What If? An Adoptee’s Loyalties Amidst Search and Reunion
What If? An Adoptee’s Loyalties Amidst Search and Reunion
Published on:
Jul 21, 2025
Category
Adult Adoptees
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Amidst the bustle of hundreds of speakers, exhibitors, and attendees, I zipped in and out of windowless conference rooms with a few minutes here and there to recoup. My organization’s annual conference is a time for adoption professionals to better their knowledge of various topics, but also to connect with their peers. To forge newfound relationships and to reunite with those from previous years.
Reunion, or the importance of relationships, was a central theme, in both session content and in the connections, I witnessed right in front of me. Navigating this space as both an adoptee and adoption professional makes me particularly vulnerable to my “why,” or my reason for pursuing this work and constantly steeping myself in my own adoption story. It forces me to confront my losses too, namely those relationships and ties severed until I pursued a search and reunion in my adolescence.
What Are the Six Stuck Spots? A Personal Look at Loyalty in Adoption
In April, I, along with my fellow Emerging Leaders, shared our personal experiences related to the “Six Stuck Spots” at C.A.S.E.’s annual gala. The Six Stuck Spots are areas where adoptees may get stuck in processing their adoptee experience including Reason for Adoption, Missing/Difficult Information, Identity, Difference, Permanence and Loyalty. I chose to speak about loyalty, reflecting on my natural inclination to wonder what life could have been like for me if it hadn’t been for life’s circumstances and my birth parents’ decisions.
There are no better words to describe this concept, so I will place an excerpt below from my script:
“Fleeting images cross my mind. Sometimes they’re tea parties, hand-me-down clothes, or toys I must share. Other times, I climb trees amidst the rolling hills of the Shenandoah Valley, green as far as the eye can see. My imagination runs just as wild as 6-year-old Emily seeing monkey bars at a playground.
[I dream] about those “what if” situations, like the sporadic, unpredictable memories of another life that could have been. Those tea parties where I sip magical potions from plastic teacups. Those times I’m ‘so-and-so’s little sister.’ The hand-me-down play clothes and family trips and shared rooms.
What if I wasn’t adopted? What if there were six of us? Or, more realistically, what about the three of us? The three split up in the pursuit of a ‘better life…’ What if, what if, what if.
The person I am feels pulled between loyalties to the people I could have been. The little girl, youngest of six, youngest of two or three, or however that math works out when [children are split up]. Loyalty to the lovely people and places that shaped my childhood AND loyalty to these newfound relationships in young adulthood. Each contact is a reminder of my fictional narrative, of those stories I made up to fill the gaps of missing information. Of longing to know more than I had the rights to access.”
What My Birth Family Reunion Taught Me About Grief and Growth
While the search for and eventual reunion with my birth family highlighted loyalties to both my birth and adoptive families, these feelings had been simmering for years prior. I look back at my grieving 15-year-old self and wish I could tell her that what is ahead will be difficult but never a path to regret taking. That some puzzle pieces will lock in place while others cause more questions to emerge, further expanding the number of pieces altogether. Most of all, I want her to know that healing will not be instantaneous. My early 20s have taught me that this healing journey is lifelong and that grief shows up as little jabs to my heart in the places I am sometimes least expecting it to appear.
Adoption is predicated on loss, but from this loss beauty can emerge . We can have beautiful experiences, connections, and love while holding space for the grief. I have found these blossoming sibling relationships in young adulthood to be exactly what was missing from my life’s “puzzle.” My loyalties are tied to all those who love me and who I love in return.
Like those joyous reunions of adoption professionals at my work conference, I see the joy in my personal birth family reunion. This joy accounts for sorrow, too. Those relationships that have not borne fruit (yet). It recognizes that my relationships have surfaced from hope in building ties and the work it took to get to this place. Although my puzzle fluctuates in size, I can now account for a few of those missing pieces.
