Adoption Blogs

So I gave my seventeen-year-old son the driver's wheel on his high school education. Not because I wanted to, but because what I was doing wasn't working. Supervising him closely and catching all his missing assignments for him to complete just caused him to lie to me and let me be his safety net. With the counselor's agreement, I took my hands off the wheel, and he is succeeding or failing on his own. Initially he became uber-responsible, skipping lunch at Arby's with his friends so that he could go to the library and catch up on work. He came home a week ago saying he no longer had an F in History. I asked him how he managed that. He said he… [more]

Who’s job is it to tell people our child’s adoption story?  Is there even such a thing as a right to know when it comes to a person’s adoption status?  Of course the child herself or himself has a right to know, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  What about the child’s relatives?  Friends of the family?  Parents’ coworkers? There are situations when it is abundantly clear that an adoption took place.  The parents may have needed to take a lot of time off work for travel, or a group of people see the mother on a regular basis and go from seeing her slim one day and with a baby the next, or the parents look nothing like their adopted child. … [more]

Both the American and British foster systems initially seek, in my experience, to enable birth parents to regain custody of their children. There are cases in which it seems clear to me that there is no hope for parents to change the circumstances that caused them to lose access to their children, but I am no professional. I'm just a mom, and being a mom, I'm glad that foster institutions do their due diligence to understand and help the entire family instead of jumping to conclusions. In case you're unfamiliar with foster care, it is the institution of placing a child temporarily within a family that has been vetted and trained to care for them. These children have had to be removed… [more]

After adopting me, my parents had continued to do foster care and over the course of my young life many children had come and gone from our home. This specific story centers on a brother and sister who came to live with us during my early adolescence. The brother was my age and the sister only a year our junior. The brother and I had hit it off and enjoyed the same outdoor activities and had become great friends. The sister struggled with the kindred relationship he and I shared and was constantly jealous and felt left out of our adventures. I can still close my eyes and smell the earthy aromas of the soil, fall leaves, and birch trees that filled… [more]

Mother’s Day was always a time of year I would wonder about my biological mother. When I was younger I knew I was adopted but didn’t know details, like my parents’ names or birthdays, so Hallmark Holidays such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day usually were what would trigger reflection for me. Growing up, when I would think about my mother (biological) I would wonder many things. What did she look like? What did her voice sound like? Did she think about me too? Did she remember my birthday? Did she still love me? Did she regret the choice she made? There was a point in my life that I even went as far as writing a fictional story about… [more]

Parents of Reactive Attachment Disorder kids are caught in a bind. On the one hand, few of us just happen to have within our circle of intimates close friends who are also parenting RAD kids. On the other hand, we need a lot of support from our friends exactly because we are parenting in such a challenging situation. What do we do? I talk to the counselor weekly, but when I'm out with the girls, and we're talking about our lives, if I'm going to participate, I have to talk about what's really going on with me. When I do, I run up against frames of reference that may have almost no overlap with mine. Case in point. I went to dinner with… [more]

My wife and I have two beautiful children, both of which came to us through the miracle of adoption. What a blessing. What a joy. Still, though, it’s been quite the bumpy road to get to where we are now. One of the toughest things we’ve had to deal with was the feeling of guilt and debt. I mean, our children’s birth parents gave us the most wonderful gift—the gift of parenthood—which came through a big sacrifice on their part. Our adoptions are very open and we’ve communicated freely and often all along the journey, which means that we saw the heartbreak in their eyes when they made the hard decisions. Even though they had their minds made up and they had their… [more]

Mother's Day can be a lonely day for a mother who isn't a real part of her child's life, after adoption. It can be a cold reminder of what you don't have, as you see your friends on Facebook flash their picture, post their thanks and as families gather to celebrate the woman who helped make them who they are. It can make you feel, as a birthmother, entirely invisible. I remember sitting in church on Mother's Day, and coaxing myself not to cry as they handed out roses to all the Mother's. I didn't get one. The year before, with my swollen belly, and ankles, a confused 12 year old had handed me one. The next? No one even glanced at… [more]

We reached the end of the road with my seventeen-year-old son who will not do his school work. We've tried peanut butter sandwiches instead of yummy food until his work is turned in. We even tried charging him $50 per missing assignment out of his part-time job paycheck. He cried when he had to pay us $200 then turned around and paid us another $150 for three more missing assignments. So did he really care? I don't think so. The final strategy--and this sounds draconian, but we were trying to get his attention--was to drive him to a motel and tell him we were paying for a thirty-day stay, and when he was getting close to the end of the… [more]

I'm a single mom. I choose to involve others in the community in raising my kids, from their teachers to their godmother to family friends. When it comes to making the right call as a parent, two (or ten) minds can be better than one. I'm a big believer in raising my kids within a village of love and support. That said, it's important to respect children's privacy boundaries and need for confidentiality. Before I speak to even my closest friends to seek advice about my daughters, I get their permission. At age 7, my twins are old enough to tell me whether they're comfortable with me talking or blogging about their experiences. It gets a little tricky when they ask me to… [more]