A couple of times I have had the pleasure of hearing Father Tom Brosnan speak at a couple of adoption conferences. The most recent was in July 2005 at the National Conference of the American Adoption Congress (AAC- www.americanadoptioncongress.org) The other was an Adoption Forum conference a few years ago (www.adoptionforum.org) I thought I would share a bit of what he spoke of in one of his keynote addresses.

For those of you who don’t know who Father Tom Brosnan is, he is a roman catholic priest of the Diocese of Brookly, NY. He is not a psychologist, pastoral counselor, or a social worker. He speaks from his own adoption experience as an adoptee. He speaks of other adopted persons, birth parents and adoptive parents who he has worked with over the past years.

In Father Brosnan’s keynote he spoke of the movies and how this is one of the few places he looses self control and permits himself to feel the difficult emotions which the experience of love and belonging evoke. His favorite film is Cinema Paradiso, which is an Italian film where a fatherless young boy from a small Sicilian town who befriends the movie house projectionist. The boy learns to love movies while learning to love the older man who teaches him so much. When the boy is 18 he joins the army and we see him standing with his mother and sister at the train station waiting for the good byes to end. The old man is there to. He whispers in the boy’s ear “go, and never, never come back”. The boy obeys. He goes to Rome and becomes a famous film director. He calls his mother now and then but keeps his promise to never return to his hometown. Then, the old man dies, the mother leaves a message on the son’s answering machine telling him the day and time of the funeral. “You know he’ll never come back” the skeptical sister tells the mother, but he does.

On the day of his return the camera is focused on the mother as she sits in a rocker, nervously knitting. Slowly the camera closes in on the knitting needles, deftly moving back and forth twining yarn and space. The camera focuses on her wrinkled hands and the long needles when in the background we hear a car pull up on the gravel path. Suddenly the hands stop, the woman quickly stands, unconsciously catching a piece of the yarn on her dress. The camera stays focused on the yarn as it unwinds with every step the mother takes toward the door. Then we hear the car door slam and the yarn ceases to unravel. We know without a word being spoken, or any visual image given besides the unraveling yarn, that mother and son have embraced after many lost years.

With this movie the point that Father Brosnan was trying to make was that the experience of loss and the need to belong are universal human experiences. There is loss in adoption and it is important to acknowledge this. It is not easy and it is not a one shot deal. It has to be acknowledged at different times through out our lives but can be essential in a healthy mental attitude.