Back in high school, I had a good friend whose mother when miffed would, for the fifty-millionth time, say, "You know that you're just a placenta, don't you? When you were born, the doctor threw away the baby and wrapped the afterbirth up for me to take home."

My father would tell anyone who asked my full name, actually Sandra Noreen, that it was Sandra No Weenie, "Because she doesn't have one."

I wrapped my son's fifth birthday presents and set them all out in plain view a day in advance with the express intent of torturing him with anticipation.

A quick Internet search just provided such cruelties doled out by parents onto the innocent heads of their adorable children... more

Or: Why it occasionally looks like Sandra goes out of her way to annoy some people.

If you're approaching the international adoption world from somewhere out there where it all seems reasonable, clear-cut and simple, sooner or later you are bound to come up against brick walls intentionally built to make the process sound either impossible, immoral, unethical, or otherwise a generally bad idea.

As an adoptive parent, an advocate for children and for adoption, and a blogger for Adoption.com, it is my responsibility... more

Jan Baker's post, "Help Needed to Understand" had me realizing this morning that despite all the to-ing and fro-ing she and I did a while back, understanding between birth parents and adoptive parents in general is apparently still a very long way off.

It does seem that the more we learn about adoption, the more there is to learn. For... more

Continued from here ...

It is, very thankfully, beyond the scope of my rather prodigious imagination to anywhere near fully grasp the suffering that must go with the first flow of HIV-contaminated mother's milk. What can presenting that nipple feel like to a mother who understands exactly what it is she is offering? Where does the concept of the lesser of two evils right itself enough for anyone to find peace enough for milk to... more

Thanks to Holly Richardson, I now know that breastfeeding is recommended for HIV positive women in many parts of the world. As Dr Hoosen Coovadia, a pediatrician in South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal, told the 14th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, instructing HIV-infected mothers in developing nations to breast-feed would result... more

I'm just passing this along ...

"Ethnic Socialization of Children Adopted from Asia"

Children, aged 14-26 who are adopted from one of the Asian countries and living in the United States are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Jayashree Mohanty, Ph.D. Candidate from the University of Pittsburgh, School of Social Work. For those children between the ages of 14-17, I would also like to invite their parents to participate in this research study. The purpose of this dissertation study is to understand the ways in which adoptive parents prepare their children for understanding their identities and how such preparation affects adoptees'... more

Today's blog is brought to you by Lanny Hertzberg, a Professor of Anthropology who is visiting us here on his way to a cool teaching gig in Italy. I find his take interesting from many angles, not least of which is that it comes without the filters the adoption community installs once adoption becomes a focus. My wife and I have been guests now at Sandra and Mark’s for the past week. We have gotten to see them and their children in this island paradise. While my wife Jane is very familiar with... more

This is the last post in the series, continued from here ... Although birth parents and adoptive parents come at adoption from different directions, there can be a few places where paths cross.

Agencies can be where the concerns meet, and both partners in this dance may be unhappy with the tune played by the professionals ... since the end result is supposed to be one partner ending up with an armful of love and the other... more

Continued from here ... I was thinking it would sound strange to Jan that the crisis pregnancies of my teen years figured very little in my negative reactions to what I was perceiving as slights from the birth mom brigade, but now that I'm writing it down ... and having a much better grip on what's the same and what's different ... it seems likely that it will make sense to her that this is the case. After all, my bio kids are just... more

Continuing the discussion between Adoption Search/Birth First Parent blogger Jan Baker and myself, that started out very badly ... You'd think by my age I'd be savvy enough to 'get' that much of what looks like anger is fear and pain, or the fear of pain. I am well aware of how very often that is the case with me, but somehow managed to do a lot of knee-jerking... more