The Family of Adoption Book

At this point in our adoption process I have read many of the kind of adoption "how to" books. I thought this one would be no different, but I was wrong. I read this book in a single sitting. It was easy to read, perhaps because not much of the actual information was new to me, but rather presented in a rhetoric I enjoyed and appreciated. The stories were what made this book for me. I cried with almost every one of them; tears of happiness and sadness. I would recommend this book to anyone associated with adoption. It would be a really good read for extended family members of those going through adoption.

One of the new things I hadn't thought of before this book was the idea that people that are adopted into families where there aren't birth children may not have experienced birth. Obviously they, themselves were born, but there usually aren't photos (in international adoption) to document the event. If other children are adopted into the same family, they also were obviously not born into the family. Unless birth is directly observed in some way, adoptees may have a difficult time conceptualizing birth. Young children need to know they were created in the same way as everyone else. Everyone deserves a story of their birth.

There were a lot of quotables in this book for me.

"The most healthy adoptive family are the ones in which there is acknowledgement of difference." Many people have told me that adoptive families are no different than any other family. I personally don't believe this. I think on a daily basis we probably won't consider the fact that our child is adopted. But it's important to also recognize the differences. Especially in our case, the differences in race. Others will notice and it's important for all of us to know how to respond.

"There is a great deal of loss in adoption and feeling of loss often manifest themselves as anger. People from the outside, see adoption as a very positive occasion, and in fact, it is. The birth parents and the adoptive parents, however, have most often gone through a great deal of loss and sadness to get to an adoption decision, and that loss and sadness is passed on directly or indirectly to the child as an underlying fact of adoption. We have learned in recent years that it does not help the child in the long run to disguise the reality of any situation; that it is better to tell the truths and to help the child learn to cope with them." I agree with this completely. The paradox of adoption is not an easy thing for those outside the process to understand, but that doesn't mean it should be brushed under the rug or ignored.

The final sentence is great: "We cannot suppress the human need to be connected". Yes!

I guess the only thing I would criticize about the book is the overwhelming focus on birth family search and reunion. It was an overarching theme throughout the book and although it's important, it was a little too much.