From Narrative Inheritance to Narrative Momentum: Past, Present, and Future Stories in an International Adoptive Family

Abstract

This autoethnographic work of an international adoptive family tells a series of stories situated in the past, present, and future of the family's experience as it relates to how international adoption has influenced their family identity. Through the concepts of narrative inheritance, joint storytelling as a family, interactional sense-making, and family culture as local model, the series of stories reveal an underlying “narrative momentum,” which orients toward a future storytelling experience. Through this imagined future, the authors speculate on how the past and present are already writing a future that is still unfolding, yet exert tremendous influence on the way the family makes sense of their unique identity and culture. The work also situates international adoptive families as a category of the broader international family form and offers autoethnography as one way to study family storytelling.