How easily can a proud parent’s enthusiastic sharing become oversharenting? Sara Easterly is back to help adoptive parents remember to see even the most common things from our child’s point of view.
Aside: my interview with Sara for the podcast Adoption: The Long View will be released November 1, just in time to kick off National Adoption Awareness Month and center on adoptee voices. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts (here’s where I do).
Sara’s episode is sooooooooo good and juicy — all of the episodes are!
Deciding when and how to share our kids’ stories publicly can be tricky for parents to navigate, especially when it seems everyone around us is posting photos and stories of their children online. Kid-focused posts are usually met with adoration from mainstream culture, who cherish a refreshing break from the rest of the feed that is so often ranting, despairing, or arguing.
There’s something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption. A family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both. Being adopted typically begins at the intersection of grief and loss for our birth parents and great joy for our adoptive parents.
Angela Tucker is on a mission to center adoptee voices — which have been historically marginalized — because she considers adoptees the experts in the adoption experience. That’s a great point, and adoptive parents are wise to listen, to understand.
In this new podcast episode of Adoption: The Long View, Angela talks about what it’s like to be wedged between the great pain of one set of parents and the great joy of the other. She tells a story about what can happen to an adopted person when they repeat an oft-used adoptive parent explanation like born in my heart. She also reveals the one thing that can stop an adoptee in their tracks from being authentic and vulnerable with their parents.
Brené Brown asks her guests on the Unlocking Us podcast: what are 5 songs you can’t live without?
I was walking Dexter the other day while listening. I started thinking about what my 5 songs would be — just in case Brené Brown ever calls me to be on her show (hah!).
First I had to figure out how to even pare them down, all the songs from all the playlists I have complied, favorites from various eras of my life. SO many soundtracks, depending on if we’re talking the early years with my sisters and parents, my college years, my young adult years, our early marriage, my second childhood (aka raising-my-children years), or even other criteria that’s not timeline-based.
I settled on the criteria as this: songs associated with people. My people.
