Just Call Her Jane: AN ADOPTION REUNION From bucolic England to a winery in Tuscany: The account of a search and discovery.

By Catriona Murray

In Florence, Italy, near where I live, there is a convent from Renaissance times called Ospedale degli Innocenti, Hospital of the Innocents. At the end of a porch, a revolving stone wheel received babies who were unwanted or who couldn't be adequately cared for. Placed anonymously on the stone, the infant, with a turn of the wheel, would be brought silently inside where nuns and wet nurses could attend to it. In many cases an infant had some sort of token pinned to its garments - half a coin or a locket, a scrap of distinctive cloth - anything that might in the future be used for identification when the mother, the grieving, ever-longing mother, might have the means to claim her child.So it was with me, given up at birth by an anonymous young mother in a hospital in the southwest of England. I was left with no physical token but what I had, the one concrete thing my mother left me, was the name Jane. So, for thirty-nine years I lived with Jane as my talisman: a sign, a blessing directly from her to me. Someday, I imagined, she would seek me out, find me, and its meaning would be revealed."If the death of my first family compelled me to find my birth parents one after the other, it was the stunningly brutal failure of those reunions that impelled me to write it all down.""Reunions are risks. Had I never gone about finding them I would have never fallen, never been so hurt. Without the fall however, I would never have had to pick myself up - mend. It is this mending which has been my life lesson."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1983354503
• ISBN13: 9781983354502
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.6" x 5.5"