What This Community Has Taught Me

What This Community Has Taught Me

Since I started sharing pieces of my story, I've heard from a lot of people I've never met — adoptees, foster parents, adoptive parents, a few birth parents, and plenty of people who are just trying to understand someone in their life who is one of those things. I've learned more from those messages than I expected to.

Mostly what I've learned is how much the specifics vary, even when the broad shape looks similar from the outside. Two adoptees can have almost the same facts — same age at placement, same rough setup — and completely different relationships to their own story. One foster parent's hardest day looks nothing like another's. I used to think, before I started talking about this publicly, that there was probably a "typical" experience I could compare mine to. I don't think that anymore. I think there are just a lot of individual true stories, none of them standing in for all the others.

That's part of why I try to stay out of the bigger arguments about adoption and foster care as systems — whether they should look different, whether certain practices are right or wrong in general. Those are real conversations and I don't think they're unimportant. I just don't think my one story, or any one story, is equipped to settle them.

What I can do is listen to the people who write in, and try to make this a place where their version doesn't have to match mine to belong here. So far, that's the part of this I'm most grateful for — not the story itself, but the company I've had along the way of trying to tell it honestly.