"Meant to Be" in Adoption
The novel Mothers of Fate debuts this month from author Lynne Hugo, a new-to-me author. It examines, from multiple viewpoints, the role of fate in the ways that parents (mothers, specifically) and children come together. Is adoption “meant to be”?
Novelist Lynne Hugo was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other honors, and has written a dozen or so previous novels. She told Bold Journey, “I write realistic fiction portraying the struggles, failures, humor, and hope of close relationships in today’s complex world.”
Mothers of Fate, she continued, “has to do with the complexities of adoption as experienced by an adoptee, a birth mother and adoptive parents.” She told Shoutout Ohio that “in each of my novels one or more of the characters is struggling with some aspect of a contemporary social issue”—such as trophy hunting, immigration, animal welfare, and with her latest book, adoption.
When her publicity team reached out, I was intrigued, especially once I discovered that Lynne Hugo is an adoptive parent. Could she adequately explore the complexities of adoption from various viewpoints?
I read to find out. I needed to know more, so I invited Lynne Hugo to interview here.
Qs: The Adoption Constellation in Mothers of Fate
What is your connection to adoption?
Lynne Hugo: My immediate connection is that I am an adoptive mother in a closed adoption through a social service agency in Chicago. At the time, that was the way a legal adoption was possible through an agency.
Why was it a closed adoption? Please say more.
Lynne Hugo: At the time of our adoption, we were not even aware of the concept of open adoption, nor was it offered by the agency. My understanding is that open adoptions began being offered generally in the early 1990s. Our adoption preceded that by over a decade. Another question entirely is how I would have felt—I was very young at the time. I suspect I would have found the idea of a birth mother actively involved rather threatening, although it would have depended on the common practice of the time and how it was presented, as well as on the level of involvement the birth mother would have desired and expected. I think I would have needed help and support to understand the dynamics involved and to work with them in a mature fashion.
Your characters are birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents (some holding multiple positions), and you yourself are an adoptive parent. How did you research these experiences that were different from your own lived experience? I think you did a good job capturing the complexities within adoption, rather than relying on worn-out assumptions about it.
Lynne Hugo: Thank you! I worked on capturing the complexities as opposed to falling back on the tropes people might expect. For many years, I have had a dual track career as a novelist and a licensed psychotherapist—as well as being a wife and active mother of two (I also have a birth child). For quite a while I served as the Clinical Director of a county treatment center for troubled teenagers and their families. In that capacity, I came into contact with a number of adoptees and their families, which gave me experience with a variety of issues—some of which popped up repeatedly—expressed by adoptees, and the frustration and bewilderment of their adoptive parents when their efforts to help were fruitless. Again, generally these were closed adoptions. The kids often struggled with idealized fantasies about their families of origin, as well as anger, loss, and low self-esteem.
Of course I did some reading about the various psychological issues surrounding adoption, but the honest answer is that I drew most of my understanding from my experience—but just to underscore: although I’ve drawn here and there on various feelings I remember having, the novel is not based on my son’s story, nor on that of any patient I’ve ever had. The latter would be unethical and not something I’d do. That’s not to say I don’t learn about human dynamics and behaviors from being a therapist. I surely do.
Did you experience any challenges raising a child by biology along with a child by adoption?
Lynne Hugo: Yes, there were definitely challenges raising an adopted child who was followed by a birth child. My adopted child really struggled with feeling different and was constantly looking to confirm how different they were. In my clinical experience, this is a common feeling for adopted children with birth siblings and it can be painful and difficult for them—it really requires a lot of empathy to handle well. Having a birth sibling gave rise to emotional pain for my adopted child, who became very angry at being “unwanted” by his birth mother, and just “thrown away,” as they witnessed the opposite with their sibling.
It makes sense that you understood the complexities of adoption by being a therapist who worked with adoptees and their families. In addition, are there any adoption content creators you connect with or learn from?
No, I can’t honestly say there are. I wish I’d there had been content creators when I was a very young adoptive mother; there was no internet then.
Qs: On Destiny, Fate, and Infertility
From the very title, and throughout the novel, you address the question of Fate, of “meant to be,” which is a trope often wrapped around adoption. Tell us where you started with this, where you ended up, and your journey through exploring destiny vs choice.
Lynne Hugo: That really began with [main character] Deana’s conviction—that we see is less explicitly and more ambivalently shared by Tony—that he was her “destiny,” and that their being together was determined by “fate,” in spite of the fact that he was married with children. It’s clear that even thirty years later, she’s transferred this need to believe that the relationship and the child that came from it were “meant to be,” and she has to find her son in order to find meaning and to understand her destiny. Another interpretation of her life story, and one offered regularly by the attorney Monica’s wife, Angela, in particular, is that beyond young childhood, our choices control whatever happens to us.
When I was much younger, I think I believed in destiny—In my experience, many young people do, especially when finding a life partner. “We were meant to be,” is something I’ve heard a lot when couples are convinced they’ve found their “one and only.” Now I’m much more inclined to think our lives are a result of the choices we make and explain to ourselves as inevitable, when choosing differently would be difficult but not impossible.
I’m certainly aware, too, and hope I represented it well: many adoptive parents in both open and closed adoptions feel or believe the infant placed with them is “meant to be theirs,” that being parents to a particular child is both their and the child’s destiny. I suspect this may or may not be verbalized.
You captured the complexities and ambivalence around adopting after infertility. How did you come to understand all this?
Lynne Hugo: I did experience infertility, so I do understand the emotional experience, although it was quite different for me from what was depicted in the novel. I have worked with women struggling with infertility in my practice, which has helped me to grasp the different ways women, in particular, deal with what can be an enormously painful and disappointing experience.
It’s still interesting to me that before we were married, my husband and I had discussed that we’d like to adopt a “difficult to place” child (a term used at the time) because we wanted our children to grow up in a racially diverse home. Then, when we did experience infertility and decide to proceed, after being approved, we were given the choice to have our names on the waiting list for a “difficult to place” (racially diverse) child. I think the diversity made it harder for our adopted child to adapt to a birth sibling, however, and probably increased their sense of being different, no matter how we affirmed their identity and family belonging. I believe in the value of racially diverse families. They weren’t common at all at the time, which probably made it more difficult for our child.
Qs: Adoption's Core Issues and Parent-Adoptee Estrangement
The novel addresses the 7 core issues of adoption for adoptees, as described by Sharon Roszia and Deborah Silverstein: loss, rejection, shame/guilt/grief, identity, intimacy, and control. How deliberate were you with covering all of these? Did you start out knowing them and aiming for the targets? Or did it happen as the characters revealed themselves to you?
Lynne Hugo: That happened organically in the psychological evolution of the characters. I always aim to write realistic fiction that reveals a genuine arc of change—no red-bow tied endings from me, but still ones that give hope.
I believe that a lot of older parents now have adult children from closed adoptions and there are a lot of closed adoption adult adoptees who now struggle with the issues surrounding whether to seek out birth parents—and doubtless some for birth mothers who lost a child to the state, or who may have never shared with her later family that she relinquished a child thirty or forty years ago. I wanted to write a story that would resonate with some of those specific issues, too, as well as core issues.
Mother of Fate includes a phenomenon that is currently hot in adoptee spaces: adoptees estranging from their adoptive parents. Did you see this often in your practice?
Lynne Hugo: I did see adoptee estrangement fairly often when I was the clinical director of an agency for troubled and runaway youth. While I wouldn’t say that adoptees were disportionately represented among our clients and their families, there were a significant number and definitely, when we saw them, adoption was very much a presenting issue. This is only a guess, but I wonder if the now common phenomenon of finding birth families may have given more and more adoptees the sense of their adoptive families being optional after a certain point in their lives and that there may be something better out there that lacks whatever baggage their adoptive family has.
I’d like to suggest here that there are many, many adults among us who were adopted as infants or children in closed adoptions—the standard before the early nineties. Their issues may be entirely different than those of adoptees raised later, in open adoptions [link added]. We’re talking about people now in, say, their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. They may even be providing eldercare for their adoptive parents. Of course some may be estranged from their adoptive parents, but perhaps it’s no more likely than birth children at this point in their lives. Their adoption-related feelings may be different and those of the people who gave birth to them are likely different, too.
Verdict on Mothers of Fate and Adoption's Complexity?
Lynn Hugo is a gifted writer; she knows how to keep the pages turning. I started reading with the intention to stop if the story relied too heavily on stereotypes or if it resorted to simplification of adoption experiences. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Lynn Hugo, an adoptive mom, somehow captured what I, also an adoptive mom, have come to understand about the complexities of adoption. I was very surprised that she has not learned from the myriad adoptees currently educating on this, and not surprised at all to find out that Lynn Hugo has experience as a psychotherapist who worked with many adoptees and their families.
I recommend Mothers of Fate and am include it in my AdoptLit positive reviews. If you decide to read it, please come back here and share your thoughts.
About Lynne Hugo, author of Mothers of Fate
Lynne Hugo is a prolific author based in Ohio. She is the recipient of multiple fellowships, including from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Kentucky Foundation for Women, and repeat grants from the Ohio Arts Council. Her 2005 memoir, Where The Trail Grows Faint: A Year In the Life of a Therapy Dog Team won the Riverteen Literary Nonfiction Book Prize; she also received the Independent Publishers Silver Medal for Best North-East Fiction in 2015. Hugo’s novel Swimming Lessons was produced by Hearst Entertainment as a Lifetime Original Movie of the Month. Hugo has also used her writing prowess to teach creative writing to hundreds of schoolchildren through the Ohio Art Council’s Arts in Education program. She holds both a Bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College and a Master’s degree from Miami University.
More on "Meant to Be" in Adoption
- Adoptees’ perspectives: Chapter 7 in Adoption Unfiltered
- Birth/first parents’ perspectives: Chapter 9 in Adoption Unfiltered
- Adoptive parents’ perspectives: Chapter 18 of Adoption Unfiltered
- Adoption: The Long View episode 305 with adoptee/adoptive mom Joanna Ivey
More Lynne Hugo
- Lynne Hugo’s website
- @lynnehugoauthor on Instagram
- Lynne Hugo on Facebook
- Mothers of Fate on Amazon
