Author

As an adoptee who had a relatively uneventful childhood, searching for my birthparents wasn't a consuming goal for me growing up. I had a natural curiosity regarding obvious biological things: did anyone look like me, where did my blue eyes come from, who could I blame for this skin that burns in the slightest sun? Sometimes I would fantasize about how different my life might have been if I had been raised by my biological family or wonder if I had any siblings. As I became an older teenager, I developed a persistent concern that I might accidentally fall in love with a biological relative, heaven forbid, and having seen a cover story in the Weekly World News, have a resulting love child… [more]

Courtney's post last night got me thinking about attachment from my own experience. I was adopted as an infant of eight weeks old and my brother was adopted seven years later as an infant of roughly the same age. Neither of us have ever had any conscious memory of any family or life prior to the childhood we experienced with our parents, our adoptions were openly discussed even if the details regarding our birth families were totally closed to us, and being children of the 70s, our parents didn't have a tremendous amount of advance adoption counseling regarding attachment. So how did our experience wind up seeming so uneventful, normal and positive? I think, from the start, our parents acknowledged and made accomodations for… [more]

When Oscar Wilde wrote that "the final mystery is oneself," we can assume he was referring to an individual's ability to develop self awareness. He might just as well have been referring to the journey that many adult adoptees take when they undertake a search to discover their biological roots. Our greatest mystery happens to be ourself: a mystery created when adoptions were hidden, closed, disguised from the world. Whether by design or by chance, adult adoptees find themselves in a position to undertake a Sherlock Holmes-like voyage of discovery whose ending cannot be predicted. My search experience spans twenty years from my first request for non-identifying information until my first face-to-face meeting with my birth mother. Along the way, I encountered opposition… [more]

It's been said to start at the very beginning as it's the very best place to start which is clearly solid advice. My name is Lisa B and I'm elated to join this already robust community as one of your new bloggers focusing on both adoptee perspectives and adoption searches. My life and resulting world view has been actively shaped by my experiences as an adoptee who was relinquished at birth through Catholic Charities to loving parents who never hid that fact from me. I've always known that I was adopted and it was as natural to me as sliced bread, walking and my own blue eyes in the mirror. Many of the friends my parents were closest to during my childhood… [more]