The prize-winning author will read from her memoir of giving up her baby as a teenager and how it affected her life.
By MOLLY MOORHEAD, Times Staff Writer
Published November 18, 2005
ST. LEO - In her memoir about giving birth to a son at 16 and coping with the loss after his adoption, author Karen Salyer McElmurray speaks to you.
You, her reader. And you, herself.
"You say that any story about motherhood should begin with our first definitions of love," she writes defiantly at the start of Chapter 2.
And later, "Love, you tell me, is the only truth."
The direct addresses are clenching grasps peppered throughout Surrendered Child, A Birth Mother's Journey, McElmurray's sometimes agonizing retelling of her childhood.
"I believe it's that birth mothers sort of don't exist in some ways. There's this experience of loss, and you sort of don't talk about it," McElmurray said in an interview. "I wanted to make you be me in some ways."
And, perhaps, she is defending herself for relinquishing her baby, born when she was unprepared for parenthood, fleeing her own parents and experimenting with drugs.
She is challenging any assumptions you might bring about a girl who makes such choices.
For McElmurray, now 49 and a creative writing professor at Georgia College and State University, writing the memoir was a healing process.
She describes the strange, sad home in Kentucky where she grew up: her controlling and unloving mother who was obsessed with cleanliness and her father who provided only minimal escape.
Disconnected from her own body and unable to socialize like a normal young girl, McElmurray would walk home from school and sit confined in the garage of their home, until her mother let her inside to clean her.
When her parents' marriage disintegrated and McElmurray's mother left, she found freedom and a boy named Joe, one year older, whom she would marry. She gave up their baby despite her father's pleading to let him raise the boy.
In a single brief passage, McElmurray attempts to explain why.
Teenage arrogance, she said, and the oddity of her son being raised as her brother. But most loudly, this reason: a refusal to "relegate her son's life to the very past she had just managed to escape."
"I wanted to save him," McElmurray said. "I felt like I was drowning."
The memoir, published in 2004, followed her novel titled Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven about a woman who leaves a child behind to work for the WPA during the Great Depression. She has published essays about her mother and has just completed another fiction work, also about the loss of a child.
And someday, another memoir, this time about meeting her son as a grown man.
"My son isn't the baby I've relinquished," she said. "And now I'm not the 16-year-old girl who did the relinquishing. Somehow the book's going to be about that."
Their reunion, enabled by eerie coincidence, took place at her apartment in Georgia: McElmurray, her husband, her son, Andrew, and his girlfriend. It bore all the expected emotions of tensions, nervousness and even disappointment.
"There's the imagining of what it'll be like and then what it's actually like," she said.
McElmurray has no other children. She has worked her whole life to overcome the heartaches that plague many birth mothers. She still calls herself his birth mother, but she and Andrew are getting to know each other, middle-aged woman and young man.
"I was frozen in time, and only since finding him am I becoming more who I might have been," she said. "Maybe there's a part of me that always will be (that) girl."
IF YOU GO
Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of the prize-winning memoir Surrendered Child, A Birth Mother's Journey, will read from her works at 7 tonight at Saint Leo University in Selby Auditorium. She is a panelist at a University of Tampa conference this weekend on adoption and culture. Her panel, "Creative Writers on Adoption," is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Saturday in the Reeves Theater of the Vaughn Center. For information on the Saint Leo event, call 352 588-8839. For the UT event, call (727) 479-6507 or visit http://utweb.ut.edu/faculty/ehipchen
