Once removed is how I have felt for most of my life. Standing apart from the stuff of real, human life. Outside looking in, an alien. Exempt from some invisible, inscrutable core human experience that seemed to initiate everyone else into some grand cosmic family to which I was merely a step-child. An adopted child. A surrendered child.

When November rolls around—National Adoption Month—I’m obliged as a good adoptee to give even more thought than usual to my entry into this world. While so many adoption institutions and Hallmark cards are devoted to de-emphasizing the differences in adoptive families, I want to discuss some ways that adoption is unique. Before getting my degree […]

  I published two Adoption Insight booklets exactly twenty years ago, and how happy I would be if the contents of those booklets had become obsolete in that time. Oh how I wish they were relics of an outdated, reformed adoption system. Alas, that isn’t the case. Women facing crisis pregnancy is a situation as […]

I had a great run of success in the 90s getting Letters to the Editor about adoption published: Harper’s Bazaar and Time magazine and USA Today, Los Angeles Times and various smaller regional newspapers. (Newspapers—how quaint!) I came to hold that particular genre in high regard. I dubbed it “micro-journalism”: a way for readers to get small but potent doses of […]