May Book of the Month Part 2

Beautiful, touching, a very easy read. Especially after Red Azalea. In fact, I picked it up the day after I finished Red Azalea and then I finished Meeting Sophie that day. Couldn't put it down.

Meeting Sophie is about a single mom, raised in the midwest but living in the 'south'. it's about her decision, as a single woman, to adopt her daughter from China.

The book is honest, real and explores some things, though briefly, about different cultural aspects in the US, differences in adoptive parents, differences in her own family. Things at one time or another EVERYONE can relate to.

The author takes us through her adoption process and the changes in her own family during that time. The demise of her parents health is especially hard to take just as she returns home from China, exhausted, a single mom without a clue about raising a child, alone, and looking like her job is over.

She talks a few times about 'ironies', her daughter learning to talk as her father loses his vocal cords, Sophie learning to walk as her father is confined to a bed. She is quite poignant during those passages and I could understand... it was just a few short weeks ago that we got our LID date, 6 months to the day our little Sophia was born. Life is full of ironies, coincidences, whatever you want to call them.

what's most touching in the book is the final section/chapters dealing with her father's health and eventual death. She touches a nerve for me, a real nerve. She talks about lying by her father's death bed listening to his breath get further and further apart. It reminds her of when Sophie first came home and how she was terrified of anything happening to her. So much so, that when she couldn't hear her make noise she would go to her crib and wake her up to make sure she was still breathing.

E and I reminisced about a time our niece was staying at the house and we watched her that night so her parents could go have a much deserved evening to themselves. I was pregnant at that time and especially sensitive to babies, I was petrified that something would happen to our niece while she was sleeping or if she awoke in a strange setting and got hung up on the play yard. So I laid on the floor, next to her play yard, making sure she slept fine, that she kept breathing and that she was safe. I couldn't leave the room I was too afraid of anything happening to her. So had a blast from the past when I read that section of the book, reminded me of watching over little N