the blue year

Why be happy when you could be normal?

January 16, 2019

In thinking of my own situation around adoption, I find myself attracted to other books around similar subjects.

Named after a phrase her adoptive mother, a Pentacostal, said to her, British writer Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf, 2011) attempts to come to terms with the brutal way she was treated by her parents, including being shunned for her sexuality, diminished for being adopted, having her books burned, and regularly being locked out of the house. She writes of working to come to terms with her parents, as well as her birth mother, once she is finally able to begin the emotionally and bureaucratically difficult process of seeking her out. She writes of her adoptive mother’s faith warped into madness, and the abilities she developed early on to protect herself, from secretly reading books from the library, to her first romantic stirrings. How does one learn to develop after such deep betrayals from not only one mother, but seemingly two? The first betrayal is the hardest to fathom, and the most difficult to transcend, especially from that person to whom our first bonds are forged.