Tonight: In Celebration of “Fancy” Families

“Sunshine is a refreshing and compelling self-portrait of an adopted woman driven to search for her pride and identity while reconnecting with her biological mother.”   -Wellsphere.com

“Profoundly affecting. Even resistant guys will find themselves melting in the sunshine.”   -Austin American Stateman

Has your life ever taken an unexpected detour?  Just in time for Mother’s Day, filmmaker Karen Skloss reunites with her biological mother to tell a personal story about adoption and life as a single mother, while grappling with the definition of family. Young, pregnant, single, and unprepared, Skloss struggles with incredible ironies — that history has repeated itself, and that efforts to protect family can sometimes do the most harm.

Sunshine premieres tonight, Tuesday, May 4 at 10:00 on Independent Lens on PBS (check local listings).

Tags: adoption, Austin, mother's day, single mothers, single parents

A Mother’s Day message from Sunshine’s Karen Skloss

Karen Skloss, producer/director of Sunshine (premiering May 4 at 10 PM on Independent Lens on PBS, check local listings), shares the process that brought her to find her biological mother and to carry her pregnancy to term, as well as the social stigmas that subtly color our view of single parenthood.

Karen Skloss and her birth mother Mary return to the Home of the Holy Infancy

I suppose anyone who is adopted wonders about their natural parents. When things are kept secret, questions are all you’ve got. In the back of my mind, I’d always thought about what life might have been like growing up with my biological mother, but I was afraid of what I might find if ever I met her. I was also afraid that she wanted to forget all about me.

When I turned 19, my adoptive mom told me that if I wanted to, I could go back to the adoption home and ask my questions. It turns out I had ridden my bike past that place a million times, The Home of the Holy Infancy, right down the street from the biggest sorority at the University of Texas in Austin, where I had been going to college. Waiting for me in the files there was a letter from my biological mother. “I just need to know that you are okay,” said the letter. It had been waiting there for five years.

› Continue reading

Tags: adoption, gay parenting, mother's day, single mothers, single parents

We Are Family — Behind the Scenes on Sunshine

Filmmaker Karen Skloss with Jeremy Harrison

What makes a family? It’s a question our society is grappling with, and the question that drove filmmaker Karen Skloss to make her film, Sunshine, which premieres on Independent Lens on PBS on May 4 (check local listings).

In this exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, Skloss captures a storyline about single fathers and gay parents that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, but which adds another layer of complexity to the broader societal discussion of family and identity, parenthood and pride.

Jeremy, father to Skloss’s daughter Jasmine, is the product of divorce and was raised in part by his gay father in Houston in the late 1970s. As was the case for Skloss, and her biological mother before her, Jeremy’s father Mike had to deal with the social stigma of single parenthood, but he also had to navigate the more explosive territory of being a single dad who happened also to be gay in a very conservative place and time.

Watch Sunshine: Single Dads >>

› Continue reading

Tags: family, gay parents, parenting, single parents