Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book was recommended to me by a friend who is an adoptee when my older sister located me through a genealogy DNA test. My family had no idea she even existed, and as my mother passed years ago, there was no way to get answers. Why would this woman, a wonderful, loving, mother, give a child away and not tell us? What happened that she would take a secret like that to the grave? How could her family not have any idea? This book explained exactly why, how, and what was happening in our society in 1964, when my mother signed away her rights to her firstborn child. It also gave me an insight into why my mother was the way she was. Why she insisted my little sister and I use birth control, going so far as to take us to the doctor for the pill, at a time when it was NOT the thing parents were doing. Why she had a yearly cycle of depression centered around the time that we now know is our older sister’s birthday. Why she never told my father, who she met not long after she gave that baby up. And other pieces, bits of information and things she said that didn’t seem that strange at the time, but looking back meant something so very different and helped put together a puzzle we never knew was there. I’m not known for being overly emotional about things, but this was very difficult for me to read, even knowing in advance the kind of societal pressures on single women of that era. I kept having to walk away for a while after reading this chapter or that story, because it was bringing everything too close for me to handle. My mother was one of these women, and although I knew she’d had an abusive childhood, I had no inkling that she had suffered this injustice as well. Even if you aren’t connected to anyone who may have been touched by this shameful era of our history, this book is a great opportunity to learn the reasons why women’s rights continues to be such an important movement, even today. We can’t let these kinds of things continue to happen 50 or even 60 years later.