My relationship with my name has been complicated over the years. The name came to be assigned to me at birth by my mother, who wanted to mash together Charlotte and a piece of her own name. Hence, I have been bestowed a name that requires me to pronounce it three times at each introduction,…
The world that seemed normal to Angela Legg as she grew up didn’t look normal to the society that surrounded her. She didn’t realize this until she was much older. In her life, she had two loving female caregivers and two brothers who gave her the appropriate hard time for being their little sis. She…
I look back with a bit of embarrassment at the snapshot in my head of the time when I sat on my living room carpet in a patch of sunlight as a teen and listened to my mother’s religious psychology radio show. At that time, I heard heart-warming stories of loving families with children who…
In this episode, I introduce you to who I am and what my adoption and foster care journey has been like. It has taken me quite a while to reach the point where I was ready to put my background in the spotlight for a few reasons. I was incredibly eager in the early days…
When some adoptees discover they aren’t US citizens, it can already be too late. Paperwork memories stapled to my brain Even though my experience finalizing our international adoption took place about 20 years ago the pile of paperwork we sifted through will not leave my memory. At one point, we went through dozens of individual…
As adoptive parents, we often try our best to do our research to find a program to adopt through that seems ethical. Sometimes we find out later that the situation our adopted children were in was far more complicated than we initially thought. Marjie Alonso adopted two young boys from Paraguay. The boys were not…
I have thought a lot about coaching and how it can benefit people. For most of my life, I have attempted to come alongside the parents and young adults I have known to help them develop meaningful goals and be their cheerleader through setbacks and successes. Over this time, I have seen how their experiences, especially within their families, have affected this trajectory. If your life has been touched by adoption or foster care, whether you experienced these as a child or a parent, they can change the way you face goals and life. I understand this nuance, not just from my own world, but from years of relationships and research from perspectives outside my own. Let me come alongside you. I will respect your experience and your path and be your cheerleader as we move toward a life you can only imagine.
This course is about how to communicate with our children about adoption in each stage of their lives. I put this course together, not because I am a mental health professional prescribing the appropriate way to parent. I am not. I have immense respect for them and what they are able to do to help keep our kids and ourselves happy and healthy. But I am speaking from my perspective as an adoptive mom with on-the-ground experience. In addition to that, I have also been a podcaster and writer about adoption and foster care issues over the past few years. I have learned from listening to others in the adoption space and doing my own research. Many adoptees have been vocal about the alienation they felt when they couldn’t talk to their parents about important aspects of who they were and how they felt about their adoption. We adoptive parents often don’t know how to navigate these conversations. I hope this course can be a starting point for parents to feel empowered to find out what will work for them and their families to allow them to bring adoption into their regular everyday conversation.
By Charlyn Spiering on January 19
A few weeks ago, the end of Christmas break was coming for my kids: the ones in college and the ones in high school. I was feeling the coming loss of time with them, so I invited one of my college kids and one of my high schoolers out to coffee. This was primarily because they were the people in the house who were present and willing to come with me. I have passed on to some of my kids the desire for cozy warmth found in places where the scent of freshly ground coffee beans burrows into your clothes. These were some of those kids. It was just chance that the two who came out with me that day were my adopted kids. I loved the way they opened up to me when I let them take control of the conversation. I could never see the world the way they do. I will never understand belonging in the way they do. I could absolutely never make the inappropriate jokes about adoption or race they do, and I hope the people at the tables around us took what they may have heard in context. I learn from them all the time. There are experiences I wish I could shield them from because the world sometimes doesn’t understand pieces of them. I can’t, but I can listen, sympathize, and fill them with highly caffeinated cups of sugar and whole milk.
Adoption Uncovered 