The Declassified Adoptee

I chuckled when I pulled M's "family portrait" that he made at preschool from his tote bag.  All four of our immediate family members were present in the colorful picture.  I could not help but notice that his little brother, W, was a tiny baby swaddled and in my arms in this creation.  I could immediately imagine M sitting at his little table surrounded by peers, making his case to his teachers as to why W needed to be a baby in the picture.  W is eighteen months old, technically a toddler, and is only a head shorter than M.  M proudly calls him "Baby W" and corrects me when I tell W that he's getting to be so big.  M is not ready to share the status of "big boy" with W yet. How M views his family is his unique reality.  This made me think of another little boy I am related to and his family reality.

In this clip, Brian Stanton takes on political attitudes and beliefs when it comes to conception from rape by raising his own voice as an adoptee who was conceived from rape.  I am so excited to have contributed to a project Brian is working on to give insight into the minds and hearts of those who conceived from rape and those who were conceived from rape.  Thanks, Brian!

"It's the red one with stripes!"  I hear my almost-four-year-old shout from the living room.  "No, not that one, Bert!"  He says.  "It's the other one!" I chuckle to myself as I listen to him call out which socks on Bernice's clothesline match.  "M" loves to match things, and this Sesame Street segment where Bert asks viewers to "help" him find Bernice's (his pet pigeon) socks on a clothesline full of mismatched socks is right up his alley. M makes a game out of things he observes each day.  Sometimes I'll find him starting at two objects intently, trying to figure out what is the same and what is different about them.  I like his curiosity; one thing that I particularly like is that he rarely uses differences to assign judgement to objects he is comparing.  He merely observes them and moves on. One day, he looked at his family members and compared them.

The exclusion of adult adoptees from adoption discourse is a significant problem in adoption.  Unfortunately, an additional issue arises when adult adoptees are included in discourse but are put at unnecessary risk by those who solicited their feedback.  Recently, Susan Branco Alvarado and Sandy Whitehawk of Adoption Policy and Reform Collaborative  (APRC) attended a conference, "Domestic and International Adoption: Strategies to Improve Behavioral Health Outcomes for Youth and Their Families," and were concerned that basic ethical standards of client-practitioner boundaries and safeguarding did not seem to be followed by some of the participating agencies.  Susan, Sandy, and several other members of APRC collaborated to draft a letter to the organizers of this conference: