Introduction to The Sought-After

Hello, Everyone:
Welcome to The Sought-After, my blog about being adopted, and about my experiences with search and reunion my birth families. I've had adoption on the brain for ever so long, and have been writing about it in secret, during the interstitial scraps of time between being a mom and being an English professor and learning how to do plaster repair on the walls of my century-old house, and, well, you get the idea.

I have been closeted about writing about being an adopted person mostly because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings: I love and respect my parents and my brothers, who have been very supportive about my search to find my birth parents, but I'm scared of hurting them by writing about my experiences of alienation and longing; I love and respect my birth parents and my newly found half-siblings, and don't want to hurt their feelings either. I also worry that writing about my experiences as an adoptee might offend other adoptive parents and birth parents who read this blog, so I am scared to do it.

But do it I shall, because I find the perspective of the adult adoptee strangely scarce out there in the current discourse about adoption. Adoption is a huge, important topic in our society and in our world right now, with so many parents choosing to adopt domestically or internationally these days; I am thankful that the adoption process in the United States now includes educating adoptive parents about issues adopted babies and children may face with with regards to attachment, grief, identity, and abandonment, just to name a few.

Don't get me wrong; I am not "anti-adoption." My parents are loving and kind, and they raised me well. But being adopted made me different; it made me feel different and it made me act different, and it took me a long time to figure out why because I was born at a time (in the late 1960s) when educating parents about the special needs and circumstances of the adopted psyche was not the norm.

So I'm here to tell the story of my journey as an adopted girl who really needed to know where she came from. I'll write about my search and reunion with my birth families, my thoughts about contemporary adoption, and my reactions to adoption literature. I'll do this in hopes of shining light on the secrets of adoption, especially closed adoption, to diminish the power that those secrets wield against adopted people and those who love us. I hope to generate discussion that will help us all feel more whole and more understanding of each other.

Thanks for reading, and tell me what you think!