Take Second-Chance Mother Narrated By Denise Roessle Listed As Script

eyes were filling and my throat choked up by the second page of Denise Roesles memoir, SecondChance Mother, I hung on every word of this extraordinary account of the experience of a birth mother as she reunites with her sonyears after relinquishing him for adoption.
Nothing about their developing relationship was simple, Referring to her emotional state before the call that opened a portal into another level of existence she says, “I might as well have been dead, ” She builds on that base as she interweaves accounts of coming to understand and reconcile with her own mother and her struggle to understand and accept a son who was less than a dreamcometrue.


While this volume is generally touted as a mothers reunion experience with a child, it is at least equally as much the story of coming to terms with her own mothers emotional distance and how that has affected her.
In a very real sense it is a coming of age memoir as Roesle belatedly learns to recognize and work with emotions she has frozen out since before her child was born and she reunites with feelings and emotions locked deeply within her since before the birth of her son.
She recounts her journey of selfdiscovery and transformation simply in freshly candid terms that build bridges straight from her heart to the readers,

The story has value far beyond the adoption community, The issues of physical and emotional abandonment Roesle wrestles with will be thoughtprovoking for any readers who have longed for deeper, more supportive relationships from parents and others.
Her experience working through the tendency to avoid confrontation, live a chameleonlike existence and generally focus on pleasing others at personal expense can provide both inspiration and roadmap for anyone in similar situations.


I applaud her frankness and thank her for her willingness to lay her soul bare to give hope to others who may follow in her path.



This review was originally published at StoryCircleBooks
This is an amazing true story of love, loss and second chances, Those of us born at a certain time in history will identify with the coercion Denise faced to give up her baby son when she was nineteen years old and unmarried.
She mourned that decision and, in her forties, registered with an adoption search group to find her lost son, What she learned upon finding him was every birth mother's worst fear, . . Written with raw emotion and unimaginable honesty, Denise Roessle's firsthand account of what it's like to become acquainted with the child you never knew is riveting, This is a good book to read if you are interested in learning about reuniting with a birthparent or birthchild, It is a stark reminder that reuniting may or may not be worth it, All the years of dreaming might not measure up to reality, It is only one person's perspective and there are many perspectives out there, It was an interesting process, this author's later years in life, I am glad I read this book, . . This sounds like ath grade book report, . . Memoir. Very well written. A heartwrenching tale of lives in turmoil, A true story about what happens when a birth mother reunites with the son she gave up for adoptionyears before, Sometimes it's not at all like those Lifetime movies, It was wellwritten and hard to put down, This book made me think about all the babies that are not wanted, I gave this four because this memoir is brutally honest about her feelings, She details her highs and lows and the reactions, whether considered right or wrong, Though at times, the feelings that are evoked from the reader can be anger, the book is a heart wrenching read concerning birth mothers' feelings of loss, recovery and disillusionment.


Heartwrenching story. Glad I read it. It could use some editing, however, Sometimes hard to tell the dialogue and passages from letters, etc, from the narrative. When Denise Roessle became a mother at, her longheld dream came true, She felt as if she wereagain, the age at which she got pregnant out of wedlock and relinquished her newborn son for adoption, Suddenly, he was back this stranger she had given birth to and he wasnt just searching for his roots, Joshua was looking for a mom, Eager to embrace the second chance she had been granted, Denise leapt wholeheartedly into the role,

“Its a BIG boy,” she announced to her family and friends, setting free her twentysixyear secret, But Joshua was not a boy, He was a grown man, with a history that fell far short of what she had envisioned for him when shed been assured he would be “better off” without her.
His adoptive parents had essentially given up on him at age thirteen, sending him away with only an eighthgrade education, He drifted through a series of institutions and group homes, and ultimately onto the New York City streets, where he fell into drugs and crime, When an early marriage failed, he and his young wife surrendered an infant and toddler to adoption, By the time Denise and her son reunited, he was in his second marriage to a teenaged runaway who was six months pregnant with their first child.
Despite her disappointment and his obvious problems, Denise was determined to restore their severed bond and give him the unconditional love that had been lacking in her own childhood.


At the same time, she struggled with her parents adverse reaction to her reunion and their refusal to acknowledge their grandsons existence, The shameful event that they had worked so vigorously to bury was back to haunt them, They could not accept their daughters happiness at having found her lost child,

Still reeling in the overwhelming mix of joy and grief, gratitude and guilt triggered by reunion with her son, Denise received a letter from an aunt she never knew existed.
Aunt Mabel revealed some startling information about Denises mother, who had claimed to be an only child raised by a kindly couple after both her parents passed away.
In truth, she was one of nine siblings tossed to the winds by their mother after the death of their father in, As she got to know her newfound aunts, uncles and cousins, Denise became obsessed with understanding how her grandmother could desert her children and how her mother, who so clearly bore the scars of abandonment, could then force her own daughter to give up a child.


A year

into their reunion, after Joshs wife left him with their tenmonthold daughter, the rage that he had initially denied surfaced, Denise went from feeling like a new mom to the frustrated parent of an outofcontrol teenager, In the face of his angry outbursts and threats to cut her off, she remained intent on “fixing” him, believing that, in time, she could heal his wounds.
Once more, she put her own pain aside and stood by him as he married twice more and fathered another child,

Only when Josh and Denise reached an impasse in year five, did she recognize how emotionally shutdown she had been since relinquishing her son and how she had let her fear of losing him again hold her hostage.
In the silence of their estrangement, she began the hard work that ultimately allowed her to resolve her own issues, reclaim the young woman she had left behind after surrendering what turned out to be her only child, and make peace with the past.
She found acceptance and forgiveness for her mother, her son, and ultimately herself, .