Eleanor Brown

Because they are all committed to the children, to letting them be a family as much as they can be. After all, who gets to say what it means to be a family? There are no names for the relationships they have to each other. There is only this broad word they are shaping around themselves: family, even though they aren’t exactly a family; that word isn’t exactly true, isn’t exactly right.

At least not yet.

No one warned her parenthood would feel so much like you were losing something every day

The problem with motherhood, Elizabeth thinks, is that it is like shaving your head. You never know how it will turn out until you do it, and by then it is too fucking late.

There is a strange trick of adoptive motherhood, she has found, a necessary blindness to the bifurcation of your child’s life. If you spend all your time thinking about the life your child might have lived, how things might have been different if they stayed with their birth family, you will rob them of the life they are living, and drive yourself crazy to boot

Each party entered into the arrangement not entirely of their own free will, with differing expectations and no contract on emotions. And like in a long marriage, they are wearing on each other, water on stone, the form they will take
unknown.

Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is

‘[Eleanor Brown] writes relationships within families so well. I adore

e adoptive women; their smart, lively dialogue sparks as the characters try to define the boun