In the opening scene of her memoir, “What We Wished For: An Adoption Story,” Lisa Crawford Watson describes one of her adopted teenage daughters flying into a rage, cursing Watson, grabbing a Swiss Army knife and stabbing her mattress over and over again.
“You’re next,” her daughter says to Watson.
For a little over three years, Watson has written weekly features for the Herald about local authors and their books. About two years ago, she decided it was time to get “serious” on recording her experience adopting twin infants. The result is a story about the effects of trauma, family love and broken relationships.
“It is much easier for me to tell other people’s stories,” says Watson, who as a freelance writer on the Monterey Peninsula for more than 30 years has profiled hundreds of notable citizens, sometimes even their dogs. She has written several books, including “Legendary Locals of Carmel-by-the-Sea” and taught classes at Monterey Peninsula College and Cal State Monterey Bay.
Yet this story is different. Despite having all the family support, educational tools and love she thought it would take, the story, as it stands now, isn’t what she wished for.
“We couldn’t have (adopted the twins) if we didn’t believe that our love of our family, the salvation of my family, would bring them forward to a really happy, healthy, productive life,” Watson says, noting the support of her parents and siblings, as well as her partner at the time. “I didn’t think that there wouldn’t be issues along the way … but, I couldn’t have foreseen all there was to come.”
“I’ve written very little about somebody else’s story similar to this,” Watson says.
Watson writes, “This a narrative I felt compelled to write as a way to heal and to connect with those who might find solace in my words.”
About 21 years ago, Watson and her partner adopted a pair of infant twins “born of a homeless hookup,” she writes, “drug-and-alcohol victims way too small for their 11 months who’d been languishing in five different foster homes waiting for someone who cared.” Watson writes of the challenges of not being considered ideal adoptive parents because of being a same-sex couple, of the sense of desperation, yet also fear, in adopting children from a troubled background and a different race. The twins are “Afro-Latina,” Watson says. She is white and lives in Carmel, “one of the whitest communities around.”
Yet, after a week-long visit to the girls’ foster home in Sacramento to measure compatibility, Watson recalls the children reaching out to her and her partner their last morning there, wanting to be picked up. In that moment, Watson said, they knew they needed to take them.
Watson writes they brought them home and were immediately surrounded by close family and friends eager to help out, which reassured them. Watson said she felt at that moment “bringing these babies into this community, that our world of friends and family would support us, and they did hugely.”
And she had experience with twins, because she is one. She often served as a babysitter to her sister’s children before she adopted the twins.
Yet, there were still problems, from addressing some health and development challenges to integrating the children into school and through troubled teenage years that resulted in emotional confrontations and sometimes violence.
But there were also hopeful and tender moments, such as the twins learning to swim and one going on to excel as an equestrian, another making the high school basketball team and, later, the twins caring for Watson’s mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Through it all there was much family support and mental health counseling for all involved.
Yet, things didn’t turn out the way Watson wished. She and her partner would separate when the twins were about 6, with her partner moving out. The two would continue to co-parent. Watson married Philip, a man “who just wanted to make his girls happy,” in 2011.
The twins were troubled teenagers who on more than one occasion trashed their rooms, from breaking furniture to putting dents in the walls. They spit in Watson’s face because they knew it would hurt her. Soon after her daughter threatened to stab her, Watson and her former partner made the decision to send them to residential therapy for several months in Utah.
After they turned 18, the twins moved out. There would be other incidents, other reconciliations, but the book ends with broken relationships.
Watson emphasizes that this is a memoir, a narrative based on her memories. She has changed the names of her daughters and her former partner in the book.
Through it all, Watson says she still loves her adopted children deeply.
“And I still say my children. And I think about them even though they’re adults,” Watson says. “I was grateful to them and respect them for their experience … what they’ve gone through.
“… they have tremendous heart and resilience and courage.”
There will be a book launch celebration from 5-8 p.m. Friday at the Carmel Women’s Club on 9th Avenue. Tickets are $35 and include an autographed book. For more information call (831) 620-1600 or visit ami.carmel.com
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