Adoption birthdays

Today's my adoption birthday, the day my adoptive parents picked me up from the hospital and took me into their home. It often feels more important than my "real" birthday, as I think of the creative, loving environment I was brought up in and credit it for what I value most in myself. 

My new book, Imagined Sons, focuses on my other position in the "adoption triangle," the birthmother. I've given five readings from the book now, and at each one someone asks whether I've searched for my son. 

I finally managed to start the process last September. I learned that the agency I surrendered my son through had been absorbed into another agency and with some research discovered the right person to contact. We swapped emails, and she said I should get on the Illinois adoption registry and in the meantime she'd send me a letter. 

The letter never arrived. It says something about the degree of my fear that only yesterday, over six months after the initial exchange of emails, that I wrote again to say so. I received a prompt response saying the letter would be sent out at once (with apologies for the lapse), and I downloaded the forms I need to fill out to join the Illinois adoption registry. I'll fill them out this weekend and post them next week. 

So I wonder what day my son's adoption birthday is. His birthday's September 11th, but I know he was briefly in foster care before being adopted, so I have no idea what his adoption birthday would be. If I'd known my parents wouldn't make it to their seventies, I would have begun this search much earlier. All I can do now is remember today, remember them, and be oh so grateful I had them as long as I did.

My adoption birthday comes round again

I was adopted two weeks after my birthday, on this date, oh so many years ago. Here I am, in the middle, oblivious to the two happy people who'd come to get me. If not in town, I always called home on this day; as I became older, the date seemed more important than my natal birthday. 

This is my second year without them, my father having died in 2009 and my mother in 2011. Last night I dreamed we (my family of childhood) were traveling by car and picking up some things along the way. At one place we stopped I found loads of keepsakes: old photographs, school yearbooks, letters, drawings, etc., but there was only so much space in the car and only so much time to go through them, which was making me increasingly anxious and upset. That's when I woke and realized the dream was close to reality, as one of my brothers-in-law threw out boxes of who knows what and a great chunk of what was saved was destroyed in a fire.

I can hardly explain how fortunate I was to be adopted by these two people, who were consistently loving, proud, and supportive of me and my endeavors. I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

 

My Adoption Birthday

This is a picture of me with my parents, Henry and Bernadine Etter, the day I was adopted, exactly two weeks after I was born. We always referred to today as my adoption birthday.

This adoption birthday is my first without them, without their unconditional, boundless love, and I miss them desperately.