Tune-in Tuesday: Episode 133

Episode 133

Karen Salyer McElmurray & Bob Stewart

Bob Stewart wrote “Shadow Boxer” in 1977, decades before he’d ever hear Karen Salyer McElmurray’s name. He wrote it about shadows in general, the kind everyone carries, unnamed. He had no idea it would end up soundtracking a memoir about a mother who surrendered her son at 16 and spent twenty-five years waiting for a sound she’d only heard once: her baby’s cry, in a hospital room she wasn’t allowed to stay in.

Karen’s memoir, Surrendered Child, won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and was named a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. But this episode, “Shadows and Song: Surrendering to the Truth Within,” isn’t really about the awards. It’s about the day a stranger found Karen through a Google search, and Karen’s son Andrew showed up in a driveway, fully grown, and Karen had to reconcile the baby she’d been picturing for a quarter century with the man actually standing in front of her.

She calls it shadow and reality slamming into each other.

This episode is all about choosing family, carrying grief you can’t fully name, and  discovering that the people we build our lives around aren’t always the ones we were given.

Bob and Karen never met before this recording. Neither knew the other’s story going in. That’s still my favorite part of doing this show: watching two people who think they have nothing in common realize they’ve been speaking the same language the whole time.