Who We Are

I was born on the last night of March, left in a field, and found before morning. What happened next — a hospital bracelet that said only Baby Girl, a foster couple who sat by an incubator for three weeks, an adoption, and a phone call forty-one years later — is the reason I write.

THE SHORT VERSION

I've been given three names, raised in two families, and loved in ways that never cancelled each other out. That's not a complication I write around — it's the whole subject. My books and this blog exist for anyone standing inside that same kind of both/and: adoptees, foster parents, adoptive parents, birth families, and the people who love them and don't always know what to say.

I write under the name Belonging Collective because none of these stories belong to one person alone. A placement, a reunion, a birthday card that never got mailed — they all involve more than one heart, and I try to write toward all of them at once rather than picking a side.

I have been loved completely by two entirely separate families, across two entirely separate eras. Both of those loves are true.— FROM THE ONES WHO NEVER LET GO

WHAT I WRITE

MEMOIRLeft in the Grass

A memoir of abandonment, belonging, and the people who refused to let go — my own beginning, told from the inside.

MEMOIRThe Ones Who Never Let Go

What happened after the phone rang: forty-one years apart, and the reunion neither of us stopped hoping for.

YOUNG ADULT NOVELEverything I Carry

A novel following one teenager through foster care — the houses, the goodbyes, and the people who stay anyway.

GUIDED JOURNALGrowing Together

A keepsake journal for foster parents to fill in alongside a child — something to hand them when they leave.

CHILDREN'S PICTURE BOOKThe Questions in My Heart

A gentle story about adoption, curiosity, and belonging, for the child who's still working out how to ask.

ON THIS BLOG

This is where I write the things that don't fit neatly inside a book — reflections on reunion, on foster care from both sides of the placement, on the questions adoptees carry and the ones adoptive and foster parents carry too. I try to stay neutral rather than advocate one version of any of these stories, because I've lived enough of them to know there rarely is just one.

Every side, on purpose

Adoptees, foster parents, adoptive parents, birth family — I write toward all of them, not just the version closest to my own.

No tidy endings

Reunion isn't a finish line and placement isn't a failure. I try to leave room for both the relief and the grief.

Real, not composite

The names sometimes change for privacy. The people, the dates, and the forty-one years do not.

Thank you for being here — however your own story reads.

EVERY STORY MATTERS