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Coming from a family were relatives took in family members and cared for them when their birth parents could not it angered me immensely how the author tried to justify her actions and her upbringing as reasons for making the choices she did in adopting as a single parent. Coming from a family wherein three out of my living remaining siblings still alive I disagree immensely that the birth parent of my siblings and their other siblings should be cut off. They should not. And can not. I accept that my siblings have other siblings and I am glad they do!

The author seems to judge her children’s relatives based off of several meetings with her first child’s birth parent and then making the irrational decision-in my eyes-to cut her son off from his siblings just because she did not like several of the adults and how they treated her.

I felt she was rude and only adopted to prove a point to the people around her and not because she actually wanted to do it not of selfish reasons.
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Kaianna.Isaure | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Mar 21, 2024 |
This was a great telling of one woman's finding of herself, and her quest to adopt. She didn't sugar coat all of the challenges she faces. Some readers might not enjoy it because it is told in first person. I enjoyed this mother's challenges and her effort to stay true to her child's ethnicity while building his tolerance of other people. I enjoyed her exploration of networks of support that are not traditional as well as traditional ones.
 
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lilwolfmisty | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Aug 13, 2020 |
between .5 and 1 star. man, i really wanted to like this. first, i should say that i thought it was going to be more about the state of motherhood and racist assumptions about black motherhood in america, but it was much more a personal memoir. so i was disappointed about that and the focus the book took in general. i do, though, think what she wants to do is important - to help single black women see their way to becoming mothers, if that's what they want to do, in a country that doesn't make it easy for them. after listening to this book, though, i'm pretty unclear how this does that. except just by showing an example of one woman who did it, i guess.

but what started, for me, as discomfort with some of her language and attitudes became more startling and hard to take as the book went on. at first, i wasn't sure i should be uncomfortable with her description of adopting her son as saving him; i hate when white people use that language when they adopt kids of color, but maybe it's different when a black woman is adopting a black baby. and i still think it might be, especially as her point is true - that black boys in particular are demonized (and more) in our society, and could use some extra care. still, she didn't become a parent to save a child, she became a parent because she wanted to be a mother. this language and distinction always bothers me.

i was also immediately uncomfortable with the fact that she changed her new son's name. he was only 6 months old, but that still seemed like a shocking decision to me. i know that maybe it's easy for me to think/say that, since we adopted our son at birth, and didn't have to worry about this sort of decision, but it seems so counter to everything i know (and everything she was saying) to change his name, or not to keep his name as a middle name or at least some kind of tribute to where he came from and his birth family.

speaking of his birth family, her decision to abruptly close the adoption, simply because she didn't really like the family she met and there were potentially some issues with his birthmom, without even verifying that those issues may arise, struck me as almost cruel. there were so many members of that family that she could have kept in contact with if the birthmom's unpredictability really was too much for her; to choose to just cut everyone off, after all the information she learned about the value of open connection with birth families, was so sad to me. (i'm totally biased. i'm a virtual evangelist for open adoption and wish that we and our son had a even third as many of the family members she chose to reject.) her reasoning for closing this family off seemed prejudiced and frankly undercut much of what she said she was trying to say in this book. "I bought into suggestions from the ... training that a child must know his roots, and that foster parents should make every effort to keep those family ties alive. After I met August, however, I could no longer feign ease in linking hands with those whose lifestyle and values were so different from mine. It wasn't August's siblings' fault that their zip code denoted drugs, food deserts, storefront churches, gangs, or jail. While there were hard working families in those neighborhoods, the lure of the streets proved irresistible for too many children and young adults. My family had already witnessed my parents fall through that rabbit hole, and there was no reason to intentionally put August in the crosshairs of a storm he might drown in. A closed adoption meant that August would be raised with no contact with his siblings or other biological relatives. I didn't want him to feel better than his brothers and sister because of the opportunities he would have, or less than because they had each other and he was alone. There was too much at stake, and one unsupervised weekend could change the course of his life. I couldn't have that. August was going places. He would be free to step into his new identity and engage the world unencumbered by the circumstances of his birth." i don't even know what to say to this except all the stereotypes she wants to avoid for her son she is willing to put on her son's siblings. she's (legitimately) mad that people assume black babies up for adoption are crack babies, but she also assumes that her son's black siblings are heading for a life of drugs or poverty or crime etc. it's her responsibility as his mother to make sure, then, that he doesn't feel better than people for having better opportunities; she makes sure, then, that she mitigates his feelings at being the only child (initially) who isn't kept with some of the sibling group; she doesn't send him on an unsupervised weekend visit if it's potentially not safe. cutting his biological people off from him instead of facing those things is not just a cop-out, but denying her son the very knowledge of people who love him. i'm a pretty shitty mother on so many levels, but this seems awfully basic to me.

i was pretty much done with this by around halfway through or so, but i really had it when the second child came and was adopted at 10 months old: "Anaya was beautiful and the perfect addition to our family. Now she needed a new name to signify her new start." this woman (legitimately) writes about the erasure of the black experience, especially that of black women. then she literally erases this black girl child's past, and her name, and acts like this is a positive thing because she's the one who is doing it.

"The secular truth was that God helped those who helped themselves."

very, very little about this book worked for me. i am willing to concede that i am not the audience for this. i thought it was going to be about how race and gender are reflected in mothering stereotypes or in society or something. it's not a book for me, it's a book for single black women thinking of becoming mothers. so maybe for that audience it'd land better. i'm wiling to give an extra half a star in case that's true and because i'm aware that i'm a white woman "judging" a black woman's book about white society judging black women as mothers. i know that's not a good look, either.
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overlycriticalelisa | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Jul 21, 2020 |

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