A Woven Family
Diane and Ken discussing the novel A Hand for Me. Photo by Rick Silber
If you would rather listen to this Blog, click on the link below. It runs 3:04 min.
My two sons and I frequently discuss creative ideas for book and film projects. Several months ago, while visiting my eldest son and getting a hands-on demonstration on how gravity works (to be revealed why in the future), I lamented about not writing faster. Some authors publish books monthly or quarterly. That’s not how I operate. In the middle of our talk, he asked when I was going to write my brother’s story.
In 2018, I published Room for Another. The novel tells of my biological mother’s childhood and how she came to put me up for adoption. Over several months, it floated on and off of Amazon’s #1 Best seller ranking in the adoption category.
My son’s question had me pondering the telling of my brother’s circumstances. “It’s so much different from mine,” I told him.
He smiled at me. “That’s what makes it interesting.”
I slept on it, knowing I’d need to place the development of my other book on hold while I focused on this new one. In the morning, the answer was affirmative, and I would share his story if he agreed. And he did!
A year before my parents adopted me as an infant, they brought my brother home from an orphanage just shy of five years old. We are not blood-related.
To say that our stories differ is an understatement—me born to a single mother; him orphaned at three years old. The only thing they have in common is that the same willing couple chose to take a chance on us.
Truly, we were a woven-together family.
What is a family anyway? So many of them are interlaced in extraordinary ways. My brother and I would never have been siblings if it wasn’t for our adoptive mother’s longing to build one of her own.
The title of the novel is A Hand for Me.
I conducted several interviews and also recalled experiences from living through them. Of course, I can’t include them all; otherwise, the manuscript would be twenty inches thick!
Instead, I selected ones that reveal some of the key struggles and triumphs and the personalities of the two main characters—my brother and our shared mother.
Family can be interwoven to form a beautiful, colorful canopy, but this doesn’t guarantee that the fabric will be free of knots or tears. Imperfection is a part of life.
People often endure sad beginnings, middles, or ends—we all suffer at times. My brother being sent to live in an orphanage at such a tender age, while his older and younger siblings were not, gave him an emotionally rocky start.
He recently gifted me a throw blanket with various sisterly sayings on it. My favorite sentiment, ‘No matter where life takes us, we will always be connected by heart,’ is one I wholeheartedly cherish and believe not only for him and me but also for our beloved, departed adoptive parents.
My hope with A Hand for Me is to remind readers that even though the people we love or who love us can disappoint, we each have a choice of re-weaving who we are as adults.
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Find details about my books at dianedresback.com and my filmmaking at mindclover.com.
