The Chronicles of Munchkin Land

I just started reading Jessica Lost: A Story of Birth, Adoption & The Meaning of Motherhood by Bunny Crumpacker and J.S. Picariello. It will be released next month, but the kind people at Sterling Publishing sent me a copy to read ahead of time. I can already tell that little else will get done in my free time this week because I already don’t want to put the book down… and I’ve only made it to the end of the short first chapter.

The book itself is written by a birth mother and her relinquished daughter. It’s a memoir told by each in alternating chapters. I’m excited to read it and… hesitant at the same time. While Bunny Crumpacker’s adoption may have been closed, I am learning that there are so many similarities in the emotions despite decades of time difference between eras.

Take for example, this paragraph at the end of the first chapter:

Not many people knew about the pregnancy then, or later, It was the great secret of my life. I can tell you how it began. I can tell you how it affected the rest of my life. I can tell you what kind of mother I turned out to be. But there is only a little I can tell you about the pregnancy, or the birth of that lost child. I kept my secret so successfully, for so long, that I no longer have it to share. For a long time, I no longer had it for myself to know.

My pregnancy and adoption have not been a secret nor were they ever. However, if I wouldn’t have actively blogged those pregnancy days, I wouldn’t remember anything. Even still, the stuff that I didn’t capture and forever save in the web is forever lost to me. Or, mostly lost to me. Moments in the hospital that I didn’t record and haven’t yet recorded still float back to me on silent days. A conversation had with yet another nasty nurse. The old lady in the lobby. My dad holding Munchkin. The phone conversation with my mom. The birth isn’t recorded anywhere in great detail and I have shoved so much of it somewhere silent and dark and untouchable.

When I read the words of other birth mothers who tell a similar story — purposefully avoiding memories of the hospital — those memories have a way of making their way to the front of my mind. And so, I’m kind of hesitant to keep reading. What memories will push through that I have kept hidden in the back of my mind for years? I don’t know, obviously.

But I’ll keep reading. I hope to have it read by the end of the week.