“...she did have her own baby. She had you, and your brother, and if you think that it was any different for her, it wasn't. And I knew that he meant it.”

“I began for the first time to really understand the loss my adoptive mother must have felt from not having her own child. I was terribly sad for her and realized that she had missed out greatly - we both had - and there was nothing I could do to change that. I could never be her natural daughter and I could never make her feel better about that loss. Guilt is a strange waste of time in the cold light of day.”

“...I couldn't let go of her hand. For a few moments, I looked at the shape of it, the roundness of her fingers. I realized that her hands gave me a sense of comfort because they were the most familiar part of her to me. Those hands had always been in my sight when I was a child. Those were the hands I held crossing the street, the hands that made me lunch and cooked me dinner, the hands that stroked me when I was feeling sad, the hands on the steering wheel driving me all over town, the hands whose rings I had looked at and played with, turning them around on her finger. I knew then that regardless of how we had fought and cried and how adoption had affected us both, those hands, free of words and emotional baggage, encompassed everything. They were pure love-all the love that she had for me.”

“I left their house that night feeling very different from when I arrived. I was exhausted and relieved, yet more importantly, I felt more grounded, as if I was finally stepping into my own body. It felt good. At last I had done it. The secret was out and I knew then that how my parents chose to deal with this information was up to them. I simply couldn't carry it all any longer. I had to stop protecting their feelings. They were, after all, grown-ups. It was time for me to heal my sadness and anger, to stop being a victim of this situation, to move on with my life.”

“To any adopted person searching for help and support, I saw this: find people who really know and understand the adoption experience and stay away from people who think they know. Avoid like the plague those who are just interested in being a part of your reunion stories because it sounds like fun. Be open to professional counselling to understand and help process all the conflicting emotions you may feel so that your reunion can be the best possible experience; so that you, as an adoptee, can pass on to your children the joy in their arrival that you never felt was connected to your own.”

“As for myself, the part of me that still believes that I was given up because there was something wrong with me will diminish with the passage of time. But I feel sad when I think about all those years of not really knowing the truth. Would it have made me feel better about myself if I had known my story? Or would it still have taken me this long to understand what it all meant?”

“Yes they are my parents but unlike those who haven't been adopted, I also have another set of parents. I know my adoptive parents love me and I love them, but I have a different connection with them than I would experience if I had been raised in my birth home. I still need to know who my birth parents are.”