“The Other Mother”

‘The Other Mother’ by Carol Schaefer is considered a classic in adoption literature. It is a poignant, eye-opening account of a 19 year old unwed motherwho was forced to give up her newborn child regretting it for the rest of her life.One of the reviewers of her autobiographyhas commented that adoption has become a “middle-class disease”and to corroborate, it can be mentioned how the author’s parents’ middle-class values dictated their decision to banish their disgraced teen-aged daughter to a Catholic home for unwed mothers and then insisted that she give up her infant son for adoption. Schaefer numbly allowed her parents and the system to make her decisions for her–only to plunge, immediately after relinquishing her child, into a depression that was to burden her for much of her life.  For years, Carol struggled to forget and live the “normal” life promised, not understanding the consequences of the trauma she’d endured. “Liberated” from motherhood, Schaefer went on to an advertising job in N.Y.C., and a successful marriage and the raising of two sons in San Francisco, but her search for her ‘absent’ first child

overshadowed her life. It was a grief that would not go away, so on her son’s 18th birthday Schaefer began to search for him. This search, as the book recounts, became a spiritual quest to reclaim her own lost self, as she came to understand the emotional and psychological wounds she and other mothers like her endure. Against all odds when she finally managed to find her ‘lost’ son with the help of his unusually empathetic adoptive mother, she realized that in many ways they had never really been apart. The Other Motherthus remains as astonishing and layered revelation of the diverse emotions that unfold during the adoptive process thus laying bare shades of motherhood—both ‘natural’ and ‘adoptive’.