PUSHING UP THE SKY: A MOTHER’S STORY
Book Jacket Art © Marcia Adams Ho
First Edition KAAN Korean Adoptee Adoptive Family Network 2006 Hardcover out of print.
To download the eBook (PDF) click here Compliments of Terra Trevor.
In lyric prose Pushing up the Sky illuminates losses and blessings coming together that parents everywhere will recognize and identify with. Hope is offered as a path for others to benefit from, with the resolve to celebrate each new day and to cherish every second of it.
“Terra Trevor’s ‘Pushing up the Sky’ is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story.”
—Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
“Trevor, a mixed-blood American Indian, and her husband had one child before choosing to add more children to their family through foster care and adoption. They adopted twice: a one-year-old with special medical needs from South Korea, and a ten-year-old, also from South Korea. There are two stories in Trevor’s personal account. The first is about her third child experiencing difficulty adjusting from foster care in South Korea to adoption in the United States. The second story is about her youngest child diagnosed with a brain tumor shortly after the arrival of a new sibling, and how this family, or any family, must endure crises and tragedy and still find a way to go on.
This is a story of compromises, insights, profound joy, deep suffering, and terrific rewards. Most of all, it’s a story on the meaning of family, learning to let go of expectations and forge a new identity. The title ‘Pushing up the Sky,’ is from a traditional story from the Snohomish tribe, about the power of communities and people working together for a common good, this is the theme in Trevor’s memoir.”
—Bill Drucker, Korean Quarterly
“In Pushing Up the Sky, Terra Trevor gives a personal and insightful account of the joys and challenges inherent in transracial adoptions. She also shares the personal growth she found in an unexpected loss and difficult family relationships. I was deeply moved by her sensitivity to her children’s struggles for identity. I was incredibly proud of how she supported them. In revealing her emotional responses to traumatic experiences, she brings us closer to each other. And in that process, makes a tremendous contribution to all of us. I highly recommend this book.”
—Dawn Downey, author of Blindsided: Essays from the Only Black Woman in the Room
After Pushing up the Sky
WE WHO WALK THE SEVEN WAYS: A MEMOIR
University of Nebraska Press
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After the difficult journey with multiple loss she wrote about in Pushing up the Sky, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something. Read more…
Terra Trevor 
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