National Adoption Awareness Month – Pop Quiz 2020

The post below is a slightly edited post from 2019 there is no pop quiz and with the covid-19 pandemic happening I’m hoping that people have become both more aware and motivated to know their family health histories; to document them, to know them, especially for their children they adopted who won’t have grown up in their biological family. Please comment and talk about ensuring this Thanksgiving you will do it, or update it. It’s important.

******

We all know that having an updated and robust Family Health History is invaluable, that the older we get, the more important it becomes. Long-time readers of this blog know that I was that adoptee who was too busy living my best life to focus on adoption and being an adoptee, until I wasn’t. Until the lack of any family health history changed my life, completely, a life I never could get back.

 

Adoption Awareness Month – Pop Quiz

We all know that having an updated and robust Family Health History is invaluable, that the older we get, the more important it becomes. Long-time readers of this blog know that I was that adoptee who was too busy living my best life to focus on adoption and being an adoptee, until I wasn’t. Until the lack of any family health history changed my life, completely, a life I never could get back.

 

The Book: Being Adopted – The Lifelong Search for Self

(a post from 2011 I’ve rewritten).  I have so much praise for this book, the way it explains the different phases an adoptee may go through, and the triggers that can happen along the way.  How the cognitive developmental stages work with understanding adoption, to different stressors, losses, the different phases of life.

 

Why are AP’s waiting to tell their child they’re adopted?

More and more adoptive parents are openly admitting that they haven’t told their child they are adopted and intend to wait to tell till the child is old enough to understand.  I know I’ve brought this up many times over the years, but this comment left under an article written by an adoptee about the hard truths in adoption (loss, abandonment, grief) sparked this post. 

 

Family Health History Updates and Adoption

I read an adoption agency post on Family Health History, left a comment, went back to read it again and realized the post is from 2016.  My comment is still there pending approval, which I expected as I commented on the weekend.  The post was on what the adoption agency does with any family medical updates, note what they do seems pretty standard across agencies, something I’ve talked about before.  Adoption agencies can also charge an adoptee to pull their file.

Is the standard good enough is the question I’m asking you my friends.

If you answer in the comments:

1. Include your role in adoption (first parent, adoptive parent, adoptee).
2. Answer whether it is good enough to you, and why, if it’s not good enough, what should be done instead.
3. Include whether you’d have known to check with the adoption agency regularly for updated family health history.

Here is the post: Adoptees and Updated Medical Information

My comment is below, but please don’t click the ‘Read the rest of this entry’ until you’ve read the above post linked, so it’s read without my bias good or bad.  If you are going to comment, it would also be good to do that before you read my comment.

 

Again…

Dr. Donna Campbell, a Texas legislator has written a preemptive letter against Texas changing the law that seals an adult adoptee’s original birth certificates away from them.  As I read the letter, it made me feel like adoptees aren’t part of families who adopt and birth parents who place.  No room at the table for adult adoptees.  She does state accommodations can be made to provide medical history, and notes there is already a way for an adoptee to get their original birth certificate, I.e. if they know the name of the parent(s) on the original birth certificate…

 

Just wow…

7 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Adopting

“6. The lack of medical information and social history is awkward, embarrassing, and frustrating.”

“Right now, forms are an annoyance. The amount of blanks I have to leave is frustrating. At some point, the gaps between what we know and what we don’t might be a source of embarrassment for my kids. I can say we have to accept unknowns (because we do), but it’s hard.”

Do you have any idea the number of adoptees out there who can only wish that the lack of FHH was just awkward, embarrassing, and frustrating…

…might be a source of embarrassment for your kids.  Embarrassment?  Try life-altering, life-threatening…

I’m going to stop here before I get really upset at the glibness displayed…

 

Shaking my head…

On a Facebook post asking if adoptees should have the right to their original birth certificate, the comments quickly devolved into the usual default opinions.  “Medical records should be available to the adopted person but birth parents deserve privacy” is the recurring sentiment reflected in many of the comments to this post on Facebook.  Those comments reflect ignorance of what medical records are, versus, what a family health history is.  It’s appalling that people do not understand the difference.

 

Wishing the best…

By TAO

Long-time readers know one of my biggest concerns is that adoption, in particular closed adoption, denies adoptees access to knowledge of what health issues run in their family, that kept members would be aware of.  With openness that is mitigated somewhat, provided the adoption stays open and both sides of the adoptee’s family are included, not perfect, but better.

Yet, there are still closed adoptions both domestically, and internationally beyond anyone’s control.  Sometimes, it isn’t just knowledge that is needed to make the difference.  Thankfully in this story, the family had searched for their child’s family prior to the diagnosis, and had success in finding them.

I hope everything goes well, and according to plan, my thoughts are with the family.

Stratham boy finds bone marrow match

 

Running into adoption, yet again…

By TAO

The other day, I was chatting with one of the guys in my class, talking about our stories, and I explained one of the reasons I’m there is because of being adopted, the lack of family health history that I wasn’t allowed to know, because by law I couldn’t know my family of birth.

Well, it turns out he had a couple of cousins who were adopted… 

 

It’s so reassuring – or not…

By TAO

A couple of days ago I made chocolate chip cookies, hubs favorite cookie, providing I make it from his mom’s recipe.  Never mind that the recipe is pretty much identical to every other chocolate chip cookie recipe – they taste better if I follow the handwritten recipe his mom sent him before she passed away.  So I use that recipe because I understand they taste better because of that memory of being a child eating chocolate chip cookies his mom had just made.

So where am I going with this touching story you may be thinking…

 

Adoption history and the lasting impact of not doing it right…

By TAO

I know – two posts in one day.  I over-did it yesterday and have done my best not to go lay-down and sleep because that will mess up my sleep tonight.  This morning I followed a link from twitter and ended up reading the first link.  I don’t know who provided the link, but reading it made me incredibly sad – not just the lies, but the mis-information that made it so much harder for Michael.  It’s from 1999 and long to be published in the NY Times – about the era when I was adopted.