Chapter Opener

Short solo video. Renee on camera, roughly 2 minutes.

Every adoption starts with a loss. One of the adoptees in the research put it plainly: every adoption starts with a loss, and people need to remember that.

This chapter is about that loss, and about the grief that can come with it. Some of it will look familiar from your grief training, and a lot of it won't. Adoption loss doesn't come with a death, or a funeral, or a card aisle. It usually starts before the person was old enough to know what they were losing. And the culture around it often doesn't count it as a loss at all.

Something worth saying before we start. Not every adoptee is grieving. Some carry substantial grief. Some grieve in cycles across a lifetime, quiet for years and then not. And some don't experience their adoption as a site of grief at all, and live full lives without ever doing that work. None of those is more correct than the others. The aim here is to help you recognize this grief when it's there and stay with it, rather than expecting grief that isn't present or closing down grief that is.

Five short lessons in this chapter, and the last one is about what happens in you.