Leni Goodman

Impossible Choices: a Mother's Struggle to Save Her Daughters Leni Goodman

Leni Goodman always knew she was destined to become an actress, and was a working actress in New York from her teen years until her mid thirties. In order to make ends meet and continue her acting pursuits, she also explored other opportunities. A major turn was falling in love with diving and collecting shells. It was a short step from there to creating, with her husband, a line of jewelry featuring exotic shells. Just as their marriage was falling apart, Crown Publishers asked them to write a book for its craft series, ?Art From Shells? published in 1972. When their daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor at age five, Leni?s life goals changed as she and her daughter begin to cope with that devastating illness. She said a final farewell to acting and went back to school to obtain a Masters degree in Psychological Counseling in 1979. Then challenging the New York medical establishment in order to keep her child alive, she embarked on a journey with a radical course of rehabilitation treatment called ?patterning? that kept her daughter alive for over twenty years. Along the way she fell in love with a woman and openly embraced her new life as a lesbian. Nearing 50, she made the decision to adopt a child and was thrust into the evolving world and many vicissitudes of foreign adoption. Again motherhood turned out to be filled with more than the usual dramas of a growing child, as they lived with the haunting memories of her adopted daughter?s early childhood abuse and trauma, which came into full bloom as she reached her teen years. Her third and current career is as a writer. ?Impossible Choices? is the book based on her evolving journey as a mother; it relates the events and circumstances which she faced with her two children. Excerpts from her adopted daughter?s insightful and moving journal entries and letters written from the therapeutic boarding schools and wilderness programs to which she was sent, help fill out the enfolding drama as they deal with the aftereffects of her traumatic childhood memories.