more thoughts from an adult who is adopted

Here are some thoughts from another friend of mine who happens to be adopted. I'm just so happy my friends are so willing to share their stories with us!!!

In November 1976, Scott, my half brother, and I were adopted by whom I will always believe are my parents! I have never looked back!

Scott and I were taken out of a situation of poverty, filth and devastation that we both remember very well into a home of love, faith and FOOD! Being a adopted child had made my life a fuller life! I realized that I was hand picked for more love then any child could imagine! Going from a foster home that had Scott and I, not for helping us but for the money from the state, to a home that was longing for the love of not only one child but two!

I know that way to many times a year someone has a child that they either do not want, or can not take care of or does not have the capability of loving BUT when this happens there is always someone out there that CAN take care of this child, CAN love this child and DOES want this child! Welcome to the wonderful world of Adoption! Adoption can be the best thing in the world for a child, either a baby born to a mother that is terrified and knows she can not do it or a older child that has been in "the system" for a while or in a place that is not conducive of learning to be a well rounded member of society. Either way adoption is not only for the child but for the parents who take this child in to love and raise as their own! When looking back at being adopted, there are many times in life that I forget I was adopted.

When I was finally blessed with a son with my wonderful husband, we scoured him looking for family traits and both my husband and I as well as my mother who was in the operating room when my son was born noted the 'Moreland/Lindsay' traits! It was a few hours later we were laughing that we found so many things about Jason that looked like my Mother and Father, when I was not biological! We still call and say 'Oh Jason is your biological grand child he does this or has this.'

So the moral to this is once you take a child as a adopted son/daughter that child IS yours! No matter what! I adore the times in my life that happen even now when people tell me 'Oh I see so much of your father in you! You are the spitting image of him and in fact I look JUST like Daddy! '

My husband and I have been luck enough to have a child after 5 years of trying and 6 losses, and even now we talk about when we are going to adopt a child. We do not know if we want a older child or another baby but we BOTH know that we want to adopt. Before we were ever married we sat down and I poured out my heart and soul about how important adopting is to me. The costs aside, which I know can put some people off adoption, I believe that it is something that so many can do and in the end it is the best thing for someone! There is always love to share, so share it and think of adoption!

Thank you wonderful Mer-mer (short for Meredith!) for sharing your story and thoughts with my readers and me!!! You can see Mer-mer's blog here A day in the life of Jason Dawes.

thoughts from another friend

I'm so happy to share our adoption journey with so many friends, and I'm even happier my friends have shared their stories with me. It has taught me so much about adoption already, the kind of stuff I cannot learn from reading a book or searching the web.

Here are some thoughts from another person I am honored to call my friend.

I'm a 60-year old female. Never adopted. Raised by two good people that I loved very much. It's possible that I was a black-market baby or the result of rape. I am told I even attended high school with my brother who lives about two hours from me, but doesn't know about me.

I have always had an emptiness, a hole in my heart, as though life begins with my birth... many teary and unsettling days since I found out, just before graduating high school, that I was not their birth child. But I'm grateful that she did not choose abortion, but allowed me life.

There is definitely something to be said for allowing the child to know both sides if they can/desire to know it, helping to avoid that emptiness that always seems to be just under the surface, and unexplainable.

God bless each of you and may God bless your searches both in finding birth parents and in finding your child to share your lives.

Thank you to sweet Sally for allowing me to share this with my readers.

thoughts from a friend, who is adopted

I got an email from an old friend yesterday and asked her if I could share it with my readers.

"Being adopted myself, I will urge that one idea be considered -- that if you CAN have the kind where the youngster knows both his/her adoptive parents and his/her birth parents, it might be cheering for all concerned. NOT knowing, as one does not when it happened in the Napoleonic code state of Louisiana in 1954, has been something of a lifelong, ummmmm, sense of something missing. Just knowing, as I do, that my mother, 26, was working on her master's degree in library science at a southern university when she fell in love with a married chemical engineer, 25, is NOT SUFFICIENT to fill the hole an ex-newspaper editor feels in the "background" for the story! I felt very much loved by my adopted family and their extended families, but there was this hole in my self-knowledge....."

Before this email, I was totally against an open adoption (for selfish reasons), now I am willing to consider it, for the future of our child. (Oh! did I say "our child"?)

Thank you my dear Lynn. I wish you luck in your search for your birth parents.