For much of Janet Sherlund's young life, she felt helpless. She thought it possible to discover who she really was or find a way to fill the big, black hole at her core. She believed finding her birth mother would heal the deep loss and grief, but with absolutely no information, and before the era of DNA testing, she was helpless to do so and thought her only choice was to live with the pain.
The title of Janet's book, Abandoned at Birth, Searching for the Arms That Once Held Me, sent shivers up my spine as I knew many who had lived in that pain.
If you are adopted or know someone who is, this interview could change the way you look at adoption. We adopted our son when he was three days old and nothing has impacted me more than this interview.
No matter how much you love your adopted child or have been loved as an adoptee, this interview will reveal your emotions at the core and answer those deep questions you may have. It is an unflinching examination of the grief and trauma caused by this primal separation and the dogged determination it takes to face the forces of opposition—both internal and external—to finally achieve answers.
It is stunning to realize that only ten states make birth records available to American-born adoptees and their biological parents. This presents a painful obstacle to discovering their origins and ending the agonizing hunger to know their identity.
Janet Sherlund poignantly captures this journey in her elegant and heart-wrenching memoir, ABANDONED AT BIRTH: Searching for the Arms That Once Held Me. Sherlund paints a vivid portrait of the detachment and longing of an adopted child and the lifelong quest to find her biological mother.
ABANDONED AT BIRTH illuminates the darker side of adoption, and what it takes to heal. “I hope it starts conversations about the rights of those given away, loss and grief in adoption, the biology of belonging and identity, and why love is not always enough to extinguish the pain,” Sherlund says. Like many adoptees of her generation, Sherlund was the offspring of teenage parents. Her mother was forced to have her baby in secret. Sherlund would come to learn that her mother was unusual for her time. Not only did she not tell the father she was pregnant, she also wanted nothing to do with her baby and never even looked at her newborn.
When Sherlund began her search, all she had to go on was a false narrative written about her biological parents by the adoption agency. The twists and turns, setbacks and disappointments, and surprising familial connections finally achieved make ABANDONED AT BIRTH a page-turner of a memoir.
Janet served on nonprofit boards in education, health, and the cultural arts before writing her memoir, Abandoned at Birth. Her single most significant life event was being given up for adoption at birth. Being adopted undermined her sense of trust and personal value and impacted every decision she made. It also led to a lifelong quest to find her biological mother, with the hope of finally feeling a tether to this world, a sense of belonging, and ultimately, herself. Her memoir fulfills a lifelong dream of raising awareness about loss and grief in adoption, and why it takes more than love to survive that trauma. A graduate of Colgate University, Sherlund lives on the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts.
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