Siblings

I peel the top half of a banana and hold it out to my little boy. The little man, who is about two months shy of his second birthday, claps his hands and takes it from me with a smile. He bites off the top inch then holds it out for me to take a bite. I tell him that I don’t want any, so he chomps off another piece and chews on it. He makes his way over to his baby sister, lying on a blanket, and holds the banana out for her to take a bite. Of course, Baby Sister doesn’t even have teeth, nor has she started on solid foods, so she just looks up at him… [more]

A friend of mine sent me a wonderful book recently, "In On It: What adoptive parents would like you to know about adoption" by Elisabeth O'Toole. There's been so much written for members of the triad, what a great idea to have a resource for all the friends and family that support the triad members! A point I try hard to make in all of my books and speaking is that my choice to place my son for adoption was not just my own - it was a choice that had a profound effect on my entire family. I also know that my son's adoptive parents choice to create a family through adoption had a profound effect on their family… [more]

Rachel wasn't the only sibling to be won over by her big brother. Years later, when my second daughter was born, the process repeated itself. For Amanda, the day Joe’s status of “brother” became real was when she was five. Joe had come to visit in order to surprise Rachel at the Madrigal performance her school orchestra was doing at the high school. We were at the house, Joe, my parents, my husband and Amanda, waiting for the time to go to the school. Amanda had not seen Joe since she was little, and couldn’t remember it, so she was eyeing him closely during this visit. After a few minutes of visiting, Amanda suddenly ran upstairs to her room, returning in… [more]

“Your picture is in his room,” his mother had wrote. As usual, the questions I was too afraid to ask were the ones she sensed and answered before they were even asked. My son’s adoptive mother wrote to me in her very first letter about how she had placed my photo in his room, and had placed the gifts I sent him home with from the hospital on a special shelf. Each year, as the letters came, she told me of how they talked with Joe about me. In the beginning, it was simply telling him my name. As he grew, the questions became more detailed, and her answers followed. By the time he was 5, I had married and had just… [more]

One of the challenges for every teacher each fall is recognizing, respecting and supporting the many different types of families in their care.  Adoptive parents can be instrumental in helping teachers with this task. Who better to teach the teachers than the people who know the adopted child best? The first step in building understanding is in helping teachers understand that families are made through adoption because they are powered by love. Children are placed for adoption by their birthmothers because they are loved and their birthmothers are willing to sacrifice in order for their child to have a better life. Children are adopted because adoptive parents have love to give a child and made the tough choice to go through… [more]

I was so scared the morning we were to meet. Mom came along, she had been there the last time I saw Joe, she had kissed him goodbye too. When we arrived, my heart began racing as I saw them step out of their van. Joe's parents and I immediately hugged, and cried, and said “Thank you” to each other until we laughed. Then I saw Joe. His head came just up to my chin. I knew every detail of his face already from studying the photos. I said hello and hugged him, kissing the top of his head. After a minute or more sobbing into his fuzzy hair, it dawned on me – “I’m  probably scaring the pants off this poor… [more]

My brothers and I are fighting. I know, I know. Everyday, all day, my life revolves around telling my kids to get a long with their brothers and sisters. Yet here I am in the midst of a doozie of an argument with my family. Silly and a bit hypocritical, don't ya think? In my defense it is the first real drama my family of origin has ever had. I credit this mostly to the fact that I am was the only girl. While growing up in a family of boys, disagreements would happen, quite frequently in fact. However, my brothers would pound on each other for a couple minutes and when you turned around to get a bucket to catch… [more]

I had no idea how challenging marriage was. I fell in love with a good looking boy, who was educated, wanted a family, worked hard and was, in my twenty-something-year-old mind, "perfect!" I envisioned spending my life with him, holding hands and calmly talking about any small problems that may arise. In a nutshell, enjoying my happily ever after. Boy was I wrong! Don't misunderstand. I still have my happy ending...it's just been a lot harder to hold onto it than I thought. Marriage is a lot more work than anyone ever told me (or if they told me, I was too busy staring longingly into the eyes of my beloved to listen!) Combining our lives into one has created tension, days and… [more]

Webster Dictionary defines open adoption as: "an adoption that involves contact between biological and adoptive parents and sometimes between biological parents and the adopted child". From that definition and among the adoption community there is wide range of contact which falls under "open adoption". Our family has adopted six children from three different families and I have a huge variety in the amount of openness that is in each relationship.  I always joke that I keep in Hallmark in business for Mother's Day because I send out so many well wishes. I have cards going to birth-moms, birth grandparents, birth aunts and birth great-grandmas. I even have one card that goes to a birth mom’s former foster mom! We have one set of birth… [more]

They say that loss is always involved on all sides of the triad—to the first parent, the loss of the placed child; to the adopted child, the loss of the first parents and of one’s own biological roots; to the adoptive parent, the loss of the biological child who might have been. But only the first two of these are strictly adoption-related losses: Had George and I never adopted, we still would have experienced the loss of our biological children who were never born; conversely, some parents come to adopt even though they are perfectly able to bear children (and often with biological children already part of their families). So while it is often true that there is loss on all sides, the losses of the first parent and the adopted… [more]