Any Other Family - Hardcover

Brown, Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059332854X ISBN 13: 9780593328545

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters returns with a striking and intimate new novel about three very different adoptive mothers who face the impossible question: What makes a family?

Though they look like any other family, they aren’t one—not quite. They are three sets of parents who find themselves intertwined after adopting four biological siblings, having committed to keeping the children as connected as possible.

At the heart of the family, the adoptive mothers grapple to define themselves and their new roles. Tabitha, who adopted the twins, crowns herself planner of the group, responsible for endless playdates and holidays, determined to create a perfect happy family. Quiet and steady Ginger, single mother to the eldest daughter, is wary of the way these complicated not-fully-family relationships test her long held boundaries. And Elizabeth, still reeling from rounds of failed IVF, is terrified that her unhappiness after adopting a newborn means she was not meant to be a mother at all.

As they set out on their first family vacation, all three are pushed into uncomfortably close quarters. And when they receive a call from their children’s birth mother announcing she is pregnant again, the delicate bonds the women are struggling to form threaten to collapse as they each must consider how a family is found and formed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eleanor Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Weird Sisters and The Light of Paris, and the editor of the anthology A Paris All Your Own. An adoptive mother herself, Eleanor lives with her family in Colorado. 

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Prologue
 
They look like any other family. A real one: cousins, siblings, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. They look like any other family with a past, with shared stories and traditions and jokes, memories of childhood summers and hundreds of holidays, carrying old wounds and the echoes of kept and broken promises.

But they are not like any other family, not exactly.

Does that mean they are not a family at all? Each of them stumbles over the word occasionally, searching for the right labels to explain their relationships to outsiders, never feeling quite understood, not quite certain themselves of what the right term for this is.
Still, that name, family, is as close as they have found. They are a family, formed by three sets of parents who adopted from the same group of biological siblings.

Once upon a time, there were three children: Phoebe, the eldest at five, and the twins, not-quite-toddlers. When their grandmother, who had been raising them, died, there was no one else to turn to. Their mother, Brianna, had been so young when she had them, was more like a sibling to them than a parent, and was no more prepared to care for them now than she had been when they were born.

As the social workers began casting about for options – fostering? adoption? – little Phoebe took her own destiny in hand and asked to live with Ginger. This was a surprise to everyone, most of all Ginger herself, whose only connection to Phoebe was her volunteer work in Phoebe’s kindergarten class as a reading tutor. But she had fallen for Phoebe in the same way the child had fallen for her, and she was happy to open her home.

Tabitha and Perry, who had married later in life and were hoping to build their family through adoption, were asked if they would care for the twins, busy and curious and energetic, an exhausting joy. They had just completed their home study and were surprised but delighted to have Tate and Taylor come home with them so quickly.
Splitting up siblings who got along so very well and had already lost so very much was generally seen as a less than ideal arrangement, but when Tabitha suggested a new way of thinking of it: the children living in different houses but still raised as siblings, the social worker and the judge, and most importantly, Brianna, embraced the plan, and so they became one family and many families at the same time.

Tabitha has always loved the idea of this magical new thing they were making. It was what she had been dreaming of her entire lonely childhood and beyond: being part of a big, happy family. They all come together to celebrate birthdays with piñatas and cake in the backyard, to share gratitude at Thanksgiving, and to have dinner every Sunday night, including Brianna when she can make it.

Ginger, who came from a complicated family and escaped it as soon as humanly possible, likes this familial closeness rather less, even though she believes firmly, agrees entirely, that keeping the siblings as close as possible was the right thing for the children. She had never thought she would be a mother at all, and it couldn’t have happened any other way. Sometimes Ginger considers the millions of decisions leading her to exactly that place so she could catch Phoebe as she fell from the sky, and marvels at the happenstance that brought her this child.

It is only that, along with motherhood, she has also inherited a complete set of quasi-relatives, after spending her entire adulthood building a life of happy solitude. Sometimes Ginger feels as if she spends all her time going back and forth to Tabitha and Perry’s house (everything happens there, of course). When the parents were first working out the boundaries and rules of this tiny nation they were forging, they had committed to weekly family dinners and holidays together as their baseline. Now it seems to have grown far beyond that, especially since Violet arrived.

Ah, yes, Violet.

They had been this semi-family for four years when Brianna called Tabitha to say she was pregnant again. The children’s biological father had come back into Brianna’s life and she hoped this time, now that they were older, they might stay together, raise this child.

He had managed to stay until Brianna was seven months along and then disappeared, as everyone else had known he would. The parents keep their mouths shut on the topic of Justin. He is, after all, the father of their children, but he is also nobody’s favorite person because he has broken Brianna and the children’s hearts too many times.

So there was Brianna, alone, twenty-four and pregnant again. She cried and told Tabitha she couldn’t do it, couldn’t parent this child, she absolutely couldn’t do it, what was she going to do?

And so came Elizabeth and John. They were young, or relatively so, having met in college, married immediately after, and then spent several painful years trying to have a child. When they adopted Violet, they went from the fog of fertility treatments straight into the fog of parenting a newborn. The adoption happened so quickly, and Violet was a colicky baby, angry and red-faced, for months that felt like years, an endless, stumbling routine of nighttime feedings. The colic has passed, but Elizabeth is still so tired, so overwhelmed, she hardly knows what happened.

All of which is to say that if anyone asks Elizabeth what she feels about their Very Special Family, she might look blank for a moment, as if trying to remember a distant acquaintance, then shrug.
Theirs is a strange way to become a family, each of the mothers has thought at some point, though how is it in any stranger than any other way people create families, based on things no more scientific than the accidents of genetics or a common interest in bowling or opera, or simply rather liking the look of someone on a particular Tuesday night? At least they have a purpose, a reason to stick together, a common cause: the children they love as much as any parent, maybe even more.

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.


1
 
Tabitha
 
Tabitha said she would get the flowers herself, and then she had forgotten.
 
Well, of course she hadn't forgotten. Tabitha does not forget things. She keeps lists and she checks things off those lists and she follows up on things from the lists and at no point does she ever forget anything. But Perry has been on work calls all day, so she has been tending to the children, and now there are no flowers in the guest rooms, which is a small detail, she knows, but all perfect moments are composed of small details, are they not?
 
And she so wants this vacation to be perfect. She wants this to be the moment when their big, busy family truly becomes real, when she and Ginger and Elizabeth bond like sisters, when they create the moments where years from now they can ask, Remember when? and all laugh the way they had the first time it happened, or ask, Remember when? and look at how the children have grown and yearn happily for these days.
 
They do have some of these memories already, but they are never quite how Tabitha wants them to be, and even so, shouldn't there be more? There just never seems to be enough time. Ginger is always leaving early because they have so far to drive and she always has some reason the moms can't do a day out together,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059332854X
• ISBN 13: 9780593328545
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar