adoption

By Lori Black I am still searching. I have been for quite a while. It’s tiring, this never ending need I’ve always had to prove my existence, but the need has not and will not leave me alone. My parents adopted me as an infant in the 1950s, when secrecy was an art form nigh unto gospel. My lack-of-information-wound has always festered at whim. In the year 2000, that wound split wide open when I acquired a life-changing piece of paper— my pre-adoption birth certificate, courtesy of a new law passed that year in my home state of Oregon. Since that day, I’ve met a few maternal birth family members, including an aunt. Aunt Mary knew of my existence and delighted in meeting and getting to know me, as long as I asked no questions about my beginnings. Believe me, I tried, eventually coming to realize that, of all the secret keepers surrounding my origins, she had to be in first place. Mary remained tight-lipped even after all the important players had passed away. Then she passed away. So did my birth mother, after having declined to meet me. Through what she had shared with the adoption agency, I knew my father had been middle-aged at the time of my conception so he had likely passed away. Despite all of this (or perhaps because of it), the legacy of secrecy still churned within. Quietly, I demanded more. The year my birth mother died was the year I turned my attention to the pristine blank space on my pre-adoption birth certificate just above the word father. *** The date is summertime. It is 2006, the year my birth mom dies. Between the information on the pre-adoption birth certificate listing my birth mom’s home state as Nebraska and the information I’d gathered from the adoption agency years earlier saying both my birth parents came from a small town in the Midwest, I had a strong suspicion that I hail from Nebraska, at least conceptually speaking. But I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and the closest I’d ever been to a farm is a Christmas tree lot. Rural happens only on vacations, and I’ve killed marigolds with a single glare. Nebraska seems as alien and as far away as the moon to me. Yet such a confluence of rural biology and urban adopted upbringing has whetted the moth-to-a-flame instincts that I’m convinced I inherited. It compels me to journey to the heartland, privately hoping there will be clues about father. Click on image to read more.

A poem by S.D. Kilmer, BPS Long is this pain,  The grief,  And the unbelief. The sorrow, Without a yesterday      difficult is a tomorrow. The impossible longing For a place I have never known.  A place never seen.  A place I know I’ve been. And yet, it was once home.

By Ari Spectorman March 23, 2022 was our final day for the winter season at our home in Key West. The SUV was fully packed for the long ride home to New Hope, PA. My husband, Tony, and I biked over for one last dinner at El Siboney, a favorite Cuban joint a few blocks away. During dinner I went to the rest room and urinated nothing but blood. “This can’t be good,” I thought. We quickly biked back home. Perhaps it was a kidney stone? There were no previous symptoms of any kind. But soon there was intense, painful pressure and I could not urinate at all. We rushed to urgent care in Key West. A quick CT scan revealed a mass in my left kidney. I needed a catheter inserted right away to release the pressure and was sent to South Miami by ambulance, a 3-½ hour slog. Tony followed soon after in the already packed SUV. I was frightened and worried Tony would be overwhelmed. I spent a week in a South Miami hospital trying to clear all the blood clots through my catheter, while undergoing various tests and scans. The devastating news was not only a most likely kidney cancer diagnosis, but also the appearance of a suspicious nodule on my pancreas. We flew back home and arranged for a transport company to collect and ship the loaded SUV to us. We would pursue further diagnostic testing and a course of action once we were settled in our New Hope home. An endoscopic needle biopsy at the pancreas confirmed our worst fears, metastatic kidney cancer. (Stage four, advanced, and metastatic all mean the same thing: a cancer that has spread beyond the original location.) I had a suspicious nodule in my lungs, two more in my peritoneum (a membrane in the abdominal cavity), and two on the pancreas. Three weeks later, on April 21, my left kidney was surgically removed at Doylestown Hospital. I’ve always known I was adopted; it was not a secret. My adoptive mother, who only recently passed at age 90, always encouraged me to find information regarding my biological parents. Many years ago, I contacted the Louise Wise adoption agency and was told my young Jewish mother gave no information regarding the father, only that it was a single encounter. At the time of my birth, in September 1961, she had asked not to be contacted, so my records were sealed. I was not particularly motivated to look for my birth parents for most of my life. Unlike many other adoptees, I never felt incomplete, and it just never felt terribly important to me. I had a full life. Married when legally permitted in 2013, Tony and I first met in 1979 as freshmen at our university. We owned a Greenwich Village restaurant together, bought a home in Bucks County, PA, and later, I grew a successful financial advisory business over a 26-year period. Eventually I did get around to thinking about my origins. I always thought my birth father was not Jewish—I have a tiny button nose and a somewhat darker complexion—maybe my father was from some exotic background? That would be interesting. In 2019, I joined 23andMe on a lark. 99.9% Ashkenazi Jew— boring! But no immediate relatives. Some months later suddenly a half-sister appeared using only the initials NF, from Morristown, NJ. She was born in 1958 and was also adopted via the Louise Wise Agency. She was looking for information about her family. I immediately wrote to her introducing myself. “I assume we share the same mother! I’m Ari Spectorman, from New Hope PA, who are you?” Within a week, not only had she not replied, but she removed all traces of herself from the 23anMe site. I scared her away, I guess. Perhaps because I’m gay and she is very religious? Being ghosted like this invites much speculation. Click image to read more.

By Radhika Eicher For the longest time, I never thought I’d have a baby or even be able to have one. But in the summer of 2023, my life changed when I discovered I was pregnant. So many emotions ran through my mind as I took numerous pregnancy tests to confirm I was actually going to have a baby. Finally, after six tests, I was able to say okay, this is really happening. My husband and I couldn’t have been more excited that we would be bringing a bundle of joy into this world. My baby girl wasn’t even here yet, and already I loved her more than life itself. I was adopted at 17 months old from India to a family in South Dakota. My adoptive family is great, but I still experienced adoption trauma concerning the loss of my birth mother, abandonment issues, and looking different from my adoptive family because of my brown skin. That trauma resulted in self-hate over the color of my skin. I also suffer from mental illness— bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety—which I believe came from my birth parents and only worsened as I grew older. Now, I’m 27 years old and I still struggle with trauma. I know many people believe blood shouldn’t matter but, being adopted, I believe it really does. I love my adopted family, but they didn’t look like me and we don’t share blood, and that affected me more than many people understand. I couldn’t wait for my daughter to be born because she’s a part of me. It’s so important to me that she’s my blood. As an adoptee, becoming a mother is such a surreal thing. I get to give my baby the love I didn’t get to have when I was a baby being put up for adoption. When my daughter, Harriett, was born by C-section, the feeling I had when I first saw her is indescribable. When the doctors showed her to me, I instantly felt immense love in my heart. I couldn’t imagine how my birth mother had given me up because I couldn’t imagine doing that to my baby girl. She’s absolutely perfect. I can’t imagine her not being in my life. She’s changed me in so many ways and has helped heal aspects of my adoption trauma. I no longer have a desire to find my birth mother because she’s everything I need and more. Still, having been a mother now for more than a month, I can say my separation anxiety has kicked in. I hate leaving my daughter. That anxiety is another aspect of trauma I’ve faced for years. I’ve experienced it with my husband and now with my baby. The connection I have with my daughter is so true, wholesome, and fulfilling. It’s grounded me to be the mother I am today because I want to be her pillar so she knows she’ll never have to doubt my love for her. She will know her mom will always sacrifice for her so she can be whoever she wants to be and go wherever she wants to go. I will make sure my daughter never has to question her identity and that she knows she is always loved and can count on me. I want to teach her so many things but most importantly for her to have self-love and self-worth. I don’t want her to struggle with that as I did growing up. I love that she’ll know where she came from and who is her mom and dad. I will never make her feel like she isn’t loved, as I felt growing up. Having been adopted at such a young age made me feel that my birth mother didn’t want me. Click image to read more.

Michelle Madrid, now an adoptee empowerment coach, was adopted by an American couple when she was a baby in the United

By David B. Bohl, MA Being adopted is one of those complicated gifts that just keeps on giving whether you like it or not. I am calling it a “gift” because I like to put a positive spin on things and because it has enriched my life—in relationships, in personal discoveries—once I understood how to deal with all the adversity/trauma attached to it. Once I knew how to navigate my own feelings about it all, it became easier to see it as something that made my life that much bigger, now that I was no longer letting it destroy me, as when I used drinking to cope with my inability to fit in. But recently the gift reared its head again. What happened is that I experienced something called a misattributed parentage event (MPE), which became an unexpected twist in my journey of self-discovery, one that I thought I had already come to terms with. An MPE—most often discovered as a result of DNA testing—describes a situation in which the person one believes to be one’s biological parent is not in fact biologically related. This can result from adoption, sperm donation/IVF, an affair, rape, or incest. For obvious reasons, learning about an MPE is often a traumatic experience. As an adoptee, I’ve always known that my biological roots were a mystery waiting to be unraveled. However, I thought I knew all there was to know and nothing could have prepared me for the revelation that the man I thought was my paternal genetic grandfather was not biologically related to me or my father. My half brother and I stumbled upon this truth through genetic DNA testing, a tool we initially used out of curiosity, but one that ultimately led us down a path of unexpected revelations. At first, the finding felt surreal, almost as if I were living in a plot twist from a novel rather than my own life. Because I had always known that I was adopted, the idea of surprises regarding my genetic lineage was not entirely foreign to me—and yet this revelation still managed to shake the foundation of my understanding of family and identity. I didn’t know this grandfather (nor will I ever know the other one) but I couldn’t help but wonder what that was like for my biological father and if he was affected in any way. Was he treated well by the man he called “father” or was he perhaps neglected? Could that explain why he was unable to show up for me? Or was it his mother who only knew the truth and was perhaps deeply affected by it? The possibilities were endless, and I’ve found myself trying to guess something that was impossible to guess as it’s been the case with most of my biological story. The one thing I did know for sure was that this was a new reality that I had to grapple with in my own time and at my own pace. One of the most challenging aspects of this discovery was navigating the implications for my family members, particularly my father’s living sisters. As I shared this newfound truth with them, I could observe the mixture of shock and confusion they displayed. This revelation changed not just my understanding of lineage, but also theirs, highlighting the interconnectedness of our family narratives. While we were all supportive and understanding of each other, I could sense the weight of this revelation as we collectively processed what it meant for our family dynamic. Click on image to read more.

By Tracy Mayo 1982 Northwest mountains of North Carolina                                                                     Tracy is 27, Thomas is 12 The elderly chestnut, lone survivor of the blight, stood as a centerpiece of all that could be surveyed from the expansive front porch. Others of its kind had once covered these Blue Ridge mountains like a shawl over shoulders on a cool evening. The deeply furrowed bark belied the ease with which an exotic fungus had slipped into the cambian and felled its brothers and sisters, once giants of these forests.   A singular sentinel—isolated, yet resilient. When weather was favorable, I would take my morning meditation in the rocking chair on the porch, facing the chestnut. In spring the flowing white catkins waved like streamers on little girls’ bike handles. Come summer the lush, saw-toothed, dark green leaves shaded the cultivated wildflowers beneath. Autumn equaled yellow blaze. But in late fall, when the burrs should have encased three chestnuts each, there were no harvests. The lone tree was sterile. Even so, it grew its canopy year by year, waiting patiently for a favorable wind to carry news of another survivor.   Most weeks I spent my day off from our business tending to the ample vegetable garden, which lay between the chestnut and our log cabin. The ancient mountains, worn down now to lush rolling hills, grew a dark sandy loam that needed no amendments other than the occasional side dressing of composted manure. I worked in the partial shade of a four-foot diameter, ground-mounted satellite dish that provided live feeds of sports and the BBC. In early fall, with afternoon’s slanted light, the bountiful harvest brought the last of the corn, the first of the autumn squashes, more tomatoes than I could put up, and the final raspberry yield. Click on image to read more.

By David Daniel My birthmother rode into town on a Greyhound bus one icy February night. We fed her roasted hen, then sat by the fire as she unpacked her scrapbook. Tucked inside a see-through sleeve was a photo of her as an acned teen, leaning back in a hospital bed, cradling the newborn she would soon surrender. Sipping her tea, she handed me a faded certificate of birth—the original one with the original name, inked with imprints of two tiny feet. Come sunup, she ambled downstairs in a paisley robe, blond hair braided to her waist, and we sat in the kitchen eating eggs my wife had made. Outside, it was unseasonably warm, so she walked our kids around the block, and as she did, I sat alone by the blackened logs, eyeing my birth certificate once again—realizing that my real name was cleaved from me as early as can be. As I saw her off at the Greyhound that night, the penny finally dropped: I had sailed through life under a cover name and never even known it.  Click on image for author bio.

By Sara Easterly As an adoptee-author whose work involves explaining behaviors to people who often misunderstand us, I love a good backstory. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked enchanted me, and an interest in understanding the developmental journeys for Darth Vader, Voldemort, and The Grinch led me to watching, with great anticipation, their longer character arcs unfold in various Hollywood adaptations. Even in fantasy literature and films, it’s engaging to ask questions like those asked by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry in their bestselling book on trauma, What Happened to You?, to empathize with iconic characters’ early-in-life wounding and see them as well-rounded, hurting humans on a hero’s journey rather than one-dimensional figures used to propel the plot forward. For these reasons, I was particularly excited to catch Warner Bros. Pictures’ Wonka and consider the mysterious chocolatier and his inner circle in new ways. Even though I enjoyed the film, I left the theater with more questions than answers and more frustration than sentimentality. That’s because, as is common in holiday stories ranging from Dickens to Hallmark creations, Wonka employed the orphan trope, along with a stereotypical happy ending with a mother-and-long-lost-child reunion—both of which lacked substance and depth. In the movie, “Noodle” (played by Calah Lane) is a young orphan who befriends Willy Wonka while they’re held captive by Mrs. Scrubitt in a launderette. Within minutes of Noodle’s on-screen appearance, she’s labeled as suffering from “orphan syndrome.” Having just released Adoption Unfiltered, a book I co-authored in which I write extensively about the lifelong effects of separation trauma, I was interested in whether the movie might explore this further, beyond the insinuation that anyone separated from their parents is broken. I felt a momentary glimmer of hope when Wonka tells Noodle it’s her “orphan syndrome” making her mistrust others. But the opportunity to delve deeper into what might be going on for Noodle never came. Somehow, despite losing her parents as an infant, Noodle presents as perfectly adapted, the only emotional residue of orphanhood: yearning for her parents. But where was her anxiety? Her alarm? Her frustration? How could she so readily give her heart to Wonka—and others, without crippling fear that she might lose those she dared to love, as were her formative experiences as an infant? Click on image to read more.

In 1912, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener published The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he proposed the world’s continents had once been joined in a single landmass that he named Pangaea. Wegener grounded his argument in the agreeable shape of continental coastlines, which look like puzzle pieces asking to be fit back together, and unlikely deposits in the fossil record of similar plants and animals separated by oceans too vast to swim. Wegener’s proposal was visually intuitive and supported by a body of physical evidence, and it should have found a home among professional geologists at the time, but they rejected the idea and abandoned it for five decades. Wegener was a meteorologist, after all. Geologists didn’t consider him part of their family. Wegener raised the single continent theory in the public mind and named it, but the idea was not his. It was the brainchild of Frank Taylor, an amateur geologist in the United States. Continental geologists might have considered Taylor a distant cousin at the time. Neither Wegener nor Taylor could say what caused the single landmass to break apart and send the continents traveling in opposite directions. That task fell to British geologist, Arthur Holmes, who in 1944 was wise to the currents of heat and rock being exchanged underground and imaginative enough to speculate that continents move about because heated plates of rock are pushing and shoving against each other below the surface.   Click on image to read more.

By Sara Easterly As an adoptee who writes and speaks in adoption spaces, I’ve encountered many adoptive parents with adult-aged adoptees who are struggling because their children have created necessary boundaries, asked for distance, or cut off ties altogether. Most of these parents entered into adoption without access to adoptee-centered information in a time that lacked much, if any, post-adoption support. They may have made it through what seemed like normal years raising their children into adulthood and have been looking forward to blissful years of parenting “retirement,” only to realize that adoption has presented new hurdles to a rewarding relationship with their adult children. If you’re faced with a similar parenting challenge right now, there may be a way through. Insight into what could be going on underneath the situation points the way. Three things adoptees’ boundaries or distancing might be telling you: 1. Adoptees may be experiencing an adolescence. Adolescence is described by child developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, PhD, as the bridge between childhood and adulthood. For adoptees, adolescence is often delayed or we undergo a second adolescence in adulthood designed to complete any unfinished business from the first. There could be a couple of reasons for this: • Important identity tasks of adolescence can be complicated for adoptees. On a physical level and on a day to day basis, we’re without genetic mirrors that would help normalize our physical or behavioral traits and proclivities or understand our changing bodies. If we’re in a closed adoption, it can be hard to imagine ourselves 15, 30, or more years down the road when our first parents’ faces aren’t accessible to offer glimpses of our future selves. These are just some of the things that can impact the identity tasks of adolescence, when we’re meant to confidently grow into ourselves. Click on the image to read more.

On Saturday November 4, 2023, The Benevolent Society, Post Adoption Resource Centre presents the Adoption Literary Festival to showcase a range of adoption stories in an Australian context.  The presentations will amplify the voices of lived experience and highlight the lifelong nature and complexities of adoption. The first Adoption Literary Festival took place in the United States in February 2022. This will be the first of its kind in Australia. The online event takes place from 9:30 am to 2:30 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (15 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.) Click here for more information and to book free tickets.   Click on image to read more.

By Bruno Giles Many years ago, after a long wait, I received an email from the Swiss Branch of the International Social Service saying that they had important information about my adoption. They’d called earlier in the day, but received my answering machine and preferred not to leave phone messages about this type of search. I was asked to call them back, which I did immediately. The woman I was transferred to introduced herself and got right to the point. She told me they had contacted both my birth mother and my foster mother, news I had been waiting more than 50 years to hear. It was quite shocking to actually hear those words. I took a deep breath, but said nothing, still trying to process the moment. Before I could respond, she continued, “Your birth mother doesn’t want any contact with you at this time, but the wonderful news is that your foster mother was thrilled to hear about your search. She is 85 years old and has thought about you all these years.” When I heard this news I didn’t know which one to focus on, the good news or the bad news, my heart sank then quickly rose up again. What is sadness mixed with joy? What is hate mixed with love? Rejection mixed with acceptance? Is it possible to cry out of one eye? The woman explained that my foster mother still had pictures of me as a toddler and was waiting to share them with me. However, as great as that sounded, my thoughts returned back to my birth mother’s news. In that moment, I finally realized there would likely never be that reunion I both dreamed of and dreaded. A painful thought for that little boy who wanders aimlessly around in my adult body. She had never answered any of my letters that I had agonized over writing to her, and this seems to be the end of the fantasy of a welcoming, tearful, joyful, lost family meeting, with possible future involvement. But over the next few months, my foster mother and I connected both over the phone and through the mail. Since she was the cousin of my birth mother, she knew her very well. I peppered her with questions about my birth mother, my birth father, what happened, and why. I was focused on one thing only, getting all the information I could on my birth mother before my foster mother disappeared again. She politely answered all the questions I threw at her but unfortunately didn’t know many of the answers to them. Then, during the moments of silence over the phone, she would slowly tell me bits and pieces of what she did know, which was the time we spent together, none of which I remembered. Slowly, over the next few months, the missing part of my life began to emerge. She explained that after I was left in the maturity ward for six weeks, she and her family took me into their home, even recalling the exact date. She said I became their little sunshine and was able to spend the first period of my life with them, surrounded by lots of love. She said it was a terrible day when the time came and they had to let me go. She compared it to the death of her husband many years later. She said back then, 50 years ago, she felt it would be better for me to be raised by parents of the same color and she felt very concerned about this, and this is how and why I came to my new parents in America. I suddenly realized that after all these years of searching for my mother, I was looking in the wrong place and at the wrong person. Just giving birth doesn’t make you the mother. My foster mother was exactly the birth mother I had hoped to find. Full of love, a bit of regret that the times hadn’t changed fast enough for us, and admitting that perhaps now, it would be different. She told me that I was like one of her own children After all these years, I believe I have found her after all!

By Vanessa Nolan Welcome to Babyworld. The fun, easy way to start or grow your family, ease your infertility pain, and forget about your worries and insecurities for a while. At the start of the game, you’ll be provided with one or two children to make your own. If you want to splash the cash, you can import additional infants, available in a range of ages and colors at different price points. Or why not go for our premium product endorsed by celebrities—the rainbow family? Will you take your chances with “potluck”? Your potluck children will be selected by the algorithm, written by our in-house team of experienced social workers. There’s no guarantee that they will pass as your natural children, and they may have additional needs of their own you are unprepared for. Or will you take time to follow the detour and visit the Build-A-Child workshop? There you will get to choose from a variety of physical, intellectual, and temperamental attributes. Your Build-A-Child will then be matched as closely as possible with a child from the pool of those available. Be aware, though, that it may not be possible to find you a match. Plan your strategy. Wait for a product that more closely meets your needs or take the first available child. In Level 1, you have up to 18 years to play with your new family. If, during that time, you collect enough points you’ll earn bonus years of gratitude and servitude. Points are earned for giving them a “good home” and for loving them so much because you “chose” them. No need to tell them what kind of “choice” it really was; that before you “chose” them you tried for years and failed to have children. This is because you control the release of information and can use this power to your advantage. If your children do suspect they were not your first choice, you can lie because they are dependent on you and will believe what you tell them. You can even play with their minds and suggest that they “chose” you. Or you can tell them it was “God’s will” which indicates strong game play and all but guarantees compliance and acceptance. In Babyworld, your children will love you back, but be wary of this love. It can be from fear of losing you, rather than a child’s natural love for their parents. Because they have been torn from their mothers, they will not know that love isn’t supposed to hurt. Once you understand this, you can use it to your advantage in one of two ways. You can make them more dependent on you by telling them how special they are and letting them remain unnaturally attached into adolescence and adulthood (this works particularly well with boys). Or you can treat them badly so they never develop any self-esteem and (bonus!) don’t believe they deserve to have information about themselves. Your first task is to name—or rather, rename your children. You can give them your surname and even a name that helps them feel part of your family so they will not show interest in their origins. If you wish, you may completely erase their identity by giving them an anglicized name if they are not from an Anglo family. This is known as the “color blind” play. An alternative strategy that’s popular these days if you have taken children from another culture is to allow them to stay connected by learning about the language and culture together. This can be superficial—who doesn’t like dumplings at Chinese New Year?—and makes you look progressive and open-minded. Some players go all in and choose a high-risk strategy: not telling the children you are playing Babyworld. This is likely to fail sooner or later, and is not recommended, but it is within the rules of the game to do this if you so wish. Remember, the release of information is under your control. If, during the course of the game, your children present challenging behavior, you have several options. First is the “warrior parent” card. You can go to battle with Social Services and schools in order to obtain the additional resources you need. This will remind you and those around you that both you and your child are different and special. You can also play the “victim” card which has two benefits: it allows you to remain blameless and it draws attention to the sacrifices you are making. All of these strategies keep the attention on you. If you have played these cards and are still not winning, you can play the “rehoming” death card which will take you out of the game but keep you alive. As a reward for taking part, you will be allowed to take the “victim” card with you to use outside the game. So even if you lose, you win! Click on image to read more.

By Akara Skye My mother dropped me off at an empty public playground without a goodbye or a promise to return. I reluctantly and dutifully got out of the car. The playground and I drew a heavy sigh. We were alone together. I shuffled over to the swing set determined to make the best of it. The hot wind kicked up, covering my face with a dusty film. For a moment, it clouded my vision, and I wondered if it might be better to not see clearly. To not see the truth of the matter; that everyone will leave me. What did I do to deserve this? If both the mother I knew and the mother who relinquished me at birth could leave me, it would be easy for others to do the same. My birth mother didn’t come back for me, but went on to a brand new, shiny life including children, the ones she kept. Now my other mother has left me. Would she come back? Hours passed, and the sun began to set. No other children had arrived and neither had my mother. I wondered if this would forever be my landscape. Dusty, dismal, and deserted. I saw her car coming up the road just before dusk. I couldn’t read her face. Was it full of dread and desperation, or maybe it was full of joy and excitement?  Had she done this with her other daughter, the biological one? Put on your game face, I told myself. Act grateful. Don’t ask questions. The car rolled up. No honk, no door swinging open. I got in, and we drove off. The forever silence between us. On the way back home, I was already worrying when, not if, this would happen again. What if she didn’t come back the next time?  Click on image to read more.

By Michelle Hensley Sometimes… She says in her tiny voice She whimpers, then cries and screams, searching out anyone within earshot, longing for basic human compassion. But there is no one to hear her. Sometimes … She says in her bit bigger voice The voice that is starting to feel autonomous, the one questioning her place on a much more intimate level, knowing she looks and feels different. This is the voice who suspects, but is not allowed to question, the one who ponders the randomness of it all, but has learned not to rock the boat. This voice cracks even when she whispers, barely heard or acknowledged. Sometimes…. She starts again. This voice is stronger, it has knowledge, experience, willpower. Her curiosity has opened a plethora of feelings, and there is no safe set of ears to hear her words. Things are so confusing that she feels she leads two lives. She carefully weighs her responses, juggles her emotions, learns how to act the role, so as not to alarm or lose the last tangible link of normalcy, between the now and the What if I…? A select few listen, but she is still not heard. SOMETIMES…. She speaks out, and her voice is steady. The words come quickly now, randomly jumbled as she begins relating to others like her, those who know. She types these words into her phone for later, an endless bullet point document that should be titled “and another thing!” This time, she can speak it out loud, she can inflict tone, and add pause, for effect. There are adjectives with fervor, there are adverbs spoken so eloquently that you can almost predict the shiver of visceral effect. There is eye contact, subtle but steady at first. It switches to more direct pointed gazes at those deemed visually offensive and judgmental. The harshest glares are saved for those who are especially ignorant and opinionated, and love to flaunt their savior complex. THIS IS THE VOICE SHE SPEAKS WITH NOW. It has substance, truth, spirit, faith, and love. This voice is the loudest. It has been boosted by the words, the acts of kindness, acceptance, and genuine support from those who show up to hear her speak. She has found fellow chorus members, allies, and comrades. The chorus has a unique sound, a melody, a song…. She has never heard such a lovely sound before. These are the voices she longed to hear, the ones who FINALLY LISTENED, the ones who met her where she was, and gave her the bass she needed. This sound, the sound of kinship, could finally drown out the demons, the gaslighters, the ones with closed minds and cold hearts. This symphony, the music, the lyrics—as only her mother tongue could express, are the exact tone, pitch, staccato, rhythm, and diction her ears need to hear, her heart needs to feel, so she can finally speak her truth. She soars, giddy with the lift of new flighty high notes and arias. She feels seen, validated, and acknowledged for her voice and her feelings. She is heard. Click image to read more.

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. 

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.

By Caitlin Jiao Alexander She will come to me as a ghost, which is unfortunate, but it is the only way. I will be compelled to glance up and I will see a woman who looks more like me than anyone else I know. She will stand a few yards away, wearing something simple, un-patterned. Her hair will be gray or black, her eyes will be dark and sad. Even if she were to smile (and most ghosts don’t smile), they will still be a little sad. She will have a narrow forehead with a smooth hairline, like mine, and full lips, like mine. If she speaks, she will say a name. I will not recognize her words as a name, but I will recognize her in the same way that one recognizes somebody in a dream: with feeling and certainty, not with logic. She will flicker like a dying lamp and then disappear. *** When there’s so much you don’t know about yourself, fantasy blooms into your mind like weeds in an empty lot. Harmless, pretty, and just as susceptible to death as they are to growth. The stories, worlds, and characters constructed by young adoptees are called “the ghost kingdom” by Betty Jean Lifton, adoptee activist and psychologist. An adopted person’s imagination stretches to fill infinite unanswered questions. Who was my mother? What did she do? What about my father? What kind of life did they have? How do I fit into that lost legacy? The adoptee creates her own narratives. She uses half-redacted clues, or information passed from agency to adoptive parent, or pure speculation to populate her ghost kingdom.   As a child, my imagination would place me in the role of an alien, a descendant of royalty, even a clone. I was eleven years old, fantasizing about my figurative letter from Hogwarts, my superhero origin story. I read a children’s book series called Replica about a girl who begins to experience strange abilities, leading her to discover that she is a clone. She has a crescent-shaped birthmark on her shoulder; I have a splotch-shaped birthmark on my back. She was adopted but didn’t know; I am adopted and have always known. “Isn’t it weird how I have that birthmark?” I asked my mom. “In the book I’m reading, the clone girl has a birthmark, too.” “That doesn’t make you a clone, sweetie,” she responded in the loving yet dismissive way of a parent. “It would be cool if I were, though,” I mumbled. “No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.” Why wasn’t it fun for her to imagine that I could be a cloned government experiment? It was fun for me. I didn’t want to be a sad, ordinary adopted person. I wanted to be special. I wanted a more interesting story than the one I was living.  Orphans and adoptees are tropes as old as storytelling itself: Moses, Superman, Annie, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, etc. Adoptees are living mysteries, quests-waiting-to-happen, puzzles with a heartbeat. The questions of our lives make for good backstory and motivation. The potential for lies and betrayal make for good plot twists. Our journeys from isolation to reunion make classic plots. But, of course, real life is not like the stories.  Click on image to read more.