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.
In Part 1, Clemencia Deleon began to tell about her wrong way adoption, a kinship placement that was supposed to be open. Despite expectations and agreements, it remained unknown to her son that the woman he lived with but didn’t call “mom” was, in fact, his biological mom.
That was an untenable situation. One way or another, a living lie will resolve — with intention or without it. And there will be fallout.
Here’s how things unfolded for Clemencia, her son Kobe, and his parents — her half-brother and his wife.
Clemencia Deleon reached out to me several months ago, grateful to have found place to talk about adoption that is neither all “rainbows & unicorns” nor “fire & brimstone.” I told her that in this space we allow for the complexity of living in adoption from all stations of the constellation, and I invited her to tell her story as a birth mother in a kinship adoption.
Kinship adoption is rather unexplored territory for me, so I was thrilled that Clemencia offered her thoughts about the kinship adoption of her son, Kobe, gone wrong. Her two-part tale of pitfalls and regret is instructive to us all.
