Once upon a time there was a social worker who was employed by an adopting agency as their “post-adoption specialist”, meaning that she handled any problems encountered by people after the adoption was finalized, including adult adoptees desiring to search.
One afternoon, her phone rang.
“Yes,” she responded, stunned and amused by the bigness of his voice and attitude.
“Of course you do!” she said gently, with a smile in her voice.
“We understand that searching doesn’t imply anything negative about the home you grew up in. It’s normal to have questions.”
“How old were you? What do you remember?”
Hint: Inside every secure adult is an insecure child. This young man was secure on the outside but had serious issues of loss inside, with which he had never dealt, such as the loss of his birth family and his name. He would have accepted these losses as “normal” within the context of adoption, but greatly feared that he might also have lost his genetic duplicate, an identical twin. He eventually learned that Mikey was another child in the last foster home in which he lived before the adoption.
