"'I was adopted because I have _____________'"

How many times have we adoptees filled in the blank about why, oh why, oh why we were given up?

Finally, some good news:

I just read this little article at the Adoptive Families Magazine website in which a social worker explains that it's important that adopted children get to make their own "lifebook" or scrapbook so they can express their feelings and ideas about being adopted and so that their adoptive parents can witness those feelings and ideas.

Let me just say: we have come a long way, baby. Doing something like this was so far off anyone's radar screen when I was a little adopted kid. I wish I had been guided as a child to express some of the fear, confusion, and guilt I felt as an adoptee. Instead those feelings had nowhere to go and so instead they got stuffed away somewhere and have been seeping out for decades in everything I've written and all over every relationship I've been in.

So, kudos to you, social workers who encourage adoptive parents help their their adopted children do this emotional work, kudos to the parents who have the guts to do it, and most of all, blessings on the forthcoming generations of adoptees who may grow up with the ability to name, expose, and dissipate the shame, guilt, and fear associated with being adopted.