Tag Archives: kinship adoption

Clemencia Deleon: Truth-Telling & Emotional Intelligence in a Kinship Adoption

You tell a small lie or you keep the truth out of something, and your intention is to go back and tell the truth. But then you forget, or you get comfortable in that missing truth part, and it just gets bigger and grows.

And so it was this energy that was accumulating. Nobody was saying anything about until I was like,
“I can’t do this anymore. I have to tell him.”

Clemencia Deleon, birth mom in a kinship adoption —

Imagine you are 18 years old and parenting a 4 month old boy, a path you don’t feel prepared for or supported in at all. You have an older half-brother; he and his wife have been struggling to conceive. You end up placing your baby with them in what is agreed to be an open adoption.

But in practice, it’s not open. Sure you have contact at family get-togethers. You get to see him. But years later, his parents have declined to tell him that he was adopted and that you are his birth mom. As he grows older, you are pressed to either stay complicit with this lie of omission, or spill the beans without their permission.

In this new podcast episode of Adoption: The Long View, Clemencia Deleon tells her story of a kinship adoption gone wrong, her quest for emotional intelligence over the years, her moment of truth in finding her voice, and lessons learned to share with you.

Continue reading Clemencia Deleon: Truth-Telling & Emotional Intelligence in a Kinship Adoption

Wrong Way Adoption: The Back Story (Part 2)

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.

People in kinship adoptions need a map, too. Or they may go the wrong way.
Continue reading Wrong Way Adoption: The Back Story (Part 2)

Kinship Adoptions Need Openness, Too: A Birth Mom’s Story

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.

Please welcome Clemencia Deleon.

openness in kinship adoption

An Oozing Wound

Continue reading Kinship Adoptions Need Openness, Too: A Birth Mom’s Story