Lisa Crawford Watson has long been an important member of the community. A prolific journalist, she is also known as a local book author. Now she is filing a memoir about parenting: What We Wished For: An Adoption Story.
“When we adopted the girls, I knew that I would tell the story at some point,” Watson says. “Writing stories is how I frame my whole life.”
There is a photograph of two children on the book cover – twins Hilary and Hayley, sitting at Carmel River Beach. The photo was taken when they were 2 years old, a year after they were adopted by Watson and her partner in 2023.
A social worker gave the new parents a warning: “There’s so much trauma in those children’s eyes. Be very careful.” And at first they were “very Pollyanna about this,” Watson admits. Then came the struggle, the exhaustion and also pleasures of parenthood.
A twin herself, Watson is a fifth-generation Californian, raised mostly in the San Francisco area, but also by her writer grandmother in Carmel. Watson moved to Monterey County for good in the late ’90s. She has been teaching at Monterey Peninsula College for 25 years, and at CSU Monterey Bay for 20. She has been writing for longer, contributing to the Monterey Herald and Carmel Pine Cone. She also published important local volumes such as Legendary Locals from Carmel-by-the Sea and The Hidden Architecture of Big Sur.
All those years, she was telling other people’s stories. This one, What We Wished For, is her own. She was moved to write it thanks to the opening of Montage’s new Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health in Monterey, supporting resilience and mental wellness for young people. Watson explains that this is a you-are-not-alone book.
“I felt the need to write this memoir now,” Watson says. “After Ohana was built, I got serious about it.”
What We Wished For will be published on her birthday, Oct. 22, followed by a book launch party.
Watson still lives in her grandmother’s cottage in Carmel. She has unpublished poems in her drawers. When she has writer’s block, she says she consults an early inspiration: “Grandma, give me the words.”
What We Wished For: An Adoption Story book launch takes place at 5pm Friday, Oct. 25. Carmel Woman’s Club, San Carlos Street and 9th Avenue, Carmel. 624-2866, facebook.com/lisa.c.watson.79.