【Adoptee’s Journey】Living Life With Questions About Adoption

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photo by Matthew Day

 Adoption has long-term impacts on three parties, relinquishing side, adopting side and adopted children. Each party goes through their own unique journey.

Hallee Randall, a typical seventh-grader teenage girl, wrote an essay (Award-Winning Essay) entitled “Living Life With Questions About Adoption”, which caught many people’s attention. In her essay, she, like lots of adopted children, has lots of wonders around her adoption, such as the reason why her birth mother placed her for adoption, what her life would be without her adoptive family, what if she likes her birth family more than her adoptive family after reunion and so on.
After lots of “what if”, she decides not to search for her birth family at the moment. As she mentions: “But for a kid, we think that ‘what if’ means that it is going to happen and then we get stressed and worried. I think on the Brightside of things. If I found her and then I started talking with her, then maybe she could answer some of my ‘what if’ questions. It might be nice, but I am so glad that I will always have a life with the family that adopted me”.
The adoptive parents are encouraged to be open-minded allowing their adopted children to talk about adoption openly. However, Hallee’s essay clearly expressed the stress of dealing with “what ifs”. This kind of uncertainty and overwhelming feeling actually hinders the adopted children to talk about their experiences openly. In other words, the adoption loss of a life “might-have-beens” should be acknowledged and grieved while involving the adopted children to celebrate their new lives with the adoptive family.  
Adoption loss is a loss to live with, not to overcome.

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