“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Charles Baudelaire
Mary Ellen Gambutti,
Author
I write personal essays and stories to bring you into my world. I invite you to explore my Portfolio.
Adoption and Beyond
Stories...
about my adopted life in an Air Force family, the separations, the moves, the uncertainty, the quest for self, and the discovery of my family of origin.
Themes Explored
* I write about my coming of age as a female adoptee in an Air Force family in the 1950s and 1960s. How Catholicism affected our family dynamic. The Baby Scoop Era, when poor mothers were encouraged to give up their newborns as a betterment to society.
* I write about the loss of identity inherent in adoption, how I became aware of loss at an early age, and how it affected me as a teen and young adult.
* I write about my search and discovery of biological mother and maternal kin in my 40's and embarked again on my search for paternity twenty years later.
* I write about the joy and toil of professional gardening in my 40's and 50's in the Philadelphia area.
* I write about the hemorrhagic stroke that altered my life at age 57, and how I came to terms with rehabilitation and recovery.
* I acknowledge the act and art of Writing as transformative and therapeutic; physically and psychologically.
Empty Lot Tanka
Safety scissors snip seed heads
and grasses brush my legs--
barefoot, shirtless natural child
my first venture into the empty lot
with ribbons in my hair.
Melcmg
New Milford, NJ
Summer, 1955
(5-lined Japanese poem)
