Ambivalent motherhood

Amy Seek was a 22-year-old architecture student thinking about breaking up with her boyfriend when she found out that she was pregnant. God and Jetfire recounts her journey from that moment through the next ten years. She is an exquisite narrator of the story: the difficult decision over whether to have an abortion, release the baby for adoption, or keep the baby; the moment when her boyfriend suggests that they choose to be a family and she refuses; the search for the right adoptive parents; and the years that follow as Seek lives with the consequences of her choice, “the early seed of a lifelong grief.”

Roughly the first half of the book is a story of pregnancy and birth told in extraordinary detail. Seek takes us through excruciating moments when she and her ex-boyfriend decide to pursue an open adoption. With them we read profiles of adoptive parents and many of 111 questions that they put together for prospective parents. My favorite: What do you do with holey socks? We attend birthing classes with them. We are at the birth and spend the next painful days with Seek as she tries to decide whether she can, in fact, sign over her parental rights.

What I learned from all this is the fierceness and tenacity of motherhood. The nine months a child spends growing inside a mother—even if that mother is ambivalent (and I think a lot of mothers are)—changes a woman chemically, emotionally, and physically. That change cannot be undone, and in Seek’s case, the physical reality of her son, the very tangible way that he is a part of her, will not go away. He is with her everywhere she goes, even though, as she says paradoxically, “I would never, ever, ever be my son’s mother.”