07/14/2025
As a previous foster kid, I always hated this narrative that I had been rescued and was somehow a heroic story for others around me.
And I hated the minimizing of myself and my stepfather. It was a horribly abusive relationship. But I remember feeling - if everyone is describing him as a monster, and I love him, what does that make me? It took the shame I already felt about the abuse, and added to it that there was something deeply wrong with me for loving him.
That messaging meant that I had given up one secret I'd been forced to keep, the abuse, for a new secret - that I loved him and missed him.
It meant another new trauma I had to go through alone: a deep, profound sense of loss. I feared him but I also deeply loved him, and through his grooming, believed he was the only person who truly loved me.
He fled and was never caught or arrested. He used to call the house after school and cry and tell me I had ruined his life. And I couldn't tell anyone. I was scared he would hurt me again but I also wanted him to come home.
I was scared I would see him again. I was scared I would never see him again.
It was a stunning loss. I went to school one morning, that afternoon DFCS took me away with only the clothes I was wearing and my book bag, put me in a home with strangers who would not let me call home, would not tell me what was happening except that my mother had to choose between my stepfather and me, and that a judge would decide if I would go home or be put in foster care permanently or up for adoption. I wouldn't get to say goodbye to anyone. It would just be over.
I was eight.
It was like a tsunami. I walked out the door in the morning and by nightfall everything and everyone I knew and loved had been swept away. It creates a feeling of terror and fear of abandonment that I still feel in my bones 40 years later.
It created a sense of distance and disconnection with some members of my family who believed that because I was returned to my family, no real harm had been done. But there is no scenario where you remove a child from everything they know and throw them into a feeling of life-threatening uncertainty, that doesn't create profound and lasting trauma.
Decades of trauma therapy and I still feel that in my bones. It changes you on a cellular level. Even when you survive and claw and scratch your way back to life, and heal, and build a life worth living.
This is not a Hallmark movie. Our pain is not your p**n.
Stop romanticizing adoption.
Start listening to adoptees and former foster youth.
I’m an adoptive mom. I love my children fiercely. They love me too. We have a beautiful bond. But make no mistake—adoption is rooted in loss.
My children would have been adopted by me or by someone else. That was the path in front of them. But the trauma? That still would have come. And it still did.
Because trauma doesn’t vanish just because a child finds a loving home.
Because adoption doesn’t erase what came before.
Because even when we give them everything we can, we can’t undo what was taken from them.
Adoption is not a happy ending. It’s a complicated middle.
It’s grief and healing braided together. It’s joy and heartbreak in the same breath.
So no, we’re not the “lucky ones.”
And no, love is not enough.
Stop only telling the feel-good stories.
Start making space for the hard truths.
Start handing the mic to those who have lived it.
Their voices matter.
Their stories matter.
Their pain, their healing, their truth—it all matters more than our comfort.
If you really care about adoptees—about foster youth—then stop centering the savior narrative. Start centering them.
They are not charity.
They are not redemption arcs.
They are human beings. With stories that started long before we ever showed up.
Listen to them.
Believe them.
Honor the truth—even when it makes you uncomfortable.
Because that’s where real love begins
