Had an interesting conversation with a friend last week.

Like me, she is an adoptive mom.

Her kids know they are adopted, as does my son.  It’s not a big deal in our respective households.  We’ve always been open.

During our chat, she was venting about her kids.  It was one of those days.  We all have them.

Part of what came up was how adoption is a “leap of faith.”  Often, depending on the circumstances, you have little, if any, medical information, about the birth parents.  In our case, for example, we don’t know who the birth father is.   We decided we could live with that.

When kids are adopted from an orphanage, you typically know nothing of the birth parents. Ours was a domestic adoption, but hers was foreign.

On one hand, you could say that having the medical information would be helpful so perhaps you can anticipate what you might be dealing with.  But, really, as a parent, you can never predict the health of your child.  Best you can do is take care of them, and yourself.

I’ve never dwelled one way or the other re: the fact that Seth is adopted.  It’s a non-issue for us.  I’ve never thought about who he is like or does or doesn’t look like.  I take pleasure in him…his infectious laugh…..huge empathy….curiosity about the world…………love of animals….etc.  You could say nature vs. nurture.

Who knows?!

My friend, on the other hand, told me how she has said to her kids…”You have daddy’s eyes”….and things of the like.  She felt it was endearing, and to her, made less of their being adopted because it came naturally to her to say that.  She loves her kids and also doesn’t think of them as being adopted, and she truly sees similarities.

Part of me wondered…did she have need to say that?

Was it important to her or her child that they bore some biological similarity?

I laugh if strangers ever say Seth looks like Marc or I because it is so not important to us.  He’s himself.

I wonder how other parents see their kids.  Do they delight if they feel they’ve created a mini me?  Does  that make them love them even more?  I presume not.  I suppose that perhaps they find it fun to see if their child is taking on resemblances, traits, interests, etc.  Perhaps it’s a way to relive their own childhood to some extent?

I had a friend who ultimately adopted after we did.  She experienced fertility challenges, with her husband, for years, but blatantly would proclaim how she wanted a “mini him.”  With each failed IVF attempt, that continued to be her mantra.  Until the day she met Seth.   Then, she came to realize firsthand that adoption can be wonderful, and you get the child you are meant to raise (if you believe that….I do).  And, she and her husband never looked back, as they adopted their daughter.  She is not a mini me of either of them, and it doesn’t matter.  She’s their love. And, they couldn’t love her more.

Robin Gorman Newman

Founder, MotherhoodLater.com

I feel like a contestant in The Dating Game television show… only I’m participating on behalf of my father. And, it’s not for a love match, but rather a live-in aide… two to be exact.

My mom passed away over ten years ago, and five years after that, we brought in a live-in aide for my father, though she’d really been largely more of a companion. It worked fine for some time, but in recent years, their chemistry has become challenging. Of late, I’ve grown certain that she and my father aren’t compatible long-term. He recently suffered two strokes and now that his needs are more acute, I’m working on bringing in two live-in aides to take shifts who I have greater confidence in in terms of managing my dad’s daily care.

It’s not easy witnessing the deterioration of a beloved parent. My dad was always so vibrant and social, and now, due to aphasia from the stroke, his communication ability is severely compromised and he has weakness on his right side. For the first time in many years, he looks like an old man. G-d bless him… he’s 93… and though he doesn’t look his age, he does look like he has aged. A stroke would knock the socks off anyone, and his recovery is a challenging one. Though he can be stubborn, for the most part he’s a trooper, plodding along with the OT, Speech and Physical Therapy. It’s not easy. There has been improvement, but he’s got a long way to go, and we don’t know how far he’ll get.

His situation brings to mind an endeavor I’m immensely proud to be a part of. I am Associate Producer of Motherhood Out Loud, a play by some of America’s most celebrated writers that had a successful Off-Broadway run recently at Primary Stages in NYC and is now poised to tour worldwide. Motherhood Out Loud shatters traditional notions about parenthood, unveils its inherent comedy and celebrates the deeply personal truths that span and unite generations. One of the pieces by David Cale entitled “Elizabeth,” touched me to the core from the first time I read the script… and even more so when it came to life on stage so poignantly by actor James Lecesne, who speaks the words of both the mother and son in the piece. I’d like to take the opportunity to share a portion of it with you, with the hope that if you find yourself parenting an elderly parent, you will know you’re not alone…

Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post

The show already had Marco Pennette’s brilliant (and hilarious) monologue about gay couple using a surrogate mother to have a child, so, for variety, so to speak, my monologue needed to be from the perspective of a straight man, and, for what she felt would be good for the overall script of Motherhood, Janice floated the idea out of the subject being the man’s aging mother who is subtly beginning to lose her faculties.

I was immediately taken with the idea of the show and being part of a multi-writer collaboration, and I was very intrigued by the subject that Janice had suggested.

Most of the monologues I write I feel are like portraits of people. Often times I try to portray a real person who has moved me in some way, though often giving them a fictionalized life. I lost my own mother when I was sixteen, so I don’t have experience of her as an older person, though I could imagine. So I zeroed in on my dear friend Billy’s mother, who I’d always found captivating, and who I’d always been in uncanny agreement with when it came to assessing contestants and their performances on ‘American Idol’ and ‘Dancing with the Stars’.

I’d written a solo show about a NYC Central Park Carriage driver and Billy’s mother was in town from upstate New York where she lives. She wanted to take a carriage ride around the Park, and Billy called and asked me if I’d like to join them. “You could do research for your carriage driver show and observe Mom for the Motherhood show at the same time!”

In the cab headed uptown to Central Park, Billy and I had the most beautiful moment with his mother.

Very quietly she lamented to us that when she was a young girl everyone called her by her birth name, Elizabeth, but since she’d become an adult people had just referred to her as Betty.

“I wish people would call me Elizabeth again”, she said, “Betty’s just so blah.”

It was so human and intimate and affecting.

This is how ‘Elizabeth’, my contribution to Motherhood Out Loud, began.

I wrote it, edited it, and emailed it to the editor of the Modern Love column. After a day or two had gone by, I panicked that the email hadn’t gone through and sent another (pathetic) one, asking if he had received it. And he wrote back something along the lines of, “Yes, and I’ll be in touch shortly . . .”

He did get in touch. He had some edits, I did some rewriting, and the essay appeared in the paper a few weeks later. It was subsequently included in a book anthology of Modern Love columns.

Cut to last winter when I get a phone call out of the blue from someone who identifies herself as Joan Stein and asks me if I remember her. How could I forget Joan Stein? Her daughter went to preschool with my son!

We chatted for a while and at some point during the course of our conversation, it dawned on me that maybe this wasn’t the Joan Stein I thought it was. And that’s when I remembered that another Joan Stein had worked with my husband on a television pilot many years ago and was a well known theatrical producer. (I had never before realized that I knew two Joan Steins.)

Eventually I recovered from my confusion enough to pay attention to what Joan was saying. She explained that she and Susan Rose (who joined her on the phone call) had pulled together an impressive and diverse collection of playwrights to contribute different pieces to a play about motherhood. It had already premiered on the east coast, but now they were heading to the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles and were thinking they’d like to include a monologue about the mother of a teenager with autism.

Susan had picked up a copy of the Modern Love book somewhere and come across my essay in it. She had mentioned it to Joan, who said, “I know Claire! I worked with her husband!” Happy coincidence.

So then, on the phone, they asked me: had I ever written for the theater?

Nope, never.

Fortunately, they were still willing to give me a shot at it.

I was unbelievably lucky: I got a crash course in theater 101 from two masters. My first attempt at the monologue was stiff and formal. Joan and Susan patiently explained to me that it needed to be rougher, more immediate, more personal, more direct. I took their notes and tried again.

More notes, more drafts, a few meetings . . . and, to my great relief and delight, “Michael’s Date” became a part of the exciting and wonderful collaboration that is Motherhood Out Loud.

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