Stow Away

In this true story, a young Cape Cod housewife in the 1970s delights in the safe harbor of her promised land. But even as she perfects her ship-in-a-bottle life, deeper forces converge. Tremors she can't identify shake her world until a tsunami of forbidden memories swamps all she knows. Plunged between layers of time, she flounders for this lifeline, then that. Submerging as if for the last time, she realizes her only hope is to breach a taboo. She must search for other mothers marooned by state-sponsored secrets like hers.

In this true story, a young Cape Cod housewife in the 1970s delights in the safe harbor of her promised land. But even as she perfects her ship-in-a-bottle life, deeper forces converge. Tremors she can't identify shake her world until a tsunami of forbidden memories swamps all she knows. Plunged between layers of time, she flounders for this lifeline, then that. Submerging as if for the last time, she realizes her only hope is to breach a taboo. She must search for other mothers marooned by state-sponsored secrets like hers. In the upcoming sequel, CAST OFF, Lee Campbell continues the story. She shows how she created a way for ordinary women like her to teach each other how to belatedly cope with a hidden loss. She also reveals how, with them, she publicly exposed that loss and changed laws and policies for generations to come.

Over her lifetime, Lee Campbell performed many traditional roles and invented still more. To STOW AWAY's e-book edition, she brings her roles as an every whichway mother, a writer, a social science professor and a curator. She also describes how larger forces dragged her by the ankles until she was raw and she accepted her most challenging role of all: a first-of-its-kind social warrior, which landed her four times on "Donahue", on "Oprah," and on countless other broadcast and print media. In 1976, Lee Campbell founded a first-ever mutual help group for mothers with children missing in adoption. Later, Lee earned degrees from Antioch University, The Johns Hopkins University and the Union Institute. Along the way, she served on the social science faculty of the University of New Hampshire, the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore, and Edison State College in Florida, from which she recently retired. As a retiree, Lee has organized all her closets, and now, after a delay of 50 years, she is finally writing her memoirs. In plain prose, Lee narrates the tension between traditional experiences (devoted mother, small town banker’s wife, domestic) and the non-traditional (trouble-maker, rebel-rouser, a “mother from afar”). She also synthesizes real-world psychology (loss, PTSD, arrested development, resilience) with on-the-street sociology (marginalization, teen pregnancy, ADOPTION, feminism, social change). She hopes her readers not only enjoy her labor but are moved to birth (or sire) a world that is a better place for themselves and others.