Julie Lawson Timmer

Letter to Librarians
The Inspiration Behind UNTETHERED
Dear Librarians,
Thank you so much for the tremendous support you have given me for both
FIVE DAYS LEFT and UNTETHERED. I am more grateful than I can adequately
express. In a video message to you, I discuss my writing process, and the
ways my method changed from my debut novel to this one. In this letter, I
thought I would talk about UNTETHERED itself, and what inspired me to write
it.
I am inspired by complex moral dilemmas that have no easy answer. So
many of us (including me) are so quick to make firm declarations about how
we would act in a given situation: I would never do x, y or z! Not in a million
years! Its deplorable! My goal in writing is to gently remind us not to
condemn certain decisions so fast, but to consider instead the other side of
the story, and the possibility that the deplorable choice may actually be
more acceptable than we first thought.
In the fall of 2013, I read an article called The Child Exchange: Inside
Americas Underground Market for Adopted Children, by Meghan Twohey
(Reuters Sept. 9, 2013), and I knew immediately I had to write about it. The
article tells the story of a number of children who were rehomed by their
adoptive parentsthat is, the children were given away to strangers after
their parents advertised them on the Internet.
Reuters found over 200 cases of rehoming, or about one child each week,
over a five-year period. But we have no idea how close this figure comes to
representing the true number of rehoming cases, because rehoming is done
without background checks on the new families, and without oversight by
lawyers, courts or caseworkers--and, therefore, without records. Also, there is
no state or federal agency that tracks children once they are placed for
adoption, whether the adoptions are done overseas or in the USA, through
private agencies or the U.S. foster care system.
The unsettling reality is that we have no idea how many children have been
rehomed in the United States, nor do we know where those children are, or
whether they are safe. Are they with the family they were rehomed to, or
have they been passed off to yet another set of new parents? Are they on
the street? Has their path from adoption to rehoming led to a final stop as a
victim of sex trafficking?

When I read the article, I could not get past the idea that some of Americas
most vulnerable children, already dealing with the trauma of being separated
from their biological parents, were promised the forever family of their
dreams, only to be delivered into a nightmare of constantly-shifting new
parents, or homelessness, or worse.
Although I was horrified by the idea of rehoming, at the same time, I was
certain there had to be more to the story. There must be compelling reasons
why parents who have gone to the trouble (and often great expense) to
adopt a child would give the child away. And for parents to give their child to
complete strangers, in an underground fashion devoid of legal oversight or
background checks, there must be a tremendous amount of desperation, or
even fear, driving their actions. Sure, its easy for the rest of us to declare
that we would neverbut never!give away an adopted child, no matter the
circumstances. It would be easy to demonize the adults in this situation, and
to write a novel that makes it very clear who the bad guy is. I dont gravitate
to easy moral issues in my novels, though; my interest lies in the complex
ones, that have no simple answer.
In researching the issue, I learned that some parents who rehome their
adoptive children are loving, devoted people who found themselves over
their heads, desperate, and heartbroken. Parents arent always adequately
prepared for the challenge of raising an adopted child, and sometimes,
theyre not given complete information about the childs mental health.
Some children, as a result of early childhood trauma or other conditions, act
out in significant and destructive ways in response to their new environment,
harming family pets and siblings and/or destroying property. Psychological
treatment for these children isnt always effective or affordable, with
residential psychiatric treatment facilities usually not covered by health
insurance, and priced far beyond many families budgets. Other postadoption services and support may be inadequate, or unavailable. And some
parents are afraid to seek such services, fearing that if they admit theres a
serious problem in their family, the authorities might investigate and remove
all children from the home, including biological children.
Adoptive parents can find themselves in a devastating Catch 22: keep the
troubled child and risk further deterioration of the family (and possible injury
to themselves and their other children), or give the child away, breaking their
promise to provide a forever home to a child in desperate need of
unconditional love and permanency. The opportunity to find new parents
through the underground online rehoming network can seem appealing to
desperate mothers and fathers who feel they cannot keep their adopted child
any longer, and dont know where else to turn. This heartbreaking,
impossible moral quandary led me to create the character of ten-year-old
Morgan and her adoptive family in UNTETHERED.

My main character, Char, came to me after I had conjured Morgan. Char is at

first a bystander to Morgans situation, but she also has her own dilemma to
work through. For the past five years, Char has been the day-to-day mother
figure to her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Allie. Allie and Char are extremely
close, while Allies self-involved biological mother, Lindy, who lives across the
country, remains aloof and uninterested in her daughter. When Chars
husband (Allies father) dies suddenly, the question is: who should Allie live
with? Should she continue to live in the home shes grown up in, near her
lifelong friends and with Char, who has been completely devoted to her
every day for the past five years, or should she be moved across the country
to live with her mother?
I was inspired to create Char because I am a stepmom myself; I have two
bio kids and two stepkids. Like most stepmoms, I have no legal rights to
my stepchildren; their parents are the only ones with those rights. My
relationship with my stepchildren is completely contingent on their father
(my husband) being alive; if something happened to him, its possible I would
never see my stepkids again. All that investment of time, emotional energy,
money, and everything else that comes with fiercely loving children as
though theyre my own could lead to nothing but two gaping holes in my
heart, and two permanently empty bedrooms in my house. This is a fear I
have lived with for fifteen years, and its one I wanted to explore through
Char.
I also wanted to use Char as a vehicle to examine another aspect of
stepmotherhood: the fact that it can be very difficult, and very painful.
Stepmoms can find great rewards in their unique position in their
stepchildrens lives, but they can also discover tremendous rejection, and I
wanted to write a book that explored those feelings. Even in a highlyfunctioning blended family, the constant message most stepmoms receive is
that when it comes to their rank among the childrens parents, they are a
very distant third choice. Many of us have spent hours helping our
stepchildren plan, shop for and execute art projects which then get taken
across town and given to their real mom. We have helped wrap Mothers
Day gifts and create elaborate accompanying cards for their bio mom, only
to receive a quick Happy Mothers Day! text just before midnight, an
obvious afterthought. Its understandable, and its not the childrens fault
the fact is, we are their stepmoms, not their real moms, and they had no
say in whether their father married us. But I have yet to meet a stepmom for
whom those facts take away the pain and frustration and sometimes
resentment of this role. What I have met are stepmoms desperate to know
that there are other stepmoms who feel exactly how they do, who face the
same battles of love versus rejection with their stepkids. I wanted to show all
of this through Char so that other stepmoms could read her story and think,
Yes! Thats exactly how I feel! Im not alone!

I hope you enjoy UNTETHERED, and that you fall in love with Morgan, Allie,
and Char.
Thank you again for all you have done for me.
Julie