Dorothy and Harvey, My birth parents

Why did I start a blog about adoptions? I want to share my experiences and hear about yours.

Welcome to my new blog.  There is so much I want to share with you and hear from you. Like many of you, my entire sense of self has been defined by being adopted. A realization of being an “other” has been a part of my psyche from my very earliest days. I truly believe when I was handed from my birthparents to my adoptive parents in a low-rent motel in West Sacramento, my tiny sentient soul registered a dramatic change. People try to disabuse me of this belief because they think a newborn person would not be able to absorb such a change. I know this is not true.

I left the womb where I had been for over seven months, and after my arrival, I was moved into a motel room. I had been breastfed by my biological mother, who I’m sure felt and smelled familiar, then handed over to strangers who were anxious and unprepared. All of this I know was absorbed by my sentient baby self. Then, a week later, they went on the run, moving me to different towns and friends so my birth mother and grandmother couldn’t find and reclaimed me per instructions from their attorney. In this blog, I want to provide an objective analysis of how adoption and the associated misconceptions affect children, driven by the desires and needs of others. And, yes, I deeply loved my “adoptive “parents and was loved by my birth parents thirty-nine years later when we were reunited.  In a short period, I lost all of them except my adoptive mother.  I am sure all of them took more secrets to their graves. Therapists say we are all only as sick as our secrets, and I was born and raised in a boiling pot of secrets and lies that were not revealed until I was thirty-nine, many of which still are unknown and will remain that way for the rest of my life.

My Parents and Me, California 1951