Synopsis (Taken from Amazon)
A gay couple’s quest to adopt their foster kids in the early 2000s becomes a spiral of legal, political, and personal challenges.
In his candid and emotional memoir, Lane Igoudin shows the human side of public adoption as he and his partner Jonathan seek to adopt their foster daughters from the Los Angeles County child welfare system. Desperately wanting to be fathers, they enter into a complicated legal process that soon becomes a tangle of drama-filled birth parent visits and children’s court hearings. Lane and Jon spend years not knowing whether they will be able to officially adopt the girls, or if the county will reunite the sisters with their birth mother, Jenna, a teenager in the state’s custody herself.
The stress of the foster-to-adopt process, compounded with the mounting, nationwide struggle for LGBTQ+ equality, erodes the sense of peace in Lane and Jon’s home. Still, the girls attach themselves deeply to their adoptive parents, while their dads do all they can to give them the best lives possible. Heartwarming moments with the kids and relatable first-time-parent woes become bittersweet as Lane realizes how much he and Jon have built—and how much they could lose. A Family, Maybe is a moving story about dedication, heartache, and love.
Review
A Family, Maybe, is emotionally tumultuous. It is an in-depth look at how fostering to adopt can be rewarding and challenging. The rawness of the ups and downs of raising children you hope to adopt has never been stated more heartbreakingly. As a parent, I identified with their need to protect the children and was devastated that they had no real control before the adoption was finalized (which took much longer than I thought it would).
However, it is more than the story of the adoption but the emotions of it, the good and the bad, intertwined with the struggle of being a gay couple (before gay marriage was legal). I did not realize it was a decade after Canada legalized gay marriage that the states finally did. That was very eye-opening for me as a reader.
If you enjoy raw, real-life stories, this book is great for you.
Get your copy here (affiliate link – thank you for the support).
