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Jean MacLeod
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My friend Krista is dropping her college freshman daughter off at school on Sunday. This highly competent, single
working mom has been hit upside the head with a plank: her youngest child will be gone in four days, which means
her own life is irrevocably changing. My friend dreads the emptiness she senses just past Sunday…she realizes the
opportunities inherent in ‘change’ but Krista has been emotionally gobsmacked; she was not prepared to have to
explore her past and present feelings, and she has been completely immobilized by the Big Dinosaur Sitting in her
Living Room…
My lifelong friend, Suzanne, flew up from Texas to clean out the house her parents built and lived in for over 50
years. I lived eight houses down from Suzanne for most of my youth, and her parent’s home was as familiar to me as
my own. Suzanne’s dad died several years ago, and her mom is now living in assisted living down in Texas. Halfway
through the pack-up process, Suzanne tucked herself back into her old twin bed and simply refused to get up. It was
a Dinosaur Crisis! Suzanne had stumbled into a pre-history ambush. Every photo, memento and 8mm movie spun
Suzanne back to her childhood, and finally forced her to witness the changes in her family (and herself) that had
occurred over the last twenty-five years.
Why do we adults believe that we can handle ‘change’ with shopping lists and a few packing boxes? Our adopted
children may be on to something--their hypervigilant over-reaction to transition and change may provide them with
more emotional preparation than our grown-up disregard for change’s profound effects will ever provide for us. As
adoptive parents, we offer a sad or scared child a safe place to talk, grieve, celebrate and plan. Perhaps we need to
recognize how change provokes these connective needs within ourselves, too.
Graduation parties, weddings, funerals, baby showers, ‘gotcha’ days, coming-of-age celebrations, even kindergarten
round-up; these rituals help us structure our experiences, but don’t quite finish the job of processing. Immediately
after my dad died a couple of years ago, a therapist friend gave me some meaningful advice. She said, “You need
to take care of yourself right now, and for the months to come.” It was so simple--but it was the heads-up I
needed to understand the physical, mental and emotional impact of the grieving-integrating process I was embarking
on.
It took three of us to rent Suzanne a storage unit, move her boxes and get her out of bed. Maybe we all need to form
posse’s to accompany friends through our personal Jurassic Parks, and help support each other’s encounters with
past history and Big Life Change.
Understanding the powerful, emotional ramifications of change, and why we trigger so profoundly over both the
important and the mundane (old letters between our parents, a toy we gave our 18 year old when he was in first
grade, family camping trip memorabilia), opens a door and helps us find a place to put our memories, or our
remorse, or the overwhelming love for individuals who have ‘left’ us. Feeling the sting of personal change, transition,
or loss may also help us generate more empathic responses for our adopted children when they express (or act out)
bittersweet feelings over losing their entire first lives with other families.
Dinosaurs are scary symbols of what we need to either slay or befriend (there is no escaping Jurassic Park, or the
previous life choices we have made). Understanding our deeply buried, ‘ancient’ connections to events occurring
today, gives us a different perspective on our surprising over-reactions, and unfreezes our ability to act.
Last month, I took my kids back to Dinosaur Ridge outside of Denver, where we gazed at real footprints made by
dinos about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. I like the visual symbolism of the Stegosaurus,
Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and Allosaurus footprints we saw walking the ‘Dinosaur Highway’; they remind me that
beings may be gone but never forgotten, that extinction--of anything--is a process, and that remains of the past are
supposed to be witnessed, studied and touched…
Jean MacLeod
Change, transition and…
A WALK in JURASSIC PARK
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The English American
By Alison Larkin
“I’m dancing on air about the fact that the book is hitting the mainstream because I SO wanted to write a novel that would genuinely appeal to the general public. I wanted people to laugh and cry with my adopted heroine, Pippa, as she emerges at the end, still funny, but stronger, wiser – an American with a British accent – who has a true chance of happiness.” ~ Alison Larkin Alison Larkin, born in the USA, was adopted as an infant by a British couple working and living in Washington DC. She spent a happy childhood in Africa and the south of England, and a creative young adulthood honing her writing, music and performance skills at the University of London and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Alison’s world came to an emotional and artistic head when she found her enthusiastic all-American birthmother alive and ready for reunion in Bald Mountain, Tennessee. Living the incongruity of being a “redneck” with a posh English accent sent Alison to the stage with a highly successful one-woman show based on the wild divide of her personal story. The English American is a fictionalized account of Alison’s own journey. Like the author herself, the book is a warm, expansive read – a blend of American over-friendly energy and English charm and social correctness. Larkin’s heroine, Pippa Dunn, never quite ‘fits’ into her staid adoptive family, and is ecstatic to meet her charismatic genetic connections in the USA. She is thrilled to recognize herself within her birthparents, and revels in filling in her missing pieces while living near NYC with her birthmother, Billie. Slowly, Pippa gets to know the genuine Billie, and her birthfather, Walt, and is forced to learn to set down boundaries and stand up for herself while she sorts out her double whammy relationships: two sets of parents, two sets of siblings and two potential lovers… Alison clarified, “I was interested in exploring the fantasy – reality elements. I think for an adopted person, if you know nothing about the parents who gave you birth, you will replace that with fantasy, and both Pippa and myself did that. I think that fantasy goes into the romance arena as well…But I did want to keep the heroine authentic.” Pippa works hard to separate fantasy from reality, and Larkin deftly handles the strange mix of light, romantic fiction and adoption issues, weaving an enchanting tale bolstered by unalterable, gritty life-truths. Characters are developed beyond potentially easy stereotypes of buffoonish rednecks and rigid Brits; no one person in The English-American is the ‘bad guy’ of the story, and Larkin manages to keep Pippa and her emotional journey real, without making her pathological. “So many novels or books portray adopted people as eternally damaged at best or serial killers at worst and I thought, I’ve had it with this! We adopted people have internal and external hurdles to overcome” said Alison, “but in my opinion, every adopted person who has ever even thought about trying to find a birthparent is a true HERO. And I wanted people to understand why!” “Remember, there can be no courage without fear” Pippa is told throughout The English American, and in facing the unknown, telling the truth and risking rejection, she is able to move bravely forward. Her quiet adoptive parents, Pippa realizes, have given her the strength to grow from her encounters with Walt and Billie, and have infused her with the empathy necessary to acknowledge her birthparent’s magnificent gifts-- and to understand their clay feet. Pippa earns her hero’s medal by the end of the book, and she comes full circle through her personal experience with humor, heartbreak, romance and hard-won knowledge. Larkin begins her novel with a quotation from T.S. Eliot that captures Pippa, wiser from her quest and poised for new adventure, at book’s end. This piece of poem summarizes an adoptee search and reunion, but on another level, it works for returning to one’s adopted home, too, medal proudly in place…
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Book Review & Author Interview for Tapestry Books Reviewed by Jean MacLeod
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