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.
I wasn’t going to write about the travesties revealed by the film Three Identical Strangers, which my husband and I watched recently when it was on CNN.
I wasn’t going to until I read a defense of the practices of the researcher, Dr. Peter Neubauer, who conspired with Louise Wise Services to separate twins/triplets and research their development without the knowledge or permission of their parents. And until I got an impassioned email from my friend, an adoptee activist who will remain anonymous here.
Did you tune in to NBC’s This Is Us last week? Randall brings up the Adoption Split.
And with this meme I reiterate a remedy I often talk about: openness. It’s with openness (not necessarily contact) that the grownups in an adoption can help their child integrate and heal.
Randall Pearson, a transracial adoptee on the show, says, “My whole childhood I felt split. There were these people I lived with and then there were my birth parents who I never met. But I thought about them all the time…like a ringing in my ears. It quiets down sometimes…but then there are sometimes where it’s so loud.”
How to Help Heal the Adoption Split
The premise of my book is this: “Adoption creates a split between a person’s biology and their biography. Openness is a way to heal that split.”
Now. Who’s going to send a copy to Rebecca? (Randall’s fictional adoptive mom.)
