Gretchen Sisson’s RELINQUISHED: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood is a powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real.
Gretchen is joining us today to celebrate her pub day with a heartwarming family tale from the library, highlighting Suzanne, a wise librarian who unfailingly said yes to children, providing them with an oasis a place of structure amid chaos.
“Children. Children!” I shout into the backseat. “Pay attention for a minute. We are going to the library to help Suzanne get the school library ready for the new school year. We are not going to the library to just sit around and read books all afternoon.”
“Mom, Suzanne is definitely going to let us sit around and read books if we want,” says Arthur, my 10-year-old.
“Yeah, kids sitting around and reading books is basically Suzanne’s favorite thing,” chimes in his eight-year-old brother, Jasper.
I sigh. “That may be true, generally speaking. But you were the ones who wanted to email Suzanne and ask if she could use volunteers at the end of summer vacation, and so we are going to school now to be useful.”
“Maybe me reading books and staying out of the way is the most useful thing I could do, though,” says Jasper. (He is not necessarily wrong.)
The boys’ school librarian has become a beloved figure in our household, the tales of her accomplishments were passed down grade by grade. There was the time in second grade when Jasper had checked out forty-seven books before the end of October and returned exactly zero; she scheduled a “book meeting” with him and patiently went through the entire list until he had agreed there were, possibly, a few he could bring back to share with others. There was the time Arthur decided that the school library needs a specific section on games (both board and video) and then submitted a proposal to her on exactly which books it should include and where it should be housed–and then, somehow, it became a reality. There was the time both boys showed up at the beginning of December–right before winter break – with a combined list of 147 books that they had read over the course of the calendar year. Could they check all of them out? Please? They wanted to make a stack of all the boys they’d read over the previous twelve months to see how tall it was. And, of course, the answer was yes: they trudged to the car after school weighted down with multiple canvas bags on either shoulder. (The resulting stacks were over their heads and pleasingly precarious.) When Arthur wanted to build a LEGO-based “secondary check out system” that could be transported from classroom to classroom, I watched, incredulously, as Suzanne ordered building supplies. When Jasper brought in a list of forthcoming titles he was hoping the library could preorder, they materialized in his backpack soon after publication.
For my children–one late reader, one early; one with dyslexia, one with ADHD–the library could have been a boring place of restraint and correction. Instead, it was their oasis; their place to create, to engineer, to find connection, to fall in love (over and over again) with all the books that were at their disposal. Which is why we were heading to school that late August afternoon, just in case Susan needed “help.”
To be fair, they did help. For the first half-hour they sorted and labeled, stacked and shelved. And then, for the next hour, they very diligently performed quality control on the stack of new additions and the new bean bag chairs–ensuring that their happy place was ready for another school year.
Gretchen
RELINQUISHED: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson; 9781250286772; on-sale now
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