Share Your Story
51 Birch Street and the story of the Block family has had a powerful impact on audiences all over the world. Now we invite you to share your personal reaction to the film, and how it hit home for you regarding your own family.
Cheri Pugh (age 44)
Doug I’ve missed your film so far and I’m looking forward to seeing it from all I’ve heard about it. These are universal issues, the different ways we understand (or misunderstand) our parents over time, so it is not surprising it is touching many people. I also have to thank you for asking me to write something which made me sit down last night and try to write it and I guess I got on a roll. I might even develop this first draft further somehow. But it became a bigger story than I thought I should put…
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Sandy Romagnuolo (age 52)
Here I sit at my computer on Soundview Road (not Port near the movie theatre as everyone thinks, but Great Neck, NY) same as that day in August, 2005 six months after my mother passed away and BAM!! “Your were adopted at birth, Sandy and you’ll never find your biological mother because she just went into the hospital saying she was Marilyn”!!! Marilyn is the mother that raised me. I can’t even bring myself to call her my “adoptive” mother as I now see is the correct lingo as I register on all of these adoption search sites. …
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Nina Gilden Seavey (age 49)
I haven’t seen Doug’s film yet (because it hasn’t yet come to Washington - which we all hope it will!) But here’s my thought. I actually know way more about my parents than I ever wanted to. There is an aspect of divorce, and my parents divorced when I was 12 - or at least that’s when the process started - where I ended up finding out a lot about them and their relationship, lots of things that I never wanted to know anything about nor really had any business knowing about. My parents got divorced…
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Peyton Hayslip (age 40)
When I saw the documentary, 51 Birch Street, for the first time at SXSW 2006 in Austin, Texas, I sat, utterly mesmerized through the entire film. Although I was at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater, and had a hot pizza and glass of wine on the ledge in front of me, I did not reach for either, and did not miss them. I watched. Studied? Wondered. Found myself ensnared in the threads of a story that could be mine. Or might be yours. Is probably all of ours if we are honest with ourselves. In late January of 2004,…
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David Too (age 56)
I had waited an adult lifetime to resolve “issues” with my dad. One of my great fears was him passing on before we had the time to talk. I was thousands of miles away when I received the call that he was dying. I rushed back home and spent his last night on earth sitting at his bedside holding his hand. We didn’t talk. We had no need to. What was obvious to both of us in those moments was that he had always loved me and me him. Never a moment of my life was that in doubt. There…
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Bill Cammack (age 38)
The breakthroughs I’ve had with my parents have really been the results from my experiencing other people’s relationships with their children or parents, then being able to view my parents in a new light by comparison. Growing up, it’s tough to tell what’s going on relative to anyone else’s life, because you only have one set of parents. It’s not like you get to change parents every few years and compare. :D By getting to know other people and their parents, or even by seeing people relating to their children in the streets or in stores, I began…
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Jan Hayward (age 50)
This is a very short version of a long story...perhaps someday I’ll put it in book form. I only truly understood my mom, Evelyn, and felt a deep empathy with her after she was gone. She died in August, 2000. Before this, she was in a nursing home for ten years having suffered a stroke, and was more like a dependent child than my mother. Since then I have ached with the desire to talk with her, comfort her, and be her female friend the way we were never able to be while she lived. She…
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Sara
My relationship with my parents is always changing. More towards the better since I don’t live with them anymore! I am not sure if I had a single moment where things changed between us and stayed that way, I feel like I am constantly looking at them with new perspectives as I mature and grow. There was a moment though when I really felt what a strange and powerful sensation in must be to have a child and to love them so deeply. My grandfather turned 80 a few years ago. He has six kids, and 10 of us grandkids. …
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Agnes Varnum (age 30)
Inspired by Doug Block and his journey in 51 Birch Street, I was trying to think back on when I realized that my mother was not some mythical creature but an individual with experiences, thoughts, failures, pain. It was difficult because I can’t remember ever having my mother on a pedestal, and the reason is the story of a childhood that you rarely hear about anymore. My mother was 19 when she had me. I’m told that I was a wanted pregnancy and I know that my mother and father moved to Maine to pursue a bohemian life…
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Philip Armand (age 29)
Not too long ago my mother confided in me that she is afraid of being alone, the reason for her 11 year relationship to a man she isn’t very fond of. Her feelings towards her boyfriend were not the revealing part of the conversation, her way of being around him had already betrayed her, it was the fact that my mother was allowing herself to be open and vulnerable in the conversation. I made up my mind at a young age that my mother could do anything and was afraid of nothing, as far as I was concerned the woman…
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