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Overview
Described in the New York Times Book Review as "uniquely enlightening," Waiting to Forget is a mother's story of coming to terms with the child she gave up for adoption over thirty years ago. In 1965 Margaret Moorman was unmarried, pregnant, and still in high school. Forced by societal pressures to give her baby up, she suffered emotional trauma both before and for years after the birth. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter and found herself terrified by the possibility of losing her younger child, a fear she can now trace back to her uncertain decision to give up her son.
Moorman discusses both her own complicated feelings of loss and motherhood and the issue of adoption from the often overlooked point of view of a birth parent.
Synopsis
"[An] extraordinary memoir of [the author's] giving up for adoption the baby she bore at 16... beautifully written, psychologically nuanced and sociologically informed."—Nation
Publishers Weekly
Moorman (My Sister's Keeper) has written a wrenching and moving account of her teenage pregnancy and her decision to give up her newborn son for adoption. A 15-year-old high-school student in Arlington, Va., she was ignorant of birth control in 1964 when she became pregnant by her boyfriend. He promised to marry her but instead joined the Navy, a move that echoed other losses: her father's unexpected death from a heart attack in 1963 and her sister's repeated hospitalizations for manic-depressive illness. The disapproval of doctors and her moody, withdrawn mother imparted shame and humiliation and induced her to give away her infant son in a "closed" adoption (the birth records were sealed). Beset by guilt, sorrow and debilitating depression, she subsequently underwent years of psychotherapy. In 1989, she and her second husband had a daughter named Laura. Moorman writes affectingly of being pregnant at 40 and of her irrational terror of letting Laura out of her sight, a fear she traced to unresolved longing for her first, unknown child. After years spent tracking the by-now grown man down, she finally located him in 1995. His response, that he did not want to see her, at least for the time being, makes for a bittersweet finale.