Welcome to Finding Me

The National Social Register, a suicide in Reno, a disgraced debutante exiled from Park Avenue to a cow town in the West, a publishing empire in New York City, and the streets of Hanoi. What do they have in common? My birthmother.

I started looking for my birthmother 20 years ago and the route was atypical at best. The story of that search is the frame of my memoir, Finding Me.

When I was growing up, being adopted typically meant one thing: bastard. Things were changing, but plenty of people still considered adoption shameful and kept their connection to it a secret. Finding Me begins with my stories from that time, leads up to 1989 when searching was finally, legally, allowed in the state of Colorado through a confidential intermediary system, and continues through December, 2009, making it a long and fascinating journey.

If you were to read Finding Me, you would watch my confidential intermediary on her search for my birthmother, and then you'd come along as my parents and I go through our own search, which was emotionally charged and which hit on the universal themes of identity and loss. The third part of the book diverges and covers the adoptions of my own children, and the final part covers meeting my younger daughter's birthfamily and the surprise twist in my journey.

Along the way I learned a lot of interesting things. Did you know that at one time baby brokers advertized infants available for adoption at the price of $100, and that they had financing options to boot? Did you know that back in the 30s, Washoe County, Nevada, granted 30,000 divorces? I learned about Romanian orphans and later the reasons why so many baby girls have been adopted out of China, my daughter being one of them. My daughters were both adopted internationally and transracially by a single mother, a whole new kind of family in our culture. 

Odds are that you have some connection to adoption: friend, spouse, aunt, sister, birthmother, or perhaps you’re an adoptee yourself. The 2000 census says that 1 of every 25 families with children has an adopted child. If you counted up all their biological and adoptive relatives, the number would exceed 100 million people. It would be difficult to find someone who does not have some sort of connection to a person who lives the reality of being adopted every day.

So, what will this blog be about? It will be about writing, getting my book published, and of course adoption and search, and adoptive parenting. I invite you to come along for the journey, it'll be a roller coaster ride, I promise you that.