November is National Adoption Month??

Did you know that November is National Adoption Month? I didn't. Not until a friend posted a quote about it on her social media page. Now that I do know, I feel the need to celebrate!

The only background history we'd been given was that I'd been born in 1973, to a young girl of fourteen years and a boy of seventeen years who had made the decision to give me up for adoption. I spent my first months in a foster home and then was matched up with and later on adopted into my family, my family, the family I can't even begin to imagine my life without. I have heard many horrible and frightening stories of how adoptions have turned out for the worse but that has never been the case for me and I am grateful to be able to say so with nothing but honest and loving truth to back it up.

I've always known I was adopted, from the time I could talk and understand conversation my parents explained to me, in ways I could understand, how it was I had come to them. My parents were always approachable and open and it was always a positive topic of conversation no matter how tough the questions I had. I was assured that I had been given up out of a love so great that I might never come to know the depths that love had carried. As hard as I tried, I could never understand how loving could mean leaving. I grew up safe, happy, healthy and incredibly loved in my family yet still, buried deep down inside my soul there always sat a fear. It was a fear that I could somehow lose my family, that they would perhaps decide one day that I had been chucked away as a baby for good reason and that they would then do the same and I would find myself without. It was a ridiculous fear, I know,  but it was a fear built in knowing knowing that my very first 'someones' hadn't wanted me and had done just that... they hadn't wanted to be burdened with me and although my parents showed me again and again that I was loved and wanted right where I was, I still worried. It's not that I hadn't believed my parents, with their assurances that I had been given away out of love, but the words just didn't ever sit right with me. I never, not even once, judged or dismissed their claims but deep down, I knew that I had never been, by my birth people, as loved as I was by who I knew to be my real, true parents.

I admire my parents, more than anybody else in this world. My parents. Two more selfless, loving people I can honestly say I have never met. It's because of their selfless love that I have lived so fortunately. They aren't my parents because they had to be. They are my parents because they chose to be. They loved me and I knew it. They love me and I know it. To know love without boundaries is a pretty incredible gift, one that I'm not sure I would know had things been different. I can't imagine having been the one to have to make to make the choice to give a child away and hope for the best but in my own case, I'm grateful the decision was made. I have lived my life with parents who taught me what it means to be family and to love completely. I have a brother and a sister I can't even fathom my life without. I have memories filled with happy and still many yet to be made.

Nurture or Nature? If you ask me, I swear by Nurture, all the way. I am my mothers daughter just as I am my fathers daughter... Dad watches over us from Heaven now, but without both of my parents nurturing, I wouldn't be who I am today, that much I know for certain. My parents raised me. They taught me. They encouraged and stood behind me. They cheered me on with every endeavor I began, patting my back in congratulations or helping me stand and brush myself off after a fall; not only did they help lift me after a hurt but they also always helped me to find the gifts inside the lessons.

I wish I had actually told my dad how much he meant to me when I still had that chance.

I still need to tell my mom.

I know I'm safe and I know I'm loved... so why is it still so hard for me to let my honest feelings be heard? The simple reason is that there are fears, no matter how ridiculous they seem, in everything, even in gifts. I was given the greatest gift of my life when my parents adopted me as part of them and it's the one gift I cherish above all else. For some reason, even at forty-two years old, I still worry that it could all be yanked away as if it were nothing but a dream. But more than I fear, I celebrate because I know in my heart that with my family... I'm home.

So, here's to adoption!!!

From the deepest deep of my grateful heart... I celebrate..... my family!



1992... Our last family picture with our dad.