example, it becomes absolutely clear that open adoption is about relationships between FAMILIES and not just children and their two sets of mothers and fathers. Rebecca herself, now an adult and writer as well, writes a poignant and honest statement at the end of the book.

As an adoptive mother, a student of adoption and a steady reader of adoption materials, this book is one of my top five adoption books, along with work by Betty Jean Lifton, Joyce Maguire Pavao and Patricia Martinez Dorner. It is packed with wisdom gathered from first-hand experience.