Linda’s Book Presentation and Movie Event
You are invited!
Date: Friday, September 13, 2019
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 124 Orange St., Auburn, CA.
First: Linda L Franklin will introduce her new book: I’ll Always Carry You: A Mother’s Story of Adoption Loss, Grief, and Healing, and follow with a reading and signings.
In her powerful true story, Linda reveals her intensely personal experience when 
the ‘50s and early ‘60s culture demanded girls like her redeem their shame by giving away their babies. Finding herself pregnant and abandoned, she retreated to an unwed mothers’ home to give birth. “You’ll never see him again. You’ll forget,” they told her as they took her son away for adoption.
Time passes, Linda marries, has two more sons and becomes a psychological therapist. But when her youngest asks a life-changing question, she realizes no mother forgets her baby. She begins searching. Along the way, the trauma and grief she’s buried explodes. Her body has never forgotten what she tried to erase from her mind. As Linda embarks on her journey to reconnect with lost family, she knows she must have the courage to face her pain in order to heal the broken young woman left behind the wall of shame and secrecy.
Second: After wine and snacks, Linda will show the film: Unlocking the Heart of Adoption by Sheila Ganz.
This film chronicles the filmmaker’s journey as a birthmother, interwoven with diverse personal stories of adoptees, birthparents, and adoptive parents in both same race and transracial adoption. Their stories provide a window into the lifelong process of adoption following the path of relinquishment, adoption, growing up adopted, raising an adopted child, years of silence and shame, and searching for answers to unasked questions.
October 25 – 27: Linda will be speaking on a panel at the Concerned United Birthparents retreat at the Portofino Hotel and Marina in Redondo Beach, CA. She will share her own first/birthmother story and how her search and reunion experience opened a much broader understanding of adoption and its effects on all those touched by it.
“The CUB Retreat is a unique experience for birthparents, adoptees, adoptive parents and others affected by adoption. There are interesting and insightful speakers, both professional and those speaking from the heart about their own experiences with adoption. There will be great entertainment and lots of laughs as well as tears. If you have never met a birthparent, or perhaps never met another birthparent in person, the retreat is a wonderful opportunity to connect in the real world with online friends, and to put a face to words and voices.” https://www.cubirthparents.org/