Raw and revealing, Amy Seek’s unflinching memoir, God and Jetfire: Confessions of a Birth Mother, opens up the world of adoption with a candor that both challenges and comforts all players in this most fraught of family dramas.
Pregnant at 22, with no plans for a child, or really many plans at all, Seek and her Norwegian ex-boyfriend Jevn decided to place their baby for adoption. Seek is intensely self-reflective as she tells the nuanced story of finding the right family to parent her son, and navigating a whole new family structure through open adoption.
As an adoptive mother myself, I was apprehensive picking up this book. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how birthparents might perceive their child’s adoptive parents. What Seek does so beautifully, though, is to show the depth of feeling on both sides, the complexity of the choices involved, and how all parties can live joyfully (if not easily) with the decisions they’ve made.
Seek never resorts to cliché, instead mining her own experience deeply and specifically, to illuminate the imperfect choices we all make, and the incredible things that can be built from them.
