Susanne Antonetta's "Make Me a Mother," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Make Me a Mother: A Memoir by Susanne Antonetta.

The entry begins:

Make Me a Mother is the story of my adoption of, and life with, my son Jin, who came to me from South Korea. Always funny, though sometimes just a little harrowing (hello, age thirteen! It inaugurated a period of a year and a half that Jin’s father and I still refer to as the Dark Ages), my book takes readers from Jin’s arrival at a few months of age to our trip back to Korea to visit the dozens of cribs of babies—and too few exhausted caretakers--at the orphanage where he once lived.

We first met our Jin at the South Satellite of SeaTac Airport in Seattle, “meeting cute” with our baby under the harsh lights outside of Customs. I was so nervous I raced through the airport security gate, all but tackled by the guards. My husband Bruce and I learned to stay up strolling him through our house all night, and later, how to connect with our son’s Korean culture. We joined a Korean church where we had barely a word in common with much of the congregation, but which we attended for years and with great love on all sides. There we had the signal joy of celebrating Thanksgiving with a feast of Korean meats and vegetables—bulgogi, kimchee, rice in nori—followed by a flock of roasted American-style turkeys.

In the end, through learning to be a mother I learned to be a daughter—to forgive and care for my own aging parents, to overcome my history as a high school dropout and drug user to become a mother. I learned how, time and time again, all families have to learn to adopt one another.

Casting? My tall, dimpled and adorable son is the easy choice. He’s a dead ringer for...[read on]

Visit Susanne Antonetta's website.

My Book, The Movie: Make Me a Mother.

--Marshal Zeringue