Missing Mothers: A Memoir

Six year old Marthas world is ripped apart when her mother dies during childbirth. As she grows up she never stops missing her mother the mother she strains to remember.Buoyed by marriage to her college sweetheart she hopefully anticipates pregnancy childbirth and motherhood. Instead infertility threatens to rip another hole in her world. She and her husband enter the unfamiliar landscape of interracial and intercultural adoption. They adopt an infant son Lucas from South Korea and a daughter Clara from Guatemala. Martha commits to providing her children with the childhood she didnt have and to mothering them in ways she cant remember being mothered.But as the lives of Lucas and Clara unfurl their individual attitudes toward maternal loss dont conform to Marthas experience or expectations.During journeys to Jeju Island off the coast of South Korea to witness her sons marriage and to Guatemala to vacation and volunteer with her daughters Mayan ancestors Martha uncovers new understandings of the ties which bind and restrain her complicated family