Sunday-night drives home from my Aunt and Uncle’s house are typically uneventful, save for dodging the occasional deer in the road. I’m usually a little tired by the time we leave, and I spend a large part of the drive wondering why we leave so late. The
Perhaps the biggest blessing of finding my birth father's family was finding out my grandmother, Marjorie Otto, was still alive. Not only alive, but thriving and eager to talk with me. Known as MomMom by the family, I say that meeting her was a blessing because she was
As a friend reminded me over coffee a few weeks ago, I have a voice that could be helpful to someone should I choose to use it.
I fully expected to be writing a few humble brag posts on my social media channels by now of my athletic prowess, or at least tales of how I survived my first couple of organized classic cross country ski races. I’ve long thought about what it would be like
When I first started this blog seven or so years ago, I wrote a post trying to implore more people to consider adopting from the foster care system and to consider adopting a child of another race. My point was that people should just get over their fears, swallow their
The more I open up about my personal experience trying to find my birth father, the more convinced I become that people talk about adoptee experiences from the wrong lens. There is an implicit bias toward the adoptive parent perspective that can, and often does, negate the experience of the
A few nights ago, The Kid and I made dinner together. It was a hamburger pizza casserole out of the Betty Crocker cookbook I’ve had for at least 20 years. While I gathered the ingredients and chopped the vegetables, she mixed the hamburger, egg, and breadcrumbs for the crust.
The day after I found out my birth father had passed away, I found myself on a phone call with his brother (my UNCLE!) for the first time. He asked a perfectly reasonable question given the situation, one that I had been wrestling with in some form for 25 years;
As I am working to build relationships with some of my birth father’s family, I have come to realize there is no blueprint for how to do this. Some in the family are quite comfortable with me being in their lives, others still wonder why I came around in
This post originally appeared in the Detroit Free Press as an op-ed in November 2014. When my wife Gladys and I were going through the mandated screening needed to adopt our daughter, our social worker joked that there is a no-return policy on adopted kids. I am sure
The day I found out he died started no differently than any other Monday. I started my day running into a meeting just a few minutes late because I wanted to make sure I walked my daughter into her classroom and we hardly ever got to school right on time.
I started journaling a few years ago as a way to get some of the thoughts in my brain out in a less public way than a blog. I focused my journal on writing letters to my daughter about everything from my own childhood to her loving attempt to serve
A co-worker shared a powerful story from Huffington Post with me today. It was one adoptive mother's account of the days from meeting their birth mother to walking away from the hospital with their soon-to-be-adopted daughter in tow. I almost cried reading it because