Adoption Reunion Quotes

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...

I used to think that being consumed by the questions of my identity and origins made me an inferior person, even as a child.

Destiny is not always preordained. Life is about making choices. Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn. Our souls cast long shadows over many people, even after we are gone. Fate, luck, and providence are the consequence of our freedom of choice, not the determinants. When justice is served by following our principles, making good decisions brings us inner peace.

Adoptees deserve open records because deception and partial truths do not set us free.

Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience.

Adoptee rights are everyone's rights, and they deserve to be protected.

You had nightmares every night for a long time and screamed in Korean words, but we didn't know what they meant. I asked someone who knew Korean, and he said it was um-ma um-ma, the word for mom.

If the system were designed to protect adoptees, why do so many have to fight for their rights?

It's illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.

Blood can help make family, but family often transcends blood.

Yet I’ve also found common ground sharing my story with people who, while not adopted, have distant or absent parents. Some of them, too, seek reconnection and reunion, with complicated results. A year or two after I met my birth father, I became friends with a woman who had grown up without her father, only to look for him as an adult. She seemed to understand and relate to my story as much as a fellow adoptee might.

If civility is your primary goal, or if productive conversation is impossible, make learning your go-to. If you just want to get through a family reunion, learning is your emergency exit that allows you to make almost any conversation civil.62 Adopt a frame of mind in which you are engaging in a study of someone with radically different beliefs than yours and try to learn all you can about how they form their beliefs.

As I approach the last stage of my life, I know one thing for certain. When my final moments on this earth come to pass, it won’t be what house I lived in, what car I drove, what job I had, or how much money I put in the bank that will be on my mind. None of that matters in the end. What matters is the lesson that God has taught all of us from the very beginning when He said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Because that is all that really matters. The people. The relationships. The love.

I’d like you to meet Bert and Ernie.” She lifted a brow at him and he shrugged. “I didn’t name them. They’re retired military working dogs. I adopted them about three years ago.” He paused. “I wanted Mr. Snuffleupagus too, but one of my buddies took him.

Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you'd probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn't sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realized you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author's feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.

I wasn't crazy after all. I wasn't the only one who experienced fear about loss and guilt towards their adoptive parents. I was relieved that it seemed very common. Adoption is an emotional subject and the problems don't end with reunion. In some ways, reunion is just the beginning of the road.

Reunion has taught me that there is no way to remake your history or your family in the image you want. But there can be more, if you are willing to look for those stories that were lost - you might just find someone new to forgive, to love, to grow with. Someone to take your hand and search *with* you.

I don't understand this--when people love you so much they are willing to get rid of you. I think if I loved someone that much I'd want to stay with them. It doesn't make sense that love would make a mother leave, and I wonder when this mother will love me that much too. I get the idea that love might be something to both desire and fear, and maybe if we don't love each other too much I won't have to go away again. I wonder why love works for everyone else, but it doesn't work for me.

To any adopted person searching for help and support, I saw this: find people who really know and understand the adoption experience and stay away from people who think they know. Avoid like the plague those who are just interested in being a part of your reunion stories because it sounds like fun. Be open to professional counselling to understand and help process all the conflicting emotions you may feel so that your reunion can be the best possible experience; so that you, as an adoptee, can pass on to your children the joy in their arrival that you never felt was connected to your own.

We make decisions in our lives, sometimes foolish ones, sometimes damaging ones, but we always make those decisions with good intentions. We don’t set out to hurt people. We don’t set out to cause ripples in a stream that become tsunamis of destruction. We take children to doctors for medical needs but frequently don’t take our children for psychological help—or we do and then are blamed later in life for that decision, too. Life is nothing but choices and every choice ripples out and touches and transforms, for better or worse, everyone else in our lives.

But I can’t and won’t judge her. People aren’t perfect. Imperfect people can do terrible, horrible things to each other and yet still be worth loving and forgiving.

Here we go. The Harlequin moment when mother and child meet for the first time in twenty years. Spare me the drama, please. I had enough of that in the foster homes they dumped me in.

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch. Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

adoption

Young children with anxiety often respond well to visual sequences of events. Small pictures of daily events may be drawn out on felt, and arranged on a larger piece of felt. Children and parents can arrange the felt pictures in an order of events, displaying what will happen for that day or the next day. Children who seem to expect abandonment can see that in the morning Mom is there, or see and talk about what it feels like when Mom picks them up at day care. A difficulty common with younger, anxious children is that they tend to stop processing information when they come to the part of a daily sequencing that involves separation. This visual aid helps them to get to the other side of the sequence in which there is reunion. This is a good aid for children with permanent auditory processing problems or emotionally produced auditory processing problems.

I deeply understood that there is no such thing as an isolated act. This particular act had looped and wrapped and folded in on itself and other acts, pushed forward, pulled a hidden past into the present, and placed it in front of me as if to say: Isn’t this a fine moment? Who knew?

Being denied their original birth certificates isn't just a problem for adoptees. It's a social problem, requiring social change.

Being adopted is complicated. It can be both a win and a loss at the same time.

Being adopted is complicated. It can be both a win and a loss at the same time, and when the “loss” part goes unacknowledged, the omission adds greatly to the complication.

According to Aunt Pauline, my godmother and my mother’s oldest sister, who later adopted me, I entered the world during a stormy period in my parents’ lives. Before I was conceived, my mother and father had had one of their brief but periodic separations. My mother had fled to her parents’ home in Durham, North Carolina, where her family urged her to seek a divorce. She had returned to Baltimore with that intention, or so her family thought. Instead, there was a passionate reunion between my parents, and I, not a divorce, was the result.

I understood that this sister of mine was going to live somewhere else, away from us...This information did not make me thing of the baby as less mine. She was my sister, like my brother was my brother and my mother was my mother. The adoptive parents' claim on my developing sister did not negate mine, she was not a kingdom or a territory or a thing with a deed; she was a person. This baby girl would be both my sister and these other people's daughter, and my mom's daughter. there would be moments when one claim took focus-- as right now this baby girl was more Ours than Theirs, and one day she would be more Theirs than Ours, but none of those connections could completely erase the others. It would be easier, perhaps, if they could, if after she was gone we could forget this baby ever belonged to us. But that's not how people work.

As of February 8, 1979, James Arthur Springer—Jim, as he went by—had been twice married. His first marriage, to a woman named Linda, ended in divorce. His second wife was named Betty. Jim Springer grew up in Ohio and once owned a dog named Toy. He had a son named James Allan (although perhaps with one L). He was a chain-smoker who liked beer. In his garage he had a woodworking bench. He drove a Chevy, suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, and once served as a sheriff’s deputy. His family lived on a quiet street—theirs was the only house on the block. As of February 8, 1979, James Edward Lewis—Jim, as he went by—had been twice married. His first marriage, to a woman named Linda, ended in divorce. His second wife was named Betty. Jim Lewis grew up in Ohio and once owned a dog named Toy. He had a son named James Allan (although perhaps with one L). He was a chain-smoker who liked beer. In his garage he had a woodworking bench. He drove a Chevy, suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, and once served as a sheriff’s deputy. His family lived on a quiet street—theirs was the only house on the block. As of February 8, 1979, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis had almost no knowledge of one another. They had met before, but only as infants. On February 9, 1979, the two met for the first time in nearly forty years. They were identical twins, given up for adoption as one-month-olds, now reunited. The shocking coincidence seems like that of myth, but it’s almost certainly not—shortly after the twins’ reunion, People magazine and Smithsonian magazine reported on the incredible confluence of genetically identical twins with anecdotally identical lives. The two men piqued the curiosity of a researcher named Thomas J. Bouchard, a professor of psychology and the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota.

Having a blood family means suddenly revising a definition of family that I have, over many years, learned to accept. How can I hold both concepts in my mind or find room for both families in my heart?

...I am about eight years old when I first become aware of being other--foreign, outside, separate. Because this lesson comes from my own family, it resonates deeper and truer than playground taunts ever have.