Your stories inspire me. When I go on a book signing or to a book fair, exhibit at an art walk or craft festival, I hear your stories. In my Etsy Shop and on Facebook, you send me notes about who you are buying for and why this person will be getting a book, print, […]
Not long after we had adopted our younger son, I heard about a couple who had adopted 12 children. Each one of these precious kids was considered “unadoptable” because of various physical and mental challenges. All of them required continuous care and since the family was quite wealthy, they had the means to provide for […]
A lovely woman, a mother of three once told me,”We would love to adopt, but I worry it would be really hard on our kids”. (This is one of those cliches people say about adoption. Yes, really). How sad I was to hear her say this. Oh, please make your kid’s life hard in some […]
Several years ago, the genealogy bug bit and I joined Ancestry.com (or as my family lovingly calls it, Facebook for Dead People). It became a fun new hobby obsession. After combing through the family history I knew, I did research on the ancestors of my youngest son. He is adopted and knew nothing but the barest […]
What does it mean to me that my son and I do not look alike, that we have ancestors from different continents? What does it mean that my son is a different race than I am? There are actually two answers to that question: It means everything and it means nothing at all. It means […]
I believe in a very succinct philosophy of adoption. It is simply this: Everybody deserves to be somebody’s child. That’s it. Everyone should be someone’s son or daughter. A decades old running argument exists about who should adopt whom. Do you have to be married or can you be single? If so, single male or […]
Adoption is part of our spiritual heritage as Christians. We are steeped in adoption culture, whether we are fully conscious of it or not. Our faith teaches Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, and since we are also His children, this makes all of us His adopted sons and daughters. We know we are […]
You know that classic Mean Kid Trick where the older sibling tells the younger one, usually in a fit of frustration, “Yeah, well, you know WHAT? There is something you don’t know, but I do! You are ADOPTED!” And the little kid runs off, sobbing to his mom, to find out if this new revelation […]
We are a culture obsessed with awards, aren’t we? Participation trophies, annual certificates of appreciation, engraved plaques for most improved scout team player, whatever. We just can’t get enough of them. So I’ve decided to create an award. I mean, why not? All you have to do is declare the award exists and make an […]
What? You’ve never heard of it? The Michael Reagan Syndrome is when a person who happens to be adopted is constantly referred to as the adopted son or daughter of ________. (Don’t bother googling it, it’s a made up term.) Michael Reagan is the oldest son of President Ronald Reagan with his first wife, Jane […]
Search the internet and you will find countless articles about what NOT to say to people who have adopted. (901,000 Google results last I checked) There exists a whole litany of dumb remarks that are commonly said about adoption. Unfortuately, most adoptive parents never forget these comments and the people who say them. You remember […]
Here is the one remark that sends adoptive parents straight to the moon: “I could never love a child that was not my own”. And other variations of the same ignorant line: “Do you have any children of your own”? “Can’t you have your own kids”? “If you adopt a kid, then maybe you will have […]
Grace is God’s unmerited favor, a kindness we don’t deserve. There is nothing we have done, nor can ever do to earn this favor. It is a gift of the purest kind. Even though Grace is God’s domain, sometimes Grace comes from another person, or in our case, two people. Our son’s birthparents. We […]
We met our youngest son the way most extended family members do: Looking through a glass window in the hospital nursery. It was a surreal, out-of-body kind of experience and to make matters even worse, at that moment we did not know if he would actually become our son or not. At that moment, we […]
Our Story (How we got Thing One and Thing Two) We met in college, dated through undergrad and got married before graduate school. Coming from large families, we knew we wanted children. We loved kids and the idea of little ones running around. There was a big unknown, however. In my senior year of high […]
Many years ago I watched “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America”, a documentary about the history and culture of Ultra Orthodox Jews. Full of beautiful stories, there is a scene that has long stayed with me. In it, a young boy celebrates his third birthday with an Upsherin ceremony. He has his first ever haircut […]
It was the first Christmas after September 11th, when the hearts of all humanity were broken and tender. We knew the world had changed and would never really be the same, but many of us were trying to reach back to our old lives, to recreate something familiar, something comforting. Something to remind us of […]