By Susie Another milestone in my reunion with my firstborn happened last weekend. (It only took 8 years and 8 months!) For the first time ever, all of my children AND (almost) all of my grandchildren were together! It was the first time Christopher’s two children met their aunt, uncles, and cousins. It was an amazing weekend, to say the least. I am so thankful that all three of my…
By Susie from: Wild Women Sisterhood FULL MOON PRAYER by Rumi What in your life is Calling you, When all the noise is silenced, The meetings adjourned.. The lists laid aside, And the Wild Iris blooms By itself In the dark forest… What still pulls on your Soul? Are you a mother who lost a child to adoption? Does your (now adult) child call out to your soul? Are you…
By Susie More thoughts from the American Adoption Congress Conference: After I had agreed with Suz to participate in her “Mitigating and Managing Collateral Damage: Impact of Adoption on the 1st Family” presentation, I thought of many examples of the collateral damage in my life. When it came to the “managing and mitigating” part, the only thing I could come up with was to not lose a child to adoption…
By Susie After attending AAC 2016, I have too much to write about to fit it all in one post. Here is a summary of the experience, more to come in the following days: The Week of Firsts I attended my first ever “real life” adoption event ~ the AAC 2016 Conference. I traveled alone for the first time, which I surprisingly actually enjoyed. I was a presenter on a…
By Susie I am getting excited to attend the AAC Conference in Denver at the end of the month! There are a few reasons I decided to finally attend an adoption related conference.This one was close enough to consider driving to ~ about nine hours away, but in the end I decided to fly in order to have more time there/less time away from work. The chance to meet in…
By Susie As a mother of adoption loss, I would first of all like to (again) make it known that I WAS NEVER PROMISED, NOR DID I EVER WANT, ANONYMITY FROM MY SON! Those who try to use us mothers as the reasons that adoption records and original birth certificates are sealed are either lying or falsely believing someone else’s lies. Most moms would openly welcome being contacted by their…
By Susie One of the biggest hurdles I have had to overcome in the six+ years since being reunited with Christopher has been the claiming of my motherhood ~ from my very first pregnancy, not just from the birth of the children I raised. For I never allowed myself to consider that Christopher was my child, therefore I was not “really” a mother to him. He was always “the baby…
By Susie I’ve been in an adoption funk again for the last couple of weeks. I know it’s partially because a planned visit to see Christopher in July didn’t happen due to my getting another kidney stone a couple of days before I was supposed to go. Now we are finding it difficult to find time when we are both free at the same time. It’s been over a year…
By Susie I ordered the new adoption memoir “A Life Let Go: A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption”. As I was reading the reviews for the book on Amazon, I found my breath taken away by one of them. One sentence in particular: “…true story of a pregnant teen hiding in the house, frozen and blind to all possibility beyond invisibility, as a baby grew in…
By Susie I’ve seen this before. From a speech given at the first American Adoption Congress in Washington, DC. It’s not that I agree with every word that makes it hit home especially hard. It’s the date that this speech was given. May 4, 1979 Just four days before Christopher was born. Just four days. Four Days I had no idea… I was not indifferent. My son was NOT…
By Susie While wasting time on Facebook the other night, I kept seeing a link that several different friends had posted about a Teleflora commercial that had left them in tears. It left me in tears too. But for reasons unlike my friends. Especially during this month of May, that includes not only Mother’s Day, but also Christopher’s birthday. What a kick in the gut. This wonderful son, grown up…
By Susie Most of the stories you see of adoption reunion in the media are just sort snippets in time ~ the moment that family members see each other face-to-face for the first time since birth. How happy and exciting it all is. Those short snippets don’t show what happens in the time after the first emails, letters, in-person visits. Reunion was life changing for me. There are still times,…
By Susie I previously posted about the Shorstein Advocacy Group and the filing of a class-action lawsuit against them. I was recently contacted and asked to help spread the word that they hope to file the lawsuit this summer. If you were defrauded by the promise of open adoption in the state of Florida since 1990, please join this class-action lawsuit. Here is the info I received: We have updated…
By Susie This is a re-post that was originally published on June 14, 2012: I stumbled onto the writing of Dabeshim a couple of days ago. One of his poemscaught me from the very first stanza. I again am amazed at how the words of someone adopted can be so meaningful to me as a mother of adoption loss. Below is the poem, interspersed with my own rambling thoughts brought…