Full Description
What can we learn about the experience of adoption from those who have taken that journey? How can those touched by adoption navigate successfully through the issues of search, reunion, and aftermath? Will those answers have a positive impact on adoption today? Drawing upon the experiences of dozens of triad members—adopted persons, birth parents, and adoptive parents—the authors offer insight into the concerns, issues, joys, and pain experienced by those who lives are framed by adoption.
The book explores such questions as:
•How do I make the decision to search for my parents?
•How do I prepare emotionally?
•What are my adoptive parents feeling and thinking?
•What if I am rejected, encounter death, or reach a dead end?
•How do I develop a relationship with siblings I've never known?
The authors deal sensitively with these and many other issues. Attention is also given to the needs and concerns of adoptive parents as their children grow into adults. Practical advice helps prepare triad members to deal emotionally and psychologically with the process of search and reunion.
Contents
Introduction
A Look at Issues and Their Impact
Secrecy in Adoption and the High Cost It Required
Lifelong Psychological Presence: Can Family Members Really Be Invisible?
Focus on the Adopted Person
Growing Up in Closed Adoption
A Walk into the Wilderness: Learning of Your Adoption As an Adult
Focus on the Birthparent
Birthmothers and Birthfathers--The Lifelong Journey Begins: Discovery, Disclosure, Decisions
Birthmothers and Birthfathers--The Journey Continues: The Lifelong Impact of Relinquishment in Closed Adoption
Focus on Understanding Adoptive Parents in Search and Reunion
Communicating the Decision to Search to Your Adoptive Parents
The Process of the Search
Making the Decision: To Search or Not to Search
Preparing Emotionally for and Initiating the Search
Patchwork Siblings: Adoptees in Postreunion Relationships
Synchronicity in Reunion
Dealing with Special Issues within the Search
When the Pieces Don't Fit: Finding Dead Ends Dead Ends
Revisiting an Old Wound: Encountering Denial or Rejection
Facing a History of Abuse or Neglect
Searching in Midlife: What Are the Implications?
Postreunion Relationships: Now What? New Beginnings
Changing Times Policy, Etc.
Appendix 1:Growing Up in Open Adoption: An Essay of Life Experience by Sara VanderHaagen
Appendix 2: Growing Up in Transracial Adoption: An Essay of Life Experience by Ai Loan Nguyen
Appendix 3: Search and Reunion Etiquette: The Guide Miss Manners Never Wrote by Monica Byrne
Appendix 4: Making Contact After the Search by Curry Wolfe
Appendix 5: Resources and Recommended Readings
Selected Bibliography
