LOST AND FOUND: THE ADOPTION EXPERIENCE

My updated edition of Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience has just been re-issued by the University of Michigan Press. It was known as the adoptees’ "bible," perhaps because it was written as a guide by an adoptee for her fellow adoptees at a time when we were all just coming out of the closet. A few years before I had published Twice Born, Memoirs of An Adopted Daughter, which adoptees still identify with as their story, and a decade later, Journey of the Adopted Self, which completes the trilogy. .

In Lost and Found, I write of the psychological effects of growing up adopted. I see adoptees as having much in common with mythic heroes, also abandoned at birth, and as survivors, who do not know what they have survived. In an attempt to cope with the mysteries of their origins, adoptees became what I call the Good Adoptee, who tries to please, or the Bad Adoptee, who acts out. Even today adoptees come up to me saying "I was the Good Adoptee" or "I was the Bad Adoptee," as if explaining who they were.

In the section on Search and Reunion, I describe adoptees waking up from The Great Sleep and making the decision to search, first for the birth mother and then the birth father. There is a chapter on the varieties of reunion experience, as true today as it was then, and the journey after reunion.

The book also covers the history of Concerned United Birth Parents (CUB), whose members felt they were being looked on as "baby machines." And there are interviews with adoptive parents, who felt they were little more than "baby-sitters" when their child had a reunion. There is also a chapter on the adoptee’s right to know, which covers the ongoing battle between conservative lobby groups intent on keeping adoptees’ birth certificates sealed and the adoption reform movement intent on opening them.

My new Preface and Afterward treat the subjects of open adoption, international and interracial adoption, and reproductive technology. The book also features a list of support groups, adoption therapists, and adoption books and periodicals.

Lost and Found has something for everyone in the adoption triad, as well as for those contemplating adoption, and those who would understand the fundamental issues around mothering and mother loss, attachment and bonding, and the human need for origins. For more on this book, see my Adult Adoption Books page on this site.