No matter how a family is formed a person can be surrounded by love. I came to understand this concept from an early age since my sister and I were both adopted as newborns through Adoption Options.
Through open adoption, I have gotten to be close with my birth family and my sister’s birth family. This lets me have even more loving people around me. I have a bonus mom, dad, siblings and even grandparents.
My adoption was never an unknown thing so I never had any surprise around it. I think my birth and adoptive parents did a really good job at never making me feel weird or different about being adopted. Any questions I had would always get answered so it was always a very normal conversation for me. I never really experienced any negative feelings about being adopted. I recognize that I am pretty privileged in the sense that I look fairly similar to my parents so I never really had to struggle with feeling different or having my peers ask why I look different than my parents.
However, I do sometimes get questions about why my sister doesn’t look like me. It doesn’t bother me too much though because I’ve always been happy to share my story and answer questions. Sometimes it is weird when I hangout with her and people assume we are friends and not sisters but strangely, I think it strengthens our bond because we laugh about the misunderstandings.
One misunderstanding people often have about adoption is that kids either come from an orphanage or a foster system. Expanding on this point, most people don’t understand my relationship with my birth family. I usually get surprised looks when I tell people I see my birth parents and birth siblings regularly, like I would with my extended family. These are myths I am happy to dispel whenever they arise as I have learned so much about open adoption, having lived experience.