They say your brother or sister is generally the person you will know longer than any other human being. My sister and I started that off on the right foot. Four years apart, I’m pretty sure the first dozen or so of my life, all we did was bicker. There was the time she pushed […]
Tag: adoption
Family, against all odds
I had a friend in college who once said to me that, though he considered himself an atheist, he wanted so badly to believe there was something, anything out there watching over us with tender love and care. He just couldn’t. I was always struck by this because I felt the exact opposite: whereas he […]
Changing Trains
There’s this moment after leaving the Secaucus station where the train ducks into a tunnel, and the deeper into the dark it goes, the quicker the air pressure changes as if to suck the little sickle cell up the vein to the heart of Manhattan. From under the Hudson, all the passengers are adjusting their […]
Holding Close the Tension of the Opposites
Not all that long ago, a friend of mine was telling me about growing up in a rough family situation. His father had committed suicide and his mother’s new fiancé was so abusive that Child Protective Services had to step in and remove him (and his kid sister) from the home. A local Southern Baptist […]
Making Kin, or why every family must adopt
If you were to ask folks how you go about creating a family, the most common answer would almost certainly have something to do with marriage and sex. Sure, there are other ways to start a family, like adoption, but given that adoptions only account for between 2-4% of American families today, it’s no surprise […]
How the Gay Marriage Debate Reveals Negative Attitudes toward the Adopted
There’s an article on the front page of CNN today, an opinion piece, that defends traditional marriage. Because it would violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause to do so, the argument – like the one that will be heard before the Supreme Court soon – is void of any religious language. Even if conservative Christianity […]
I Spent a Week in a Moroccan Orphanage and Lived to Blog About It
In America, when we hear about orphans, we immediately conjure up images of little orphan Annie fighting the evil Miss Hannigan with rich ole’ Daddy Warbucks on her side. It’s a hard-knock life, after all. My guess is that you’d think, in a developing country, that stereotype would be even worse, but I’m not sure […]
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