All I Wanted Was A Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage - Inspiring True Story for Book Clubs & Adoption Awareness

In All I Wanted Was a Home, Clark Watts has produced a beautiful memoir about growing up in a Dallas orphanage over fifty years ago. At the age of nine his father, an impoverished junior high school dropout, explains to him in the course of a neighborhood stroll that he, the oldest of four, is to become the man of the house. Then the father walks away and out of Clark's life forever. After months of struggling to hold the family together, his mother faces the most devastating choice of her life: to give up her children or see them starve with her. Fortunately she makes the correct choice. This is not a story of surviving institutional abuse and neglect. Church-sponsored Buckner Home provides the Watts children something they had never had: a stable home and the promise of regular food and education. And who would have guessed that at least one of them possessed rare genes indeed? It is an account of children influenced in a safe environment provided by selfless people to learn discipline, honesty, and accountability in the absence of any material advantage. The outcome is triumphant, and memorable. To a post modern world spiraling out of control with whining victims and unrealistic leaders, this book is a cry of hope and joy.