Adoptive Families

The invitation came in a small and sweet baby pink envelope. Our adoption attorney had set the date with the County Clerk for our finalization hearing, meaning we could start the official countdown — the countdown to being an official family. We made signs on bright pink paper displaying the “days until Gotcha Day” so we could rip one down each day until the hearing. Our girl, 11 years old at the time, had been through this before but didn’t remember her previous adoption day. This time had to be memorable. The finalization date was the new beginning we had prayed for, but also seemed like an end to something – no more social workers checking on us constantly, no more mandatory family counseling… [more]

Welcome to my blog post! I’m glad you are here, and I hope you visit often. To give you a little background on our situation, my husband and I have been married for 13+ years. We got married when we were both 30, and we never really thought we wanted children. We lived a good life, thinking only of ourselves, we lived in a big house on a lake and drove expensive cars, had a big boat and spent money like we would have it forever, traveling and partying with friends, we thought we had it all! We owned a business, and when the recession hit, we struggled, to put it mildly. About 3 years ago we had to file bankruptcy and… [more]

My dear sister-in-law was a chiropractor, and she was one of the smartest people I ever met.  I remember her once talking to one of my nephews who had recently suffered an ankle injury and telling him about the scar tissue that develops around the site of the wound.  She talked about how vulnerable and inflexible the surrounding muscles are even after the original wound heals because they have to adapt to the inflexible scar tissue.  She was telling my nephew that he was going to have to be extra careful because that ankle was now going to be more prone to future injuries because of different tissues. My sister-in-law's lesson on injuries led me to think about that primal wound of… [more]

The hardest decision my husband and I have had to make in the seven years since we got our kids is whether to allow contact between them and their birthparents. We first fostered, then adopted, a sibling group (ages 8, 5 and 16 months) who were taken away from their birthparents for substance abuse, domestic violence and mental illness. For the first two foster care years, the  birthmother had one visit with my daughter and no visits with either son. The birthfather had a handful of visits with all three kids as a group, but he missed many more than he kept. By the time the kids were freed for adoption, the birthparents had lied to them, stood them up for visits, and promised… [more]

If there's a theme in the upcoming week at our house, it's CAMP!  My 17-year-old left today for four nights to attend a leadership camp at the University.  (She's actually staying in the same dorm where I lived....ahem....a FEW years ago!)  Tomorrow I take my 12-year-old to camp for 5 nights.  He's never been gone so long and I'm a little worried--for myself!  (I'm also more than a little interested if history repeats itself: Last year he went to this same camp for 3 nights and when he returned home, I was going through his stuff for laundry I noticed that his bar of soap was still in its paper wrapper!) My youngest isn't going on any sleepovers this week but she is… [more]

As scary as that moment was, the thought of being adopted into a stranger’s home to be my “forever family” sounded pathetic, as if I needed a family or anyone else for that matter. Several times I was asked if I wanted to be eligible for adoption and every time a confidently said no. The same questions were asked when family members expressed interest in adopting my younger brothers, but given the familiarity with our foster home and the benefits that the state offered once we aged out of foster care I convinced them that adoption wasn’t necessary for any of us. Despite how difficult it was for my brothers and I to maneuver through college the thought of wanting a family was… [more]

My seventeen-year-old daughter has a boyfriend. This isn't one of the many "boyfriends" she had when she was in junior high, the kinds of boys who came and went from her life as quickly as a bag of M&Ms disappears from my house. I didn't care for too many of the boys that my daughter liked during this period, and honestly, I was worried about her choices and what these kinds of boys meant for her self concept--and I think poor self concept is an issue that plagues many older adoptees. Her first boyfriend turned out to be a real creep, and after they "broke up" (after being together all of three days), he and his friends taunted her, and made her life… [more]

Bonding and attachments are topics in adoption that get a lot of press—and I understand why.  Lately, I have been reflecting on the process of coming together with my children.  I have three kids who have all been adopted at different ages, and I know that connecting with them was different for each. I was in the delivery room when my son was born.  Someone put him in my arms and that was it.  I was there—invested completely—at an emotional, physical, cognitive, and psychic level.  No effort was required.  No thought processes activated.  It was magic. My two daughters were adopted internationally and were older when they came home.  One was seventeen months old and the other seven years.  With the “baby” it was… [more]

I just finished a book for my book club tonight—the book is Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. It is a powerful book about so many things, and I am really looking forward to our discussion. (An interesting note about Bardach is that after the war he came to the U.S. and worked as a plastic surgeon. He developed a surgical procedure for dealing with cleft palates, the Bardach palatoplasty, a procedure still in use today--so all of those international adoptees who undergo surgeries to fix their cleft palate can thank this man.) Before he was to come here, however, he lived in Poland, and during WWII he was sent to the Soviet gulag. His… [more]