Hi, I’m Kristi
EVERY STORY MATTERS
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
FAMILY
Every person who raised me, in one room, on the same couch. This is the photo I'd point to if someone asked what "both/and" actually looks like.
Back row, left to right:
Linda and Alfred, my adoptive parents, and Wylie, my foster dad. Front row: me, my daughter Peyton, and Sandy, my foster mom.
Linda & Alfred ADOPTIVE PARENTS
Sandy & Wylie FOSTER PARENTS
Peyton MY DAUGHTER
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.
On the 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
MEMOIRS
Left in the Grass
A memoir of abandonment, belonging, and the people who refused to let go — my own beginning, told from the inside
The Ones Who Never Let Go
What happened after the phone rang: forty-one years apart, and the reunion neither of us stopped hoping for.