Adopting Fatherhood

Growing your family through adoption can be a heart-wrenching process. The countless meetings with social workers, the endless paperwork, the carrying around of papers for “your child” because they are technically still a ward of the state. It can be emotionally draining, but I found that it helped us be more intentional when it came to how we want to parent. One thing we were both clear on was letting The Kid know in age appropriate ways that she was adopted. The decision was partially made for us, as we knew it would become obvious as she grew older that she wasn’t Caucasian or Latina. But it was a decision heavily influenced by the pain and confusion I felt learning who my birth father was as an adult. To us, it was better for her to grow up knowing and helping her understand than pretending the adoption did not happen and letting other people define the story for us. We accomplished this in a few ways. One, we keep in touch with her foster family (although not as well as...

The more I open up about my personal experience trying to find my birth father, the more convinced I become that people talk about adoptee experiences from the wrong lens. There is an implicit bias toward the adoptive parent perspective that can, and often does, negate the experience of the adoptee. I started really paying attention when people were asking me why I waited so long to reach out to my birth father. That is a legitimate question for his family to ask me, especially when considering he was in the last stages of his life. For the general public, I have a different standard and I would hope they would also ask me a second question, but few ever do. Did your birth family ever come looking for you? The only people that ask are my dearest friends. For the most part, I try to answer the first question sincerely and directly. Usually, I land on something like it took a long time to make the decision because I did not want to hurt anyone but eventually I realized I was ...