Indian Late Discovery Adoptee

I have never really been good at describing my feelings. It takes me a while to find the words to describe or explain my thoughts. What I think I'm good at, is making analogies to break things down and explain them. One of the things people have been telling me since learning about my adoption is that I should be grateful for where I'm at now. The thing is, I am already aware of this. I got to where I'm at because of choices I made after I left "home". When I talk about my thoughts and express how I feel about my adoption, I am in no way dismissing my present. But it is imperative to acknowledge that my past had affected me. This is something that I will not only carry for the rest of my life but I will have to deal with from this point onward. At any rate, here is one of the analogies I've been sharing with most people around me in an attempt to explain not just how I feel about being in a hidden adoption, but also where I'm at now. Imagine for a mom...

"Adoptees lose so much in the name of adoption - we are born into the expectation of sacrificing who we are and where we come from in order to fit in." - Ferera Swan "Every adopted person is a story. Ignore the story, and you ignore the person. Tell your story. Research the details. Be relentless. Beginnings matter - without them none of us would exist." - Anne Heffron As long as I can remember, looking in the mirror has often been hard. Not to say that it caused me a great deal of pain, but every now and then, it was just confussing. I would study the details of my face and wonder who I resembled. I never saw my "mother" in me, and I could never quite see my "father". Occasionally a friend or someone I meet would see a family picture I'd share and they mention that I look somewhat like my "father". But I couldn't quite see it. Now that I know I'm adopted, I look at the mirror, and I don't know who is loo...

Where are you from? For most people it's the place they grew up in, maybe even the place they were born. For others, it's where their family is from. Really, it's all about your roots. Where you lay the foundation that makes you the person that you are. I have been fortunate enough to have lived in a few countries. I've lived a year and a half in South Korea, five years in Indonesia, eleven years in India, and the rest of the time, and the gaps between those countries has been various states in America. So, for me, being asked "Where are you from?" has always been a tricky question to answer. Because we moved around so much, I never really felt like I belonged to a place. That being said, my response has typically been, I'm from all over. I couldn't really say I'm from where my family is, because we were, and still are scattered all across the globe. Growing up as a brown person in the United States however changes things. When people ask w...

Writing up my first blog post about being adopted has been tough. Not just trying to find the words to put down, but because I wasn't sure how to open myself for everyone to see. This is a path that I knew once I go down, there is no going back. There's no off switch for what is shared. But I wanted, and needed to do this for myself. My first post is as raw as I can make it. I do hope that by showing my vulnerability, it might help someone else. Because, you can be strong in your vulnerability. Well, I started this all off with a simple Facebook post to the people that know me. It read: "Well, it turns out I'm adopted. The past three and a half months has been extremely difficult. I'm typically not one to share the stressful moments of my life on here, but I've decided to share this with everyone that I know. I recently listened to a podcast about adoption called "Born in April Raised in June" by April Dinwoodie. In it she speaks with Darryl ...

I am a Late Discovery Adoptee. This is a term I only discovered fairly recently in August of 2019. I was browsing the web, looking for any sort of answer to understand this crazy new discovery about myself. But, yeah, turns out I'm adopted. And I found this out at 34. Some of you reading this already know me. Some longer than others. For those that either didn't grow up with me and know how I was brought up, or just don't know me at all, let me start at the beginning for you. I was born to a Cuban mother and an Indian father in February of 1985. It was 10:55 pm, in a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Well, this is what I was told by my parents. I had an older sister at the time, and we were a family of 4. Growing up, I never questioned our parents who I was. They, and by they I mostly mean our mother, shared stories about the day I was born. There was never any question about it. My older sister and I were and obviously still are brown. My older sister however, has a l...