“The adoptive mother believes she is the real mother because she is the one who got up in the middle of the night and was there for the child in sickness and health. The birth mother believes she is the real mother because she went through nine months of sculpting the child within her body and labored to bring it forth into the the world.”

I’m feeling vulnerable today. That’s not a bad thing. I’m just aware that I’m soft and raw; I’ve let my guard down. Adoption reunion requires this of me. That may seem counterintuitive. It might seem to some that this would be at time, more than any other, when I should protect myself and shield my emotions. But if both people do that, there can be no connection. Imagine two knights in full armor trying to embrace each other. I cherish each communication from my biological father. Each one — even if it’s just a short email … a line or two of text and a photo — tells me something about him. And that’s what I asked for. I wanted, quite simply, to know this person who is partially responsible for my existence and my “composition,” my particular genetic makeup. The flip side of the coin is the desire to be known. To know one’s biological parents and to be known by them. Such a simple desire. Such a basic human urge. It is so surprising to me at times that adoptees have to fight so hard to make people understand why this is something that we (or many of Read more

“Double Dipper.” That’s a phrase I encountered once on an another adult adoptee’s blog in reference to people like me who have more than one connection to adoption; specifically, adoptees who adopt, adoptees who place, and first parents who later adopt. It was not intended as a compliment. My particular category, adoptees who adopt, must seem incomprehensible to some adult adoptees and first parents. I am not someone who holds a roses-and-sunshine view of adoption. I have experienced the pain of adoption from my own side of things, and I am not blind to the pain on the first family side of the equation. I see the need for reform in all areas of adoption. I believe that family preservation should be a higher societal priority than it currently is. So, what would possess someone like me to affiliate myself with an institution I criticize? I can tell you that I was drawn to adoption in part because of these things, because I believed my awareness would make me a better adoptive parent than those of the past who held an oversimplified view. I could justify myself by explaining how my position as an adoptive parent is different than that Read more

  “Genetic mirroring” is a term that no one used when I was growing up. I didn’t encounter it until a few years ago, though I had an intuitive understanding of the thing itself long before I discovered the vocabulary to match. If you grew up with biological relatives, genetic mirroring is something you probably take for granted. You’ve likely never given it a second thought, and you also probably can’t really imagine not having it. But for many of us who grew up without it, genetic mirroring was the strangely absent piece that we may not have even known was missing. Genetic mirroring is one of the ways that human beings make sense of who we are and define our identities by observing people who share our genetic make-up. I experienced it for the first time when I was 30 years old, after locating my biological family. The first people I met in person were an aunt and uncle, and I will never forget that night. I don’t think I can adequately describe what a bizarre experience it was to have reached adulthood without ever having met a member of my immediate biological family; and then, suddenly, to see Read more

I sometimes wish I knew what it would be like to not be adopted. If you are not adopted, please think about that for a moment. Think about the things that you take for granted. Think about the simple, natural connection between you and the people to whom you are related. Even if your relationship with your family is not 100% positive, there is a quality of your connection to them that you have probably never questioned; they simply ARE your family. They didn’t choose you; you didn’t choose them. You are connected to them by the interwoven threads of shared experience and biology. For me, as an adopted person, things are not so simple. It occurred to me recently that being adopted is a bit like having Strabismus, or “Wandering Eye,” a condition in which the two eyes don’t quite work together as they should to create a single, unified picture.  As a metaphor for the adoption experience, this translates to two separate visions of family. One eye sees the world through the lens of experience and upbringing. This is the “nurture” lens, connected to a definition of family as those people with whom I grew up, who cared Read more

People often ask me why I decided to adopt from foster care.  As with so many things in life, there is no one simple answer. My husband and I had a desire to grow our family and a vague awareness that there was a need for parents to adopt older children, who are considered difficult to place compared to infants and toddlers. (I’m even more conscious of that need now, having since acquired additional awareness about the challenges faced by teens who age out of foster care without finding permanency with adoptive families.) I thought that my husband and I would be good candidates to parent an older child. Though I had loved parenting my biological daughter Mackenzie when she was an infant, I had also enjoyed moving into later stages of child development. I didn’t really want to return to the baby stage. I’m a word person — I like interacting with children when they have acquired language and I enjoy them even more as their sophistication with language increases; my husband is similar to me in this regard. I have enjoyed every stage of parenting, and I have never wanted to go back to an earlier one. I Read more