The First Mother's Day Card
A Novel of Open Adoption

About this book:

Seven-year-old Lily has always known she has two mothers—the one who packs her lunchboxes and the one with the yellow door in Ohio who sends birthday bears. But when an art class assignment prompts her to craft a Mother's Day card for Chloe *herself*, no longer mediated by her adoptive mom's careful curation, the delicate architecture of their open adoption shifts in ways no parenting book prepared Sarah for. In the space between a magenta crayon portrait and a flattened piece of blue construction paper, Sarah confronts the quiet terror of becoming a spectator in her own daughter's heart.

Mark offers steady pragmatism; Lily offers the devastating logic of a child who sees no contradiction in loving two women at once. But Sarah is left navigating the uncharted territory where gratitude curdles into jealousy, where being the "anchor" means watching the rope slip through her fingers. As the card travels three hundred miles to an apartment with a yellow door, the novel unfolds across a year of firsts—first unmediated letters, first missed boundaries, first moments where biology and love refuse to stay in their assigned lanes.

Tender, unflinching, and laced with the messy humor of real family life, *The First Mother's Day Card* is a story about the expanding definition of motherhood. It asks what happens when the child you raised reaches for the woman who gave her life—and discovers that love isn't a zero-sum game, but a language both mothers must learn to speak together.