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I couldn’t sleep last night and was channel surfing when I turned to Lifetime and wouldn’t you know that a movie with an adoption theme was coming on.
The movie was called Our Son the Matchmaker and is based on “actual events.” It was actually a decent movie that I didn’t find a whole lot wrong with. It left me feeling warm and fuzzy inside with the story book ending.
In the movie, we meet Julie (played by Ann Jillian) and soon learn that she is a forty three year old birthmother. She is at work one day when a social worker comes and tells her she needs to speak with her privately. The social worker speaks with her and lets her know that the son she placed for adoption at fifteen is now a grown, married man with a baby on the way and that he is looking for her and wants to meet her. She begins to tear up as she learns his name and that he is a minister.
Julie is given the option of whether or not she wants to meet her son and she chooses two. As she prepares for this first meeting, she flash backs to when she was fifteen and this is how we learn all kinds of details about the adoption.
It was the typical closed adoption story of that era. Girl becomes pregnant, family is shamed and embarrassed, so she gets sent away to a maternity home for unwed mothers to have the baby. She asks to hold him after he is born and is denied. She is told to move on with her life and forget about the baby. Her parents tell everyone she had gone on a choir tour so her parents were the only ones who knew about the baby and the adoption or so she thought. She later learns that a lot of people around town figured it out but just never said anything.
A tearful reunion between mother and son soon follows and Julie is able to explain to her son face to face that she never wanted to place him for adoption, that she was forced to do so by her parents and the era. He assures her that he has no ill feelings towards her and after that they began to have an ongoing relationship.
Julie’s son’s father was her high school sweetheart although not long after she left for the maternity home he joined the army and she never saw him again. But since her son requested to meet him as well, she began to look for him and soon after found him. Their romance is rekindled.
I don’t want to give away the ending in case you want to watch this movie but it had one of those story book endings leaving me wondering exactly how much of the movie was based on actual events. All in all, it was a decent movie.
