Why I’m Starting This

I've sat down to write this first post more times than I can count, and deleted it just as many. Every version felt like it was trying too hard to explain itself. So here's the plain version instead.

I was born on the last night of March, 1980, and left in a field before anyone gave me a name. A foster family took me in two weeks later and loved me for seven months. Then I was adopted, and that family raised me. Both of those families are still in my life. Neither one cancels out the other.

For a long time I didn't talk about any of it much. It felt like there wasn't a place to put it that didn't ask me to pick a side — grateful or grieving, lucky or wronged, one family or the other. I've since decided there isn't a side to pick. There's just the whole, complicated, true thing.

That's what this blog is. Not a campaign for or against adoption, not a highlight reel, not advice from someone who has it figured out. Just a place to think out loud about foster care, adoption, birth families, and the people who hold all of it — adoptees, foster parents, adoptive parents, birth parents. I want to leave room here for everyone's version of this to be true at the same time, even when those versions pull in different directions.

I'll post here most days. Some entries will be short. Some will be about my own story, some about things I've learned from other people's. If you're connected to adoption or foster care in any way — as the child, the parent, the sibling, the caseworker, the friend trying to understand — I hope you find something here that feels like it was written with you in mind, because it was.

Thanks for being here on day one.