I listened to testimony on a bill making its way through the Texas legislature that would impact people like my son and my daughter. HB 2725 would restore access to an original birth certificate to adults adopted in Texas.
At about 5:29:30 (listen if you’d like), one of the committee members says in response to previous testimony, “I’m curious about the rights of the adoptive parent. Part of the reason the law was designed this way [sealed birth records] was to protect and nurture the legal construct that the adoptive parents are the parents…I haven’t heard anything from the side of the adoptive parent.”
That got me thinking about the rights of the adoptive parent. And for this gentleman, a Texas Representative asking thoughtful questions during this hearing, I weigh in.
My eldest child turned 18 recently. It’s such a strange line, an arbitrary line, a legal line, between childhood and adulthood. Things change and things stay the same.
We held a party for our newly proclaimed adult, and of course my parents were part of it. My mom brought a present — for ME.
Me at 18
It was a poem I’d written on my own 18th birthday decades ago. Mom had framed and adorned it with a miniature version of my senior portrait.
It’s not the world’s best poetry (or prose, perhaps; not sure which I was going for), but it does give renewed insight into what it is like to be in the newborn days of being an adult.
After years of “manually” trying to conceive, John and Katie Kelly put their bodies, wallet and marriage through the ringer of modern infertility treatments.
Twenty years ago I was living this movie. I’d met my Mr Wonderful but we weren’t making babies. We had to get help making babies. We never did make babies. My ovaries became my most thought-of organs and my marriage was tested to its core. It was a painful chapter of my life in so many ways — physically, emotionally, financially, and relationshipally.
Not many people knew what we were going through back then. At the time, infertility felt like a shameful and dirty secret, so we endured our journey largely alone, relying only on each other and close family.
