Writing about your life's story is one of the hardest school assignments for a child who has been adopted. The teacher says to include the significant events in your life. Being adopted is pretty significant! But do you want to say that you were adopted? If you don't, does that mean you're lying about part of your life?

Is your adoptive family's ethnic background really your background or should you leave that part out of the story?

If you were placed for adoption at an older age, do you leave out the memories of your life before adoption?

Telling my adoption story today is much easier than it was in school!

I don't have much information about my life before I was adopted.  I do know that I was in and out of foster care a couple of times, and I was adopted when I was 16 months old. Today we call this "toddler adoption."

When my birth mother contacted an adoption agency, she had two children (my half-sister and me) and she was pregnant with a third child, my brother. She made an adoption plan for both my brother and me, and she asked that we be placed together. Her decision, which took so much strength and courage, was doubly hard because it involved two of her three children. My older half-sister would stay with my birth mother.

My adoptive parents had indicated on their application that they would take twins or siblings. And so when the social worker called about my brother and me, my parents said yes.  They became my Mom and Dad and my forever family.

At the time my brother and I were adopted, the conventional wisdom was that you told your children they were adopted, and as long as they knew that, you didn't really need to talk about it anymore. I knew I was adopted before I even understood what adoption meant, and because I knew that, our family rarely talked about adoption after we started school.

Today, experts in child development know that adoption is a lifelong journey, and that children need different information at different stages because their understanding is continually growing and changing. Particularly in the middle years and adolescence, children need to feel that they can ask questions and receive truthful and non-defensive answers. Many times the questions have no easy answers.

I was 34 years old before I was ready to search for my birth family. Not all searches have a happy ending, but mine did. My birth parents had gotten married and had four more children. When I found my birth parents, I found a whole new family!

In my work with adoptive families over the years, I have seen that families are hungry for information. During the adoption process, there is a built-in support system through the adoption agency. But after the adoption, many parents feel that they have been cut loose and left alone to cope with adoption issues.

That's the reason for Speaking of Adoption. Adoption is an ongoing process that impacts every person involved…the child, the adoptive parents and the birthparents …over the course of a lifetime. Speaking of Adoption seeks to bring information and resources to families during the lifelong journey of adoption.