by Dani Joy 
I didn’t go looking for the truth about adoption.
I wasn’t bitter, angry or regretful. I had spent the last decade clinging determinedly to the belief that it was ‘God’s will’ that my son should be adopted. And that I had done what was best for him.
I became a regular visitor in the adoptive family’s home. I had the unicorn of open adoptions and told myself that this was good. This had been right. This was how adoption should be done.

By Janice Jones
(Author of Dr. Beare’s Daughter: Growing Up Adopted, Adored, and Afraid)

I was four-and-a-half months old in 1947 when I was adopted by Ralph and Lou Beare of Celina, Ohio. My new father was a respected doctor and surgeon, and my new mother was a proud doctor’s wife. They’d already been married fifteen years. They decided to adopt after Lou had a hysterectomy at the age of forty and had to give up her last lingering hope of having “her own.” My parents named me Janice Lucinda. My mother said they chose Janice because it couldn’t be shortened into some “gawd-awful nickname.” and Lucinda after her own first name.

by Kathleen Kirstein
I am a late-discovery adoptee. I learned I was adopted at age forty-nine when I couldn't get a passport because, on the application, I couldn’t explain why my birth certificate had been filed fourteen months after my birth. The answer was in my medical record, buried under 49 years of office notes. I found the first entry in my chart: “ Adopted Baby 4 lbs 4 oz, two weeks premature. My parents then confirmed this for me two days later.

I want the world to know that even the best adoption situations carry trauma. Even those of us who didn’t know we were adopted. My childhood was as normal as expected in the white suburbs of a small New Hampshire town in the late 1950s. This is a story of how, at age sixty-seven, I came to realize the true level of trauma from relinquishment.