Hello,
a bit about me:
I was born the seventh of eight children to an Irish Catholic family living in the western suburbs of Chicago. When I got pregnant at fifteen, I was hidden in our home until I gave birth to a baby girl and signed the papers releasing her to adoption. I was to keep her birth a secret.
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In 1975 I married and four years later migrated to Oregon with my husband, Steve, and our four-year-old son. There we had two more children and I juggled child-raising with running a word processing business in Ashland, Oregon.
That beautiful baby girl came back to find me. Hard as it was to deal with my own grief and shame and to break my silence about her, I was, and am, so glad she searched. I wanted her in my life, and we rewove our family to include her in whatever way she feels comfortable.
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In 1998 another change: My husband, Steve, and I bought land in Williams, Oregon, to start an organic farm and build a strawbale house. We did all that, and twenty-two years later we sold the farm and moved close to conveniences like grocery stores and doctors. Now I devote most of my time to freelance editing, and writing fiction, memoir, and poetry.
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If you are on the adoption journey, I hope you find A Life Let Go... helpful to you. And if you know someone on the adoption journey and they reach out for support, I hope you will offer them a cup of tea (or a glass of wine?) and a good listen.
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On this site under the "Adoption Perspectives" tab, you will find links to adoption search and support groups.
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SUPPORT OPEN RECORDS NATIONWIDE! Adoptees should have the legal right to their identity information. It is flat out wrong to say that birth mothers do not want the records unsealed. Statistically, only .0007 percent of birth mothers opted out of having their name revealed to the adoptee. And it is wrong for adoptees to have to suffer to keep others, the few, "emotionally comfortable."
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Patricia's writing awards include:
First Place, Poetry, Yosemite Writers Conference, 2006
First Place, Non-Fiction, Yosemite Writers Conference, 2006
People’s Choice Award, Yosemite Writers Conference, 2006
2011 Kay Snow Award, Third Place – Fiction
Her short story “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” was published in Quality Women’s Fiction.
A Life Let Go, A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption published 2015.
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Knocking from the Inside, a book of poems, published 2016.