Sherrie Eldridge

“You realize you've never walked in another person's shoes. Never have. Never will. The same is true in adoption. There are three sets of adoption shoes sitting at the end of the boardwalk. The adoptees...the birth parents'...and the adoptive parents'. Each is unique and each has a story to tell.”

“I have this deep need to bond with real blood relatives, but I feel like I'm not really a part of either of my families.”

“...they look at adoption through rose-colored glasses, trying to make it a win/win situation for unplanned pregnancies and infertility, never giving a thought about what effect adoption has on the child.”

“Adoptive parents often say about adoption day: "It was the happiest day of our lives!" While most of us are happy to be adopted, our own hearts tell us that adoption day was the most painful day of our lives, for the person with whom we shared deep intimacy suddenly disappeared from our world.”

“If we were created from the very fiber of our birth parents' physical and emotional beings, don't you think our need to think about them would be innate? If we had primal conversations with our mother in the womb, wouldn't you say it is natural for us to think about her as we are growing up and growing old? And if our birth father's DNA helped determine the color of our hair and eyes, wouldn't you say that he is just as much a part of us as our mother and it is normal to want a relationship with him? Wherever we are in the spectrum of perceptions about our birth parents, we must rest assured that our thoughts are normal and healthy. They are part of the fiber of our being. Part of the package of being adopted. It is all about our identity...our dual identity.”

“The remarkable thing we have is a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.”

“Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something.”

“Because adoption is a lifelong journey, we have a future filled with the potential to learn invaluable lessons. But many of us haven't been taught that we have a choice in every situation in life.”

“Because our birth mothers made a choice for us that dramatically changed the course of our lives and over which we had no control, many of us have a foundational belief (often unconscious) that we don't have the right to choose our own course in life. We feel instead that we are at the mercy of others.”

“It is a celebration of the fact that we were adopted for a purpose and that adoption is an experience that has the potential of teaching us some of life's richest and deepest lessons.”

“...the advantage of having an unexpected opportunity to successfully grieve our early-life losses; to enjoy healthy relationships; to develop an unshakable sense of self-esteem; to find our unique purposes in life; to have peace about our adoption experiences; to find our true identities...now I am alive...fully alive and on the cutting edge of my life's journey. What better place could one be?”

“Then one detail caught my attention. "Time (of birth), 5:57 A.M." Wow! I really was born! I wasn't an alien who was dropped down into my adoptive parents' arms. I was a real baby who experienced a real birth from a real mother at a real time of day. For me, that tid-bit of information was like a meal to a starving woman.”

“How you choose to respond to each moment of the movie of life determines how you see the next frame, and the next, and eventually how you feel when the movie ends.”

“Listen to your hearts, parents! You are the expert when it comes to knowing your child. I love the Scripture that says we are to let the peace of God rule in our hearts...In other words, peace in your heart is to be like an umpire calling the shots. When in doubt--DON'T!”

“I believe one of the most sacrificial acts of love adoptive parents can do is to give up their preconceptions and agendas about what their child's views "should" be and be open to hear the conflicting emotions and thoughts their child often experiences.”