CUB Retreat 2024: A Transformative Experience for This Adoptee

As an adoptee, I recently had the privilege of attending the CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) Retreat 2024 in Kansas City, Missouri. Having attended two Untangling Our Roots conferences, I had met several first mothers who encouraged me to join them at CUB. I knew this event would be wonderful and healing, as it provides an inclusive space for first parents and adoptees to connect, share, and learn from eachother.
Adoptee / Birth Father Speak at Adoption Knowledge Conference, Austin, Texas, 2012
Our Alternate Universe: A Mother’s Day Letter to My Biological Step-Mother
From the moment we met, I knew you were not just my birth father’s wife, but that you’d somehow always been a mother I’d been missing. Nanny, the day I met you, I did not feel like you were going to become “like a mother to me,” I felt you already were. I immediately felt […]
A Memoir About an Adoption that Never Happened.
A memoir about an adoption that never happened. It is a black market baby’s story about the parents who held onto her as tightly as they did her secret, and the mother who let her go. It is about one woman’s walk home, a journey back to self, a healing of primal wounds, to claim her truth and correct her identity.
Mirror Mirror
How Being an Adoptee and Single Parent Shaped My Parenting Style and Relationship With My Daughter
In My Birth Mother’s Shoes
At 19 years old, I created the same circumstances to put myself squarely in my own birth mother’s shoes. Do I keep my unplanned baby? The moment the plus sign appeared I knew what I would do. I could never leave or abort my baby. In an instant it dawned on me, ‘inside me now is my first known living blood relative.’ I was scared and elated.
Fear, Anxiety & The Primal Wound
I wake up this morning and I feel it again, the wave of sickness lapping my gut, a slow tide rising in the depth of my belly, a heat warming my throat, stealing my breath, burning my chest a bright red. This is no serene sunrise, I crave peace and tranquility, but no, my heart […]
Harm Unintended
Acknowledging My Birth Mother’s Angst After Reading My Last Post