Award-winning writer and author Sally Bacchetta announced the release of her new book, What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent's Perspective. The book is described as “a tender, revealing look at adoption from the parent perspective.” Whether an adoptive parent, an adoptee, someone considering adoption, or simply curious about adoption dynamics, What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent’s Perspective will touch hearts and increase readers' sensitivity to the challenges and joys that are unique to adoptive parenting.
Bacchetta wrote the book in response to a need common among adoptive families. “Adoptive families navigate emotional terrain that fully-biological families don’t have to,” said Bacchetta, adoptive mother of two. “This is a book adoptive parents can give to their child and say, ‘I know adoption is painful, unsettling, joyous, and affirming. It’s that way for me too. More than anything, adoption is the way we came together, and I’ll always be grateful for that.’”
“Sally has written a narrative that is heartfelt, honest, and warm,” said Greg Franklin, Esq. and Fellow of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys. “She’s told her story truthfully and without sugar coating, but also with knowledge from which I would have benefitted had the book been written before my family embarked upon our own journey to adoption. The readers of this book are lucky to have the benefit of Sally’s experience and her shared wisdom, because her story reminds us that we have so much in common.” more
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Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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I
'm ready to admit that I struggle with blogging about adoption, and the struggle surprises me. I have no mixed feelings to get in my way... no ongoing grief or frustration to impede me. In fact, I have been twice-blessed with adoptions that exceeded even my wildest hopes. Twice-blessed with healthy newborns adopted domestically after meeting their birth mothers, who are two of the most fabulous young women on the planet, and an adoption attorney who is compassionate, wise, and professionally impeccable. No drama. No trauma. No hardship worth counting, other than financial, and that burden is universal among adoptive parents.
So, what's my problem? I've thought about it a lot, and I finally realize my "problem" is exactly that I have been twice-blessed with adoptions that exceeded even my wildest hopes. I call it Adopter's Guilt.
My "problem" is that when I go on the website of the adoption agency we used, I see faces and faces and faces of people waiting to adopt, eager to adopt, some desperate to adopt. Some of these faces I know personally, others I know from reading their profiles online. Though their smiling pictures beam, "Notice me! Pick us! We'd be great parents!", I know that as day after day slips away Doubt plods in with a heavy step and whispers, "Why has no one noticed you? Why has no one picked you? Perhaps you're not meant to be parents after all. Ever."
My "problem" is that adoption has brought people into my life. People like Michelle, who of everyone I know is among the most full of love and life and promise, yet she waits and waits and waits, with growing despair. People like Charlene, who waited 7 years for an adoption match and has suffered - since the day she brought her daughter home - with debilitating depression and self-doubt. People like Dara and Jeff, whose post-adoption experience has been a devastating legal nightmare. People like the birth mothers who write to me about feeling remorseful or inadequate or shut out.
My "problem" is that adoption means gain for some and loss for others. There are winners and losers, chosen and unchosen, the triumphant and the defeated. Some of us are made whole by adoption and others are broken apart by it.
My struggle to blog about adoption is really a struggle to reconcile the irreconcilable. Why me? I have no idea. Why not you? I have no idea.
I can't change anyone else's timeline any more than I could have changed my own. I do believe that everything happens in the right way at the right time (whatever that means), and that we almost never understand that until we're looking back.
I'm supremely grateful to be one of those looking back. I trust that you will be too.
Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
My Google Profile+
Sally Bacchetta's YouTube Channel
Award-winning writer and author Sally Bacchetta announced the release of her new book, What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent's Perspective. The book is described as “a tender, revealing look at adoption from the parent perspective.” Whether an adoptive parent, an adoptee, someone considering adoption, or simply curious about adoption dynamics, What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent’s Perspective will touch hearts and increase readers' sensitivity to the challenges and joys that are unique to adoptive parenting.
