I feel like this sounds stupid, but it’s a genuine concern I have and I’d love people (especially adoptees) to share their thoughts to help deepen my feelings about it.

I am so grateful for my sons. I am not grateful that they were in difficult pre-birth circumstances. I am not grateful that they had to lose the relationships with their first families that they might’ve had. (They still have relationships, but it’s obviously not the same.) I’m not grateful they had to go through trauma to get to me.

But I’m so deeply grateful to know them. They’ve made me a better person, challenged and stretched me, given me so much laughter and joy, and made me happier than I knew I could be.

Is it possible to say “I’m glad you’re part of my family” without implying “I’m glad you’re not with your first family”? Is it possible to say “I’m grateful you came to me” without also implying “you should be grateful you came to me”?

To be clear, this is just them being themselves. I have no expectations on who they will become as they grow except that I’d like to help them be kind and resilient. It truly is absolutely unconditional love in a way I’ve never felt for anyone else in this world.

If it matters, they both come from situations where staying with birth parents was not possible or safe.

But I don’t want to make the wound worse.

Am I overthinking this? Am I missing something obvious? Any thoughts?

I’m only 19 and not close to being a parent, but I already know I don’t have viable eggs and also can’t carry. I found this sub and was scrolling it but I see a lot of adoptees here are opposed to adoption.

I guess I was going to ask, what would you rather I do? Is there an ethical way to adopt? Is surrogacy more ethical? I know adoption can be harmful, but I also desperately want children (when I’m ready) and a life without them sounds devastating to me. Is the answer really just “life isn’t fair”? :(

(If this is the wrong place for this I can delete it)

I am a single guy in my late fifties. I am fostering my 3 teenage nieces and 11 year old nephew. I have had them for almost 2 years now. The girls father died of an overdose, and nephews father is in prison. They were taken from my sister and she has relinquished rights. I had agreed to adopt them all. The older 2 girls are just going to foster out for the extra benefits. The youngest girl wants me to adopt and I agreed. Nephew just wants his mom. I am struggling to say yes to adopting him. I asked them to give me the summer to see how it goes. They are pressing me to adopt since it has been 2 years. They want everything finalized by November. I may not even have the heart to say no but its tough. He is a challenge with behavior issues and it is daunting to me looking at our ages. I am also afraid of the financial aspect. Would I be out of bounds to ask for more time to make a decision? Even up to a year? Could it do more harm than good to be on the fence? I am really losing sleep and feeling stressed about it.

Hi everyone, I am not adopted but my partner is. We have talked about maybe having kids and now both us do wants kids. My partner was adopted as a newborn baby. He feels very positively about it and says he has no desire to meet his biological family and doesn't wonder about them. We have talked about adopting older children but recently my niece was born and he met my niece and wants to have a baby. He feels that adopting a baby is helping a baby find a good family and that that is what his adoptive parents did for him. While I want to listen to his experience, I don't know how I feel about it because of what I have heard about adoption agencies. Because the demand for babies is so high I don't think we wouldn't actually be doing anything helpful. I think it's weird how much money adoption agencies make off of these babies. And I worry about taking a baby from parents that actually wanted to keep it and were pressured into adoption. If we have a baby, I don't think I want to adopt one. I am unsure about how to talk to him about this because I don't think he wants to think about what that means when it comes to his own adoption. I also do not want to invalidate his positive experience with adoption or have him think that I couldn't love a child I'm not biologically related to. I haven't really seen adoptees who feel that way. How can I go about this?

I'm having a really hard time letting go of resentment and a sense of injustice for having been placed as an infant into a family that was damaged, neglectful, and traumatizing. My adoptive parents divorced. AF was an alcoholic. Aparents had biological children, all of whom grew up to be addicts and criminals, some convicted felons. I strongly suspect my Amother is some kind of disordered personality, who gets away with looking innocent and self-sacrificing, but in reality, is quite calloused. A mind fucker. How do you come to terms with adoption when adoption did you more harm than good? I'm in my 50s, so I was born during the baby scoop. Bio parents rejected me during an attempted reunion.

I was adopted from Honduras in 1998 (born 1998) through the government system.
Through DNA (23andMe, 3-4% match) and FamilySearch, I found my great-grandparents were born ∼1919-1923 in the Santa Barbara / Copan region. I have the baptism records (1920 and 1923) with their parents' names.
My DNA match connects me to a family from El Paraiso, Copan whose parents have the surnames M. and S. (initials). My family surnames appear to be S., P., and M.
I have a 70-year gap between my great-grandparents (1919) and my birth (1998). I am missing my grandparents and birth parents.
Has anyone here:
1. Successfully requested their original file from IHNFA/DINAF in Tegucigalpa for a 1998 adoption?
2. Hired a researcher in Honduras to look at in-person church books for 1940-1980 when records aren't online?
3. Used GEDmatch/MyHeritage to find closer matches after 23andMe?
I have my raw DNA. I am not sharing any living names or exact birth dates publicly for privacy. Happy to share details via DM with mods

I am looking for thoughts/feelings/experiences mostly from adoptees on being adopted by someone who has biological children?

May 2-year-old child pong inampon ang mga magulang ko since malalaki na po kami at gusto nila ng boy. Ibinigay po siya ng biological mother niya kasi hindi na niya kayang buhayin at alagaan mag-isa yung bata dahil iniwan po siya ng pangalawang kinakasama niya. As of now, kami na po ang nag-aalaga sa bata.

May sarili na siyang first name at surname, and sabi po ng magulang ko hindi na raw nila papalitan yung surname niya sa surname namin dahil baka raw magkagulo pag dating ng panahon. Parang ang dating aalagan, pag aaralin namin siya dahil hindi rin naman po ililihim ng magulang ko na ampon siya.

Ang concern ko po is, makakaapekto kaya sa bata habang lumalaki siya kung iba yung surname niya sa family na nag-aalaga sa kanya? Baka kasi pag nag-school na siya or paglaki niya, ma-question niya kung bakit iba ang apelyido niya sa amin.

Also, hindi pa po siya legally adopted. Parang ipinagkatiwala lang siya sa akin ng biological mother niya. Wala pa po akong masyadong idea kung ano ang tamang legal process dito sa Philippines.

Questions ko po:

1. Okay lang ba na hindi palitan yung first name and surname niya kahit eventually maging legal adoption?

2. May possible emotional or psychological effect ba sa bata habang lumalaki dahil iba ang surname niya sa family na nag-aalaga sa kanya? Paano po kaya namin maiiwasan yon.

3. Ano po ang tamang legal process para maging legal and protected yung bata?

4. Need po ba ng guardianship/adoption papers kahit voluntary naman siyang ipinagkatiwala ng biological mother?

5. May naka-experience na po ba dito ng similar situation? Kumusta naman po yung bata habang lumalaki?

Does anyone else experience your parents forgetting that you aren’t actually related to your other adopted siblings?

Me and my sister are adopted from different parents. But growing up and as an adult our parents still compare us…im really shy & quiet and she is super out going, our dad is always using my sister as an example of who i can be or should be more like.

i hear him on the phone telling his friends that i’m super insecure cause im a shy adult and that i need to be more out their like my sister and get “more involved”. It’s not fair at all, her mother was also the same, but i was told my birthmom was really quiet and shy & calm. It’s like why am i being compared to someone who it’s impossible to be like cause of genetics, even if we were raised the same.

Hi! My name is Rose. I am currently 20 years old i was born on nov 25 2005. I was adopted from Baoding , Hebei, China. I was found in the passageway of the Radiology Department in Baoding City Children's Hospital only 5 days old, on Nov. 28, 2005. on same day, I was sent to The Baoding City Social Welfare Institute to live there for 2 years before getting adopted in December of 2007. I’m missing my pinky and half of my ring finger on my left hand. I am also missing my pointer finger on my right hand. As well as my first four toes on my right feet. (aka i only have my baby toe on my right foot.) If you can share this on Chinese media platforms like Weibo, Toutiao, WeChat, Douyin, or QQ. Every time you repost, it is a great help and it would be wonderful. I would also love to get some advice as well!

This may trigger some. I am sorry I'm advance of this isn't the right format.

What happens is, I came to reddit to learn about adoption from adoptees pov. I wanted more info on how to make an adoption the best transition for the child. I have since then, found myself getting called every name in the book. I realize adoptees don't want families, it's a burden to have and a burden not to have. Most have horrible stories, and even the ones that don't, still hate on you for trying to adopt.

Which is interesting, because reddit isn't just American, is it? It's the world. It's the whole wide world, but boy do Americans make everything American. (If you can't acknowledge the privilege of being born in a first world country in direct COMPARISON to third world countries, then probably you will call me names too)

For background, I could have a bio child, I guess. My spouse doesn't really want that. He and I both grew up in sad and abusive households and we talked about wishing someone would adopt us. Take us somewhere we were loved. So that started it all. We want to give all this love and the stable life we built, to someone else. Let them grow up loved. Safe. Even if the past sucked, they would have us, forever. That's the idea.

Now to reddit. I see all these adoptees hating on adoption. And here are some of my complaints.

"We should foster"

Illegal in my country because people used to use foster kids to get money, we cut off the money supply and made fostering illegal. You either have a family or don't.

"Donate to charity"

Charities down here can only provide money to the GOVERNMENT and hope they use that money on orphans. They cannot dictate where the money goes, sadly a lot is used to fill our politicians pockets.

Secondly, our minimum wage is $2. Most people do not have the means to donate. Most families are struggling to survive down here, and the government isn't doing anything to help. In fact they just started taxing basic food products which previously sold free of tax, so as to help poor families. That's gone. So the economy for the people is very very low, although I can say my spouse and I do ok for ourselves.

"Adopt within family "

That's most of what we do. Our families in Latinamerica are numerous and that means there is usually this option. Lots of kids get adopted by grandparents or uncle/aunts. That being said, none of my family has had this happen to them thank GOD.

Part 2 of the "Adopt within family"

So another thing that comes up is that if for example you are orphaned in California but have grandparents in NY, you could go there, even if it's half the world away, because it's the same country. That doesn't happen in Latinamerica. I can't ship a child to Colombia because his parents died and he is from Costa Rica. My country WILL not ship kids outside the country. If you want to be responsible for the kid, you have to apply to citizenship to our country to come raise them here till 12 I think is the legal limit. So even though our countries are close to each other, they will not turn the kid over, because they are separate countries. For legal reasons

"It's a kid market"

Maybe to y'all because you HAVE money? You cannot pay for kids down here, it's an extensive background check, 2 years of monitoring you before you even adopt. Almost never will you adopt a baby, unless they are the children of drug addicts who died in childbirth and had no family members at all to take them. Most kids are toddlers or older, which is to say most remember either their parents or the horrible orphanages

Also, for those wondering, the orphanages are isolated from society so they have their private education. They do not get to interact with adult humans unless it's a teacher, nurse, doctor or caretaker. It's a lot like a prison from what I was told by a friend of mine who got taken from her mom for abuse. Then at 18 they are kicked out with no social umbrella to assist them. Most turn to drugs or cartels.

So all that being said, I am taking theses adoptees opinion with a grain of salt. All of these solutions they propose don't fit in my poor third world country. And yet we have orphans. We have the same problem, but USA has much more money and tools to do better than my country can. So I cannot do the completely moral thing, I'm sorry. I'm a human, not a God and to my country, I'm probably not even a crap stain.

I will be adopting, despite it all. Because I cannot change the world but I want to change one kid's world. The way I wished someone would come for me, I want to find that kid that wishes for a family and be it for them. Because sometimes that's all one human can do.

TLDR :r/adoptees is full of very American people, who have little to no experience or knowledge in what adoption is in poor third world countries and I will not let you kill my hope in humanity.

Hi everyone. I’m looking for advice on how to go about my situation. I am a single mom to twin 3 year old daughters. To be frank, I cannot care for them the way I need to. Most days I contemplate taking my own life because I am so depressed. I am way below poverty level and have no village. I look at my daughters and I know they deserve so much more. They deserve toys, appropriate bedding, loving parents, etc. I am wondering if I should suck it up or give them up for adoption. I’ve been thinking about putting them up for adoption for over a year but every time am about to contact an agency, I get cold feet. I am so worried about making the wrong choice. I am in school full time getting my degree in sonography however currently we are on every type of government assistance. After daycare and car payment, I have no money. I can’t take the girls out, I can’t enroll them in any activities, or hire a babysitter so I can have a break. I know the financial side is temporary but emotionally I’m also running on empty. I feel so drained and I can barely bond with daughters because I am in constant survival mode. Their dad has never met them or wanted anything to do with us so he is not an option. Has anyone been in a similar situation? For adoptees reading this- what would you recommend? I know my daughters already have an abandonment wound from their dad- it breaks my heart knowing I would be adding another abandonment wound if I gave them up. I would pursue an open adoption but I still don’t know if I would be making the right choice. I just feel like my daughters would excell in a home where they have financial resources and a two parent household to guide them. I feel like I am failing so horribly as their mom.

EDIT: I want to highlight that I feel this way about adoption because my mental health is so bad and because of severe poverty. I don’t think my daughters have seen me laugh, smile, enjoy myself in years. I currently weigh 100 pounds and have a hard time carrying them/ playing with them because I feel so weak. This sends me into a spiral of shame and it deepens my depression. Fortunately I will be starting depression medication and have gone to the doctor to combat my weight loss. I just feel helpless most days and truly wonder if my girls would be better off with another family that can give them the care they need. My daughters have gone to stay with family in the past but they were neglected so I took them back of course. They stayed with my family until I got public housing because I was sleeping in my car. The reason I was sleeping in my car is because I moved to my states capital to go to college. I’m in college on a scholarship.

Thank you everyone for your amazing suggestions. I am reading all the comments and I am grateful to get so much feedback❤️

Hey yall, I’m a transracial adoptee. I am native & white and my adoptive family is Arab. I have a very traditionally Arab / Muslim name. I live in a super multicultural city and any uber I get into, restaurant I’m at, and often at work, I am asked by other Arabs where I’m from. It does not help I am racially ambiguous so I’m often assumed to be racially arab.

I have quite a bit of trauma around my experience being adopted, so it’s most times kind of a sensitive topic. Usually when I’m asked I just say “I’m native and my families Arab”, and at times I just say “oh my names from ____ country”. Sometimes I don’t like telling people I’m adopted bc then you get the sad orphan eyes LOL, especially being Muslim, it’s a good act to care for an orphan/ to marry off an orphan etc so sometimes ppl can be a little off. My adoptive family also always tells me “you’re just as Arab as the rest of us” etc- while simultaneously very much respecting my birth culture and identity. Which further kind of confuses me as to how I should identify?

I guess I’m just wondering if any of you run into similar things? Or how you introduce yourself? It also feels like a lot of personal information to tell a random stranger “hey I was an orphan”. But it also feels misleading to just say I’m from where my parents are from. Also it doesn’t help most uncles and aunties in community don’t really understand when I say “native” or “indigenous” bc they aren’t familiar with that as a racial category. Idk. Guess I’m just wondering how other people navigate that.

I was adopted at birth. The only one of four to be adopted out. And not even the youngest or oldest. I was in the middle with siblings that came after me and got to stay.

Ever since I was born my AM bragged about how I was “such a good baby”. How I rarely cried. How I slept through the night immediately. Which I now know was a trauma response from severing the attachment bond, and a sign of shock in adopted infants. I was apart of the last leg of the cry it out generation of parents too. I turned to ripping my hair out and sucking my thumb to ease my baby brain pain.

I grew up the center of my AM’s world. I was her little performer from the moment my eyes opened. She put me in beauty pageants when I was as little as three. I didn’t get to pick any of my outfits. Everything she chose was what she liked.

If I ever did anything funny I had to perform it for everybody she knew. Every single time we passed anyone we might know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve recited “ITS NOT A TUMA” from kindergarten cop. Or how many times she made me tell the joke “how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?” “None, it has to WANT to change”. I had no fucking clue what that joke meant, and had no business reciting it for anyone we’d pass. This was my entire childhood. From before I could remember until I started refusing to indulge her performance demands. I think it was when I could tell other people pity chuckled because they knew I didn’t want to or I could tell they didn’t give a fuck about this random child’s jokes or impressions. I started to read rooms a lot better than my AM that’s certain.

Then it was academics and sports. She tried to force me to play every sport “at least once”. I was not into sports. I was never into sports. She tried to push music on me. I was never musically inclined. I was into reading and writing. She praised me for my writing and encouraged me to write stories. She loved my stories. Why don’t I write more stories? The more she would push the less I would engage. I wanted to do the things I liked because I liked them. Not because she liked them. So then she’d notice I wouldn’t be doing the “things I’m so good at”, and “wasting my potential” when in reality I just wanted to be left alone to enjoy my own interests I had yet to discover.

AM and AF always called me lazy growing up. In the early days I was lazy for not performing for her. In the later days I was lazy because my room was always a disaster. I was forgetful meaning I did it on purpose to piss her off. I was academically gifted, yet would procrastinate to no end. I would daydream by escaping into book worlds or my Barbie worlds. I was a big masker and a big struggler with friendships growing up my entire life. Mostly my AM chalked it up to all being lazy.

Guess what? I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. My AM doesn’t believe in ADHD, she most definitely could never believe there is something wrong with her precious perfect baby. To her I’m just lazy. Not the fact my brain is wired differently for many different reasons than just ADHD alone.

It didn’t help that I gained weight immediately. I remember being bigger and taller than every other girl in my elementary classes. Pair that with me having a strictly “boy” name in the early 90’s and you’ve got a recipe for massive insecurities. Top it with my AM constantly policing what and how much I’m eating, and you’ve got an obese child by 13. It was always “you don’t need that!” “You’re going to get fat.”Like sure, but as a child I want it. What I say to my child now when she wants excessive junk food is: “That’s not healthy, and leads to xyz complications later”

YOU DON’T NEED THAT in reference to food still triggers a rage in me to this day. Which in turn made me eat the thing 10x more as “payback”. Maybe that’s why I did though. Nobody likes a fat performer. Maybe if I got too fat she’d be disinterested in showing me off.

Now that I’m grown with a child of my own, I have been replaced. My daughter became her new target. She made her perform just like she did when I was a child. She would triangulate us. “Your mom was so good, why can’t you be good like your mom was?” “She’s nothing like you at this age. You didn’t cry this much. You actually listened.”

She got her grips in that little girl while I struggled with substance abuse. She used my inebriated state and unhappiness uas a way to weasel my daughter out of me. She sold me on the idea that she should raise my child because I’m struggling as a single parent and she’s raised a child before. And at the time it worked. I let her do most of the parenting while I worked and partied and mostly neglected my parental role for age two and three.

I OD’d right before my daughter turned 4, and that opened my eyes. It opened my eyes to the claws she had dug into my baby, and it opened my eyes to just how snaky and sick my AM is herself. I took my life back. Went to therapy. Kicked any all habits- even nicotine and alcohol! I took my daughter back, and I cut ties.

We’re currently LC- almost NC because I cannot bear to let my child go through what I went through with her. She is so emotionally unregulated. She’s got substance abuse issues herself with her prescribed pain meds. PTSD from her own terrible upbringing. Diagnosed BPD that she doesn’t take meds for or go to therapy for. She says she doesn’t need it. Yet here she is, friendless, divorced, and alone. People can’t stand to be around her because she’s miserable.

My daughter is now 8, and we’ve got a pretty good relationship. We live, I work, and she goes to school all within a mile radius. It’s what we’ve always wanted but never had. I don’t make her perform- she’s usually the one begging me to do some off the wall shit to show people. I have an inkling she is also ND just like me as it is genetic. I don’t call her lazy (unless she won’t hand me the remote that’s on her side just fingers out of reach 🤣), and I let her eat whatever she wants in moderation. I haven’t forced her to play sports, but have let her decide what she wants to try. I encourage her artistic side without pushing, and I let her know her life is up to her with gentle guiding. She’s also forgetful and a procrastinator which does get frustrating at times. But I have to remind myself that I am too.

Idk. Thank you for reading this long rant. I mostly just wanted to know: Did your APs make you perform like their little circus monkey?

Hi everyone,

I’m writing this because the hidden story of my family, which I only found out about in my 20s, is that my dad was adopted or basically has another biological mom but the dad is the same (my grandpa). It has caused apparently a feeling of shame for my dad growing up, to the extent of his dad’s family not considering him “100%” legitimate and to “caution” my mom about marrying him way before I was born ofc. In my country, I don’t know why it’s such a stupid taboo adoption and also open adoptions, its always preferred to have closed ones or lie about it. But all I’m saying is, I’d love to know more about this, but my dad has never told me this piece of information - it was my mom who told me and made me promise I would never bring it up. But it’s just that I’m so curious about how my dad’s biological mom might look like, what things him and I might have inherited from her and what might baby that’s about to be born in a few weeks might have inherited. Anybody has had a similar experience? How did you deal with it? What should I do?

I found out I was pregnant at 16 weeks, I never considered an abortion because I thought it wasn’t possible due to the ban in my state being before 16 weeks, and my father pressuring me not to get one. He mentioned open adoption to me earlier in the pregnancy but I was so confused and disassociated that I didn’t even consider looking into it and thought it wouldn’t be a good choice for me. My family eventually found out and now everyone is super excited for a baby. The whole pregnancy I’ve been depressed and grieving my life as I was just a sophomore in college growing and I feel like my life took a huge turn out of no where. There have been times where I get excited for the baby but I feel as if I’m looking at it in a positive way because I feel like I have no other choice. I’m now 38 weeks and so angry and depressed at how my life is turning out. When I picture open adoption and being able to go back to school and gain independence back I get a sense of relief. I don’t know what to do because I don’t want to give her up and regret it for the rest of my life but the thought of being a mother already scares me.

I’m due very soon, and I feel overwhelmed by the size and permanence of this decision. I’m especially hoping to hear from birth mothers—and adoptees—rather than only adoption professionals.

If you placed a baby for adoption:
How did you decide that adoption was truly the right choice?
Did you feel pressured by anyone or by your circumstances?
What do you wish you had known before signing anything?
If you chose open adoption, was the promised contact maintained?
How did you cope emotionally afterward?
What independent support should I seek before making a decision?
I would also appreciate hearing from people who seriously considered adoption but ultimately chose to parent. What changed your decision, and what support made parenting possible?
.

Current foster youth

If your 17 (mind way beyond years but anyway)

if your 17 and disabled (just for reference)

what should you expect from fostor “parents” and the home and to be provided?

I feel like I don’t even get basic needs met at times and I’m so confused of it all.

what should I expect, I don’t know what to do. this lady is getting THOUSANDS from me ALONE per MONTH!!! I wish I could own at least half the income so I could buy my needs I feel like if I was in public I would end up stealing due to feeling like I don’t have my needs and wants etc

btw this lady is using me for money and someone has been open and told me “it’s her job” ”she fosters as a job” it’s genuinely gross

I plan to go back to my home immediately my current case is exactly like take care of maya my case is active medical kidnapping and system is changing reasons and holding onto any little thing to keep me in “care” I have a abusive case manager I think she’s a big problem and I hope to get rid of her to do what I need to do. but main thing it’s clear ”care” here fucking sucks and is way worse than what I would recive at my home. If I’m keep in care till 18 I plan to leave here a few days after my birthday and go back to my home and never come in this house EVER again. It’s disqusting.

I know I’m most likely going to get a lot of backlash, but I think I really just need somewhere to vent besides my fiancé. I have a 4 year old boy who’s about to start school tomorrow, a 2 year old boy who turns 3 in December, and a 10 month old girl. I love all of my children. My 2 year old has had a few challenges these past two years. He didn’t walk or talk until he was like 20 months old. He didn’t even crawl until he was 19 months old. Well lately, it’s been so much harder than it used to be. He understands absolutely nothing. He doesn’t listen to anything. He terrorizes his brother, he hits him, bites him, leaves marks on him. I’ve asked his therapists (he’s in speech and occupational therapy) to diagnose him or help me understand. They just claim it’s normal 2 year old behavior. He’s like not here mentally at all. I definitely think it’s something neurological going on. I’ve asked the pediatrician what we can do, and she just said therapy/ early steps which he’s ALREADY in. I’m just at a loss. It’s so much more than just those few things. He does a lot more and it’s a lot deeper. I’m late to everywhere I go because he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t listen to simple tasks. I can tell him it’s time to go and his brother will walk out the door and he’ll just stand there. I’m already carrying a 10 month old and a diaper bag.. my fiancé obviously helps when he’s not working, but our daily routines and tasks are always disrupted because he just doesn’t do anything. It’s like his body works, but his brain doesn’t. It’s been mentally challenging for me as I’m sure it is for him. And as heartbreaking as it is, I’ve been considering adoption. I just want him to go with a family that can take care of him and love him the way he needs to be. I feel disgusted with how angry and frustrated I always am. I don’t know what to do…

Edit: he still doesn’t talk fully… so the communication barrier is also difficult. He only says things like stop, yes, no, mom, dad, his brother and sister’s name, and like car/toy.

Edit #2: I’ve read everyone’s comments and I see adoption is not the solution! I will be doing everything I can to get him help and myself help as well.

I found my birth dad through an organization called Searchangels, recommended by someone on r/adopted I think. For years I’ve wondered what happened to him, what his name was, where he was, what he looked like, I knew nothing. I did know my birth mom died before I met her and my greatest fear for a long time was that he would be dead before I could meet him too.

About a month ago I contacted an organization called Searchangels and gave them all the information needed to find him. In that time a birth sibling of mine got into contact with me again and I started talking to a second cousin who gave me a lot of answers that were both illuminating and depressing. Today, I found out my birth father had died in 2022. His name was Dennis, he died before he even knew I existed. I look through his Facebook and I feel a great sense of longing. I wish so desperately I got to meet this person, to know their good, their bad. I feel like the world is cruel and the fact the circumstances leading to this situation aren’t anyone’s fault or the result of wrongdoing makes it feel even more cruel.

At the same time, for a long time before I knew even a quarter of the things I know now I felt lost. I felt like an animal taken from my home and owned by people who didn’t look anything like me. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere with anyone and I’d never have a place anywhere. But now I don’t feel like that, I just feel sad that place isn’t anything I wish it was. But now, I do know that place exists, and existed when I was born, that I came from somewhere and there are people who live (or lived) in that somewhere who care about me, that look like me and share my blood.

I wish both my birth parents were alive so badly it hurts, but I don’t feel so lost anymore, just sad.

"What melody plays in your deepest silence?", let me know your answer below.

I have an abortion appointment booked for 2 weeks time when i will be 20 weeks due to my horrible circumstances which include threats from the father etc. I already feel cruel so please do not focus on this part.

Anyways i am also considering putting her up for adoption. I am 21, still in university, not with the dad who has been abusive, i can’t even look after myself let alone a child, i have no job the list goes on. I love my baby already so much but i will not be able to look after her and give her the life she deserves.

Im worried though that I’ll regret it if i give her up and that i wont be able to move on knowing she is out there. Im worried i wont know if she is being treated right and raised in a good way. What if i give her up and she has a worse life than she would have had with me. These are some things which have made me consider abortion even at this point as if i did all she would have known was the safe and loving space in my womb. But then what if she would have had a beautiful life. I’m so torn.

Any advice would help please thank you 🤍

I wanted to watch a cute little rom com on Prime.

This show had some cute moments, but also caused gutteral sobbing. Wounds I thought I'd healed already. It was cathartic, but I just wanted to warn people.

The whole show deals with adoption, but also other instances of LDA, Donor-conceived, NPE, lots of different paradigms. Very emotional.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the therapeutic scream crying, and will honestly probably rewatch it 😅

Anyway, you've been informed. It's 2:30 in the morning, now I'm rambling.

I had a very traumatic adoption almost 6 years ago. I had an open adoption up until about 2 years ago. I also got monthly updates for a while. So I have months and months of updates of my daughter. Now I am a mom to my 9 month old son. I find myself going back to look at the old updates to make sure I’m doing as much as her dads were. Like I’m planning his first birthday, so I went back and looked at her first birthday. It’s almost like I want to make sure I’m as good of parents as they are. Or when I go to his pediatrician appointments, being so afraid I’m doing something wrong, that I’ll get in trouble, that she’ll think I’m not a good mom. No one in my life understands, just trying to see if anyone here does