Adoption: The Making of Me. An Oral History of Adoptee Stories

Mark Diebel has been married for almost 46 years and has two sons and two grandchildren. He has been serving as an Episcopal priest in parish ministry for thirty-six years. He was reunited with his birth mother, a second-generation Japanese immigrant, in 2004 when he was 49. A year later he learned that his natural father, a Cuban doctor, was killed in a bizarre accident in Matanzas Cuba in 1970. Over the years, he has learned abou...

Cary is a baby scoop-era adoptee who was born in a Florence Crittenton Home in Atlantic City NJ in 1964. Her first mother was 19 years old and was forced to relinquish her baby like many young mothers of those times. Cary had a great upbringing in a family that loved her and never made her feel othered. In her early 30s she reunited with her birth mother and then her birth father. The reunions went well for the most part, but some ...

Ellen is a baby scoop-era New York State adoptee. She was adopted by a loving Greek American couple through a closed private adoption and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with a younger adopted brother.

Ellen always wanted to find her original family and searched off and on starting in the early 90s but kept hitting roadblocks. Her adoptive parents were not supportive of her search so she had very little information to go on. Th...

Simone Pajo was born in Auckland New Zealand in 1968, the baby scoop era.  She was the middle child between two bio children and was adopted after the death of the middle bio daughter.  She grew up knowing her adoption was the result of a baby's death and this greatly affected the way she saw the world and her place in it.  It has taken decades for Simone to form a coherent worldview where her right to her identity does not de...

Ryan Anderson is a foundling and a transnational, transracial, and late discovery adoptee (LDA). Found on the street in El Jadida, Morocco he was adopted at age 3 months and then brought to Scotland at age 6 months, in between this time he was fostered by a Moroccan family. He first found out he was adopted at age 18. Since 2020 he has been focused on personal development, to then became open to sharing his story at age 31.

Jessica is a 1970 baby scoop-era adoptee, who started discovering her roots at age 50. After more than 80 years of closed records in NYS, she was able to obtain her original birth certificate in 2020. Two DNA tests and one secret after another uncovered a history of relinquishment, trauma, and family ties nearby of where she resides in upstate New York. 

At 54, Jessica is learning to live her truth on her terms and allowing herself ...

Valerie Naiman is an adoptee, singer, story-songwriter, eco-village founder, ontologist, and author. Her #1 bestseller book, Mystic Masquerade, an Adoptee's Search for Truth, was based on five decades of a search that took her around the world as she unraveled the mystery of her stolen identity. 

Valerie holds a master's degree in Art and worked as a costume designer and actress in film and theatre in NY, Miami & LA. S...

Chris Valdheims is a domestic adoptee born in the late 1970s and adopted in the early 1980s after spending years of his early childhood in foster care. Growing up, he knew very little about his birth family other than his mother and father had met while she worked as a librarian at MIT. He also knew his father was Black, and his mother had immigrated to the United States from Latvia. He spent years searching for answers about his f...

After being an only child all her life, Margaret Jane’s adoptive parents adopted four more children through the foster care system. This experience of witnessing adoption through foster care, and being the oldest sister of a group of adoptees, has given her a unique perspective and experience with adoption. 

Margaret Jane is married to her high school sweetheart, who she shares 3 kiddos with. She is an avid gardener, house...

Susan Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press in November 2023. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.  Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of repr...

Stacie is a Canadian born and an adoptee to same race and religion parents in 1991-1992. She is part of a mixed family of adopted and “home-made” siblings, all boys, and is the second oldest. She grew up mostly outdoors in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Traveling to Canada every summer fostered loving bonds with both of her grandmas and many cousins. Living further away from them, though, meant she had to create her group of “famil...

Ken DeStefano is a domestic adoptee born in the late 1960's and raised in a caring and loving home.  As an adoptee, he has had a largely happy life, but always wondered about the unknown.  That curiosity led to a search for his birth mother and a reunification with her.  His debut novel, "I Will See You Again...Hearts Will Sing," tells the story of two people whose past, present, and future lives are inexplicably lin...

Victoria Rich never expected to search for her biological family. Always curious about her origins, she did a photography project at the infant home where she was born but did not pursue any personal searching. Then she read The Girls Who Went Away and was struck that so many of the women interviewed said they thought about and worried about their babies all the time. She had grown up hearing the message that you should never look ...

John Frey was born in Vietnam and brought to the United States as part of Operation Babylift when he was a year-and-a-half old.  John often struggled with his identity, having been adopted and raised by a White American family while not having any connection to his birth country or culture.

I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiyo Ito.
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Kristal Parke is a talented Cree filmmaker, producer, podcast host, and adoptee, whose personal journey has driven her to explore themes of identity, belonging, and family in her work. Born and raised on the West Coast of Canada, Kristal was adopted into a non-indigenous family as an infant. This experience profoundly shaped her perspective on life, and she has used her creative prowess to shed light on the complexities of adoption...

Lorah Gerald is a same race, domestic, Baby Scoop Era, preRoe adoptee. She posts as The Adopted Chameleon on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Patreon, and Pinterest. She co-facilitates Adoptees Connect Tulsa and has a private Facebook group for adoptees and all MPEs called The Adopted Chameleons. She started her social media pages after her reunion with her biological family.

She was raised as an only child in her adoptive fami...

Sarah D. Shearer is a writer, wife, and mother. She was adopted from Russia as a baby but has spent her life in Thomasville, Georgia. She is passionate about encouraging people to overcome and maintain a positive perspective.

Sarah is married with two beautiful children. She and her family live on a sprawling rural farm, which gives her, as L.M. Montgomery says in Sarah’s favorite childhood novel Anne of Green Gables, great “scope f...

Born in Edinburgh in 1963, Roy grew up an only child and always knew he was adopted, or as his adoptive mother, Mollie, would tell him, “chosen”. Whilst loved unconditionally by Mollie and her husband Peter, the stigma of being an adopted teenager in 1970s Scotland resulted in Roy being bullied and spat on in school. 

At sixteen, he left Mollie a note asking if she had any information about his blood parents. She supplied a form his...

Pam Uzzell is a documentary filmmaker and podcaster currently living in Oakland, CA. She is the director and producer of four independent documentaries and the host and producer of the podcast, Art Heals All Wounds. 

Her adoptive parents were loving but saw her as the “oddball” of her family, resulting in a profound sense of loneliness. She turned to reading as a way to find a sense of belonging, which led her to gravitate...