May 2023

By Louise Browne

The world suddenly made sense. Everything was as it should be. My son was born. We named him Jack. It was a strong name we agreed upon and a name that fits his strength today. All paths in life led to this exact moment. The moment he was in my arms. I could no longer hear the whirring of the machines that had been putting the necessary fluids into my body while the surgeon worked. The beeping of the monitors was silenced, and all of the excitement and conversation around us became muted. His father was crying, and I could hear his voice but not make out his words. I looked into those eyes. Chocolate pools my father had later called them. He looked into mine. He no longer cried, and I no longer had a hole in my heart. I somehow knew him before. We knew each other. It wasn’t only the months of being connected through blood, emotion, sound, and touch. It was somehow from another plane, another time, and maybe not of this world. For a brief second, I could grasp what that was but I couldn’t hold on to the thought—it wasn’t really for me to understand. It was a knowledge that will come again. In a future time. A quarter century later and in a blink of an eye, we are still connected. My heart walks around on this beautiful earth having to learn life, to negotiate the ins and outs of love, friendship, heartbreak, joy, sorrow, loss, and success. A moment ago I was doing the same. Life is as it should be. This is what matters. A river with a strong current flows between mothers and their children. The feeling of floating in that river and being gently carried is what we search for throughout our lives.

Louise Browne is an adoptee and co-host and co-creator of Adoption: The Making of Me Podcast, along with Sarah Reinhardt. This piece was written for her son, the first blood relative she met. She felt she knew him instantly, as if maybe from another time. It struck her years later when she found out that her birthmother, Linda, had passed when Louise was still a little girl, that maybe there was some symbolism or truth to that. Like many adoptees, she had a hole that was filled with the birth of her son in a way she could never explain at the time and a curiosity that became instantly more clear. Now, after coming out of the fog and discovering more about herself and what that longing and hole meant and means, it takes a new shape, and is more prominent than ever. It captures the feeling that all adoptees want to feel—that moment of connection that even in reunion they may never get to feel and can’t recreate—the search for that current in the river. Find her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

By Shannon Quist In their defense, all the stories they heard about adoption were fairytales. All they knew was that their bodies could not make a baby together and there was a fairytale option in front of them, a socially acceptable alternative. Adopt a baby. And so, armed with the holy love of God and the righteousness of white privilege, they bought into a story that began with a happily ever after and cost them a pretty penny. Later, they would complain that they didn’t get the benefits of a tax break when adoption tax breaks became a thing. They paid for a human. They invested in a family experience. But investments like this don’t always go as planned, do they? In their defense, nobody told them anything that would make them question their decision. Not the other adoptive parents. Not the agency. Not the lawyers or social workers. Not the church. Nobody handed them books written specifically for their kind of family with bibliographies in the back, nobody said to them that someday their child would scream, “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL PARENTS.” And so they did as they were told and raised the baby as if she had been born to them. But she wasn’t. And they were missing important pieces of the story. They didn’t know, until she broke down, that anything was wrong at all. How could they have known? The power dynamic was set, whether they meant to build those walls or not. But those walls get built when you buy a human, there’s no escaping it. And so, when she started screaming, they looked at each other and asked, “Is this adolescence?” But that wasn’t the whole picture. They could have looked for literature, called a professional, asked for help. And, to an extent, they did. They bought Focus on the Family literature and signed their daughter up for therapy and asked their family doctor to diagnose her. But those fixes were only band-aids to a reaction. What was the girl reacting to that made her act this way, feel this way? They should have read the literature for themselves, called a professional for themselves, asked for help for themselves. And maybe it isn’t all their fault that they didn’t do this. What was the adoption agency doing to support them after they’d brought home their child? What literature were they sending? What resources? What support? What advice? None. So, who could the parents really call anyway? Ghostbusters? These parents got the short end of the stick, too. They were promised a happily ever after. And when everything turned sour and they didn’t know who to call or who to blame, they turned on themselves (“maybe we’re bad parents”) and they turned on their daughter (“maybe there’s something wrong with her”) when they should have turned on all of civilized society that thinks adoption is such a lovely thing to do, brave and wonderful on all fronts. So their flavor of embarrassment went from the grief of being unable to conceive to the shame of being unable to parent. And there was nobody to call for help. Click on image to read more.

Mother’s Day

In Defense of My Adoptive Parents