Yesterday 12 years ago our family was reunited for the first time. It was an incredible experience and to celebrate we did an online video and chat. It was a lot of fun and it was great to hear everyone share their experiences.
For those of you who could not stay for the entire show, or were unable to join us, we recorded the whole thing. It is about 2 hours long but I bookmarked the each section to make it easier for people to watch in parts.
We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback because we are thinking about doing it again.
This Sunday December 20th it will be 12 years since our family was reunited. To celebrate we are inviting you to join us in a live video chat from Panama. Starting at 6:30pm we will be answering any questions you might have about the story or our experiences. This is a chance for you to meet some of the “characters” from my mother’s up coming book.
This past Tuesday night I was on a cronfrence call with Sidney Gaskins and Kevin Hofmann. The call was about how to approach the search as a parent and as an adoptee. Sidney is a mother of an adopted child and shared how she approaches the subject with her 10 year old son. Kevin is an adoptee who recently started searching for his birth family again. It was a great conversation. I would like to thank Sidney for putting this together and Kevin for sharing his thoughts and feelings.
Here are some of the topics we talked about:
Adoptive parent fears
Adoptee fears of addressing parents with the desire to search
Terminology used
Process of addressing biological parents as part of the adoptee
Non-threatening ways to address biological parentage with adoptees for adoptive parents
We hope this information will be useful for adoptees and parents who are wondering how to approach this sensitive subject. We would love to hear any feedback people have about this conversation.