This year World Adoption Day was November 9, 2024. An annual day to shine a light on voices in the adoption community, and to share the stories of those who have been on the journey of adoption. A day to celebrate all the relationships in my adopted life. And a collective effort to raise awareness of the more than more than 100,000 children waiting to be adopted from foster care.
Naturally, as an adoptee I had NO idea what my birth mom went through when she gave me up for adoption. I only knew what my experience was, my feelings, my questions, my wonderings, and my internal struggle. Little did I know that she had a struggle of her own.
NOW, I have a new perspective thanks to Cathy, a DNA cousin. As a birth mother, she wrote a book about her search and journey to find the daughter she gave up for adoption. I have a very new appreciation for what my birth mom must have gone through. The heart ache and pain she would have endured. Did she get to hold me? Touch me? I do know that she named me. I was born Richard Bruce Osmond.
Check out Cathy’s book, Does She Think of Me. Here is an excerpt for her book.
“You’re not permitted to see your child at birth.” The nurse was cold and stern as she draped a curtain across the teenager’s midsection. The baby’s cries echoed off the cold operating room walls and boomeranged back to the girl’s shattered heart. Wiping the tears from her eyes she desperately clung to her baby’s fleeting shadow, cast upon the thin fabric that hung between them. An unplanned pregnancy at seventeen, and the feeling they had nowhere to turn, forced a young couple to make a decision they would regret for the rest of their lives. Although Cathy and Joey had their entire future planned to eternity, nothing could have prepared them for this fork in the road. One decision, either way, would change the course of their love forever. The pounding of her heart dances in rhythm to the methodical passing of time. How could nineteen painful years drag on like an eternity, yet suddenly fade in the blink of an eye? Anxiously waiting for the phone to ring Cathy accepts the unknown. Her future happiness depends on the questions she yearns to have answered. Did she make the right decision? Can her daughter forgive her?
Meandering Moose 