[RNM]⇒ Read Free Rock Needs River A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption eBook Vanessa McGrady

Rock Needs River A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption eBook Vanessa McGrady

Download As PDF : Rock Needs River A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption eBook Vanessa McGrady

Rock Needs River A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption eBook Vanessa McGrady

The first half of this 200-page book meandered through details of multiple messy relationships, often laced with infidelity. I catch myself rereading the book description to double check that the focus of the book would be adoption. The author finds someone special—Peter—a married man with teenager daughters. We learn details of Peter’s failed marriage and messy divorce. How embarrassing for Peter, his first wife, and their daughters—why should they be shamed in someone else’s memoir? Doesn’t that violate memoir etiquette?

Eventually, the focus shifts to having a child and the painful journey to adoption. Enter Bill and Bridgett, a couple who are expecting and trying to find parents for their child. The author (and Peter) want this baby. The story bumps along, vague on adoption details, but soon they’re at home with their own baby girl! I wanted more about how the relationship between bio-parents and adoptive parents. Instead the focus was heavier on how Peter was a disappointment as a husband and father, and the dissolution of their marriage. Again, lots of Peter shaming. Even if everything said is true, why would anyone bash the father of their child in such a public way? So ugly and unnecessary.

Finally, we get to Bill and Bridgett, the bio-parents. They went from just-getting-by to homeless. What stands out about this couple is they don’t ask for anything. They don’t ask to move in, but they accept the offer. Somehow Bill and Bridgett disappoint the author at every turn. They don't make the choices she expects them to make. They won't let her fix them and they back away when the author keeps pushing them to change. The author describes it as them being mad at her. She messaged them for years to get them to talk to her and when they finally agree to her requests for an interview about the adoption, she is devastated because they don’t say what she wants to hear. They chose her to be the mother of their child. Why is that not enough?

Bill and Bridgett were self-aware enough to know they shouldn’t raise a child. I wonder if they regret open adoption. I hope they never read this book.


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Rock Needs River A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption eBook Vanessa McGrady Reviews

I read this book in a span of hours, eager to hear about the journey to adoption. Instead, it was a very messy tell all focused almost solely on other people’s choices or “mistakes” (as so judged/perceived by the author). The author spends a lot of time airing her ex-husbands dirty laundry and posturing as a white savior to her daughters birth parents, but at its core, this is so much white privilege wrapped up in mystical wishful thinking and selfishness thinly disguised as “good intentions”. She claims to have spent a ton of time and energy “helping” her daughters birth parents, but when they finally tell her the truth of their anger and frustration with the adoption system, she has to leave to decompress. That was her chance to help them unpack their trauma and potentially move forward, but I suspect the author still has too much of her own trauma to help anyone else with theirs.

One thing that deeply bothered me - she shares an anecdote about how, in her desperation for a baby, she trolled a forum where teenage moms to be posted about their unplanned pregnancies. The author wrote a message to a teen who was weighing her options, gently urging her to consider giving her baby to the author, and was RIGHTFULLY blasted by those who found her disingenuous and borderline manipulative. In my mind, I can’t reconcile that this highly educated person didn’t understand the incredibly ugly implications around propositioning a vulnerable woman in this way. I can only assume she was blinded by her drive for a child. She goes on to say she tried to apologize and reply to the comments, but was banned by the moderator... I suspect she kept a haughty, self-oriented tone instead of empathizing properly with those whose trust she had broken.

In many ways, the author shares more about herself than I think she ever intended. She wanted a baby who would love her after years and years of not finding love anywhere else, as highlighted in the first part of her memoir, where she details past relationships. She criticizes her ex-husband for drinking while she puts herself on a pedestal for being sober. The things she points about about her daughters birth parents as negatives could very likely be used to describe her early life that she so openly shares in the beginning of her book. But what was okay for her at one point was unacceptable for them, in both cases.

I got this book for free and so will likely remove it from my library as I have no desire to revisit it again.
The first half of this 200-page book meandered through details of multiple messy relationships, often laced with infidelity. I catch myself rereading the book description to double check that the focus of the book would be adoption. The author finds someone special—Peter—a married man with teenager daughters. We learn details of Peter’s failed marriage and messy divorce. How embarrassing for Peter, his first wife, and their daughters—why should they be shamed in someone else’s memoir? Doesn’t that violate memoir etiquette?

Eventually, the focus shifts to having a child and the painful journey to adoption. Enter Bill and Bridgett, a couple who are expecting and trying to find parents for their child. The author (and Peter) want this baby. The story bumps along, vague on adoption details, but soon they’re at home with their own baby girl! I wanted more about how the relationship between bio-parents and adoptive parents. Instead the focus was heavier on how Peter was a disappointment as a husband and father, and the dissolution of their marriage. Again, lots of Peter shaming. Even if everything said is true, why would anyone bash the father of their child in such a public way? So ugly and unnecessary.

Finally, we get to Bill and Bridgett, the bio-parents. They went from just-getting-by to homeless. What stands out about this couple is they don’t ask for anything. They don’t ask to move in, but they accept the offer. Somehow Bill and Bridgett disappoint the author at every turn. They don't make the choices she expects them to make. They won't let her fix them and they back away when the author keeps pushing them to change. The author describes it as them being mad at her. She messaged them for years to get them to talk to her and when they finally agree to her requests for an interview about the adoption, she is devastated because they don’t say what she wants to hear. They chose her to be the mother of their child. Why is that not enough?

Bill and Bridgett were self-aware enough to know they shouldn’t raise a child. I wonder if they regret open adoption. I hope they never read this book.