Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she embarked on a journey to discover where she came from and, ultimately, who she was. After many missteps and dead ends, Ross uncovered her heartbreaking and inspiring origin story and began navigating the complicated turns of reuniting with her birth parents and their new families. Through backcountry travel in the American West, she also came to understand her place in the world, realizing that her true identity lay not in a choice between adopted or biological parents, but in an expansion of the concept of family.

The media, from Dr. Phil to the "New York Times Magazine, " is adamant that there is no love lost between working parents and those who stay home with their children, each fighting an ideological and economic war based on what they think is best for their children. Yet in reality, as Miriam Peskowitz powerfully discloses, parents don't want to fight one another at all; they simply want more options. Moreover, the very sides in this debate don't exist: one third of all mothers work part-time, falling in the vast abyss between full-time careerist and at-home mommy. How does the corporate climate in America force women to claim either a career or a family at any given time? Are the choices women are making--to either adjust careers, "carousel" in and out of the workplace, or quit altogether--really choices at all? And how do we expand the definition of productive worker to include an engaged parent? These questions and more are answered and explored in this moving and convincing treatise on the new-century collision between work and mothering.