All My Love: Stories of Hope, Inspiration & Support From A Birth Mother

“During the holidays, for me, it was really different each season. Sometimes I really wanted and needed the love and excitement that came from those family gatherings with all the babies everywhere. And then other times it was really hard and brought a lot...

It’s December of 2024, which means we're bringing you the 5th -- and last -- Best Of advice. The first part of this episode is our traditional season-closing digest of best advice from all Season 5 guests, and the last part is a special musical treat from...

Have you ever noticed that -- much like Riley in Disney•Pixar's Inside Out series -- you have different parts? The Internal Family Systems (IFS) framework asserts that everybody consists of different parts. Our guest this month, Kathy Mackechney, LCSW, IFS...

When our adoptees are young, we cannot anticipate how and when they will process their adoptedness someday as adults. Such processing may not even be on our radar. For adoptees, figuring out their identity with the added layer of adoption, requires extr...

In a previous episode of Adoption: The Long View (ep505), an adoptee noted that her parents are the center of their adoption story just as she is the center of hers. It’s no big duh that the parents of an adoptee and the adoptee themself experience the s...

If you are trying to adopt and putting you and your family online, don’t be surprised when you are contacted by adoption scammers. If you are new to adoption, the very idea of an adoption scam may sound absurd. But this is the internet and conversing wit...

One of the myths of adoption is the now debunked “blank slate” theory that if you get your baby early enough, they won’t have experienced any trauma. And therefore, you won’t be raising a child with a trauma history, and you won’t be dealing with big,...

In this much anticipated episode, we resume our conversation with adoptee and adoption educator Torie DiMartile on adoption math that adoptees have to deal with, the worlds they must precariously straddle throughout their lives, the opposing emotions the...

We all know from 1st grade math that a half plus a half equals 1. But for adoptees, the math doesn’t always add up the way we think it will. At one time I thought that if I could just incorporate my children’s first families into ours, then Tessa and Re...

When everything you’ve tried has failed and you’ve waited longer than you had ever imagined, where will you find the motivation to continue to try and adopt? If you’ve reached your lowest point, will you be able to push through? We all want to believe th...

Over the last few episodes, we’ve focused on openness in adoption – both in the immediate time of placement, shortly thereafter, and longer term. Today, we’re going to return to one element of the adoption process itself, and that’s the ICPC, which stand...

The moment you become a parent, time seems to stop and you can’t see beyond the sweet baby or toddler you have before you, looking up at you with those big eyes that say you are everything. Those days of full dependence on you feel like they may go on fore...

From dating sites to job boards and social platforms like Facebook, choosing the right photo for yourself has become a very big deal. Adoption profiles are no different. Making a strong first impression can be the start of a life-changing adoption conn...

My new book Adoption Unfiltered, has three chapters in it devoted to religion and adoption, with my co-authors and I each researching and covering a chapter. Sara Easterly, an adoptee and a Christian, wrote about religion’s pain points for adoptees. Kelsey...

Congratulations. You are adopting! And now that it is official, like all other adoptive parents in your position, you will be looking to make a life-changing connection with someone who is placing her child for adoption. But how will you do it? Relyi...

Early in my adoptive parenting days, when my kids were first becoming able to talk about their adoptedness and continuing through their adolescence, I was on alert for signs that adoption had hurt them. I’d been listening to adult adoptees and I knew that...

What is an Adoptimist? It's someone with the right mindset for adopting a child. You can’t just ‘want to adopt’. You have to be willing to put that desire into action, into outreach, into total positivity while trying the very best you can to make it hap...

"Expect your plans to change. You don't know what your open adoption is going to look like for a lifetime. Don't worry about making plans for a year, or two years, or three. Just worry about the next three visits instead." - Linda Sexton, Open Adoption Pio...

Welcome to Season 5 of Adoption: The Long View! This month's guest is someone I made a bad first impression on (in my own head, anyway) because of an assumption I made about her that turned out to be wrong. Adoptee and content creator Jennifer Dyan Ghost...

A critical element of open adoption relationships - and one you may not have previously considered - is the power differential in the birth parent / adoptive parent relationship. This power differential is one that fluctuates over time and it can have a...

"The way families approach to children in this space that they are hoping to adopt is often leading with this idea of ownership. And you see that in just language people use... While it feels like it could just be looked at as semantics, it's really reflec...

It’s December of 2023, which means that my new book, Adoption Unfiltered, written with Sara Easterly, an adoptee, and Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, a birth parent, is finally available! The first part of this episode is our traditional season-closing digest...

“ I think a lot of times without realizing it, adoptive parents start the story from where we (adoptive parents) started our story, but for the adoptee, it starts when they're conceived. And so I wanted my daughter in the story to be in her birth mother's...

This is a really special episode for me because not only am I the host, as I always am, I am also a guest. I’m so excited to announce on Adoption: The Long View, that within a month, a book I, along with my two guests, have spent the last 3 years envisio...

Social media has changed just about every aspect of our lives. Adoption is no exception. We talked on a previous episode about using social media for outreach to expectant moms with the goal of finding a match. Today, we’re going to talk about some other...

One of the distinctions we continually make here on Adoption: The Long View is the difference between "open adoption" and "openness in adoption." The former typically means having some sort of information about or contact with birth family, but the latte...

So many parents end up wishing they'd had a time machine to go back and know earlier what we didn’t know then about parenting, which is the whole premise of this podcast – to take the long view. With adoptive parenting, that wish can be even stronger, be...

“You do not give up on parenthood. If this is something you want to do...there are people like us who will help you. We will encourage you. We will read your story and celebrate you...Every day I want to build more families. I want to take this financial p...

Parenting a child of a race different from yours adds a whole new element to adoptive parenting. While this episode does focus on raising an interracial adoptee (also called a transracial adoptee), becoming more comfortable with talking about race is a w...

Open adoption refers to the level of contact and relationships between the adoptive family and the birth family. Having some form of contact is where many adoptions will end up. Whether it is via text, phone calls, or even some social media, a relationsh...

"Whether our daughter had stayed with her birth family, whether she ended up with us, whether she ended up with any of the hundreds of other prospective adoptive families that were waiting to adopt at the same time we were, she was always going to be l...

If you’ve been listening here long, you know that to believe that adoptive parenting is no different from regular old parenting will likely end up with you feeling blindsided some day, without tools and without strategies. This is because all adoptions...

One thing we know is that adoption comes out of a broken attachment, that the baby or child we parent has already lost something primal, that biological connection to the first mother, as well as the genetic connection to her and to the baby’s first fa...

A disrupted adoption is when a waiting adoptive family and an expectant family or a child eligible for adoption are matched, but the adoption is stopped at some point before finalization. Disrupted adoptions often result in the child being returned to...

Transracial Adoption can make some people uncomfortable. There are wide-ranging views on the topic: from “love is enough and you shouldn't have to worry about anything else,” to “You're not doing enough if you don't relocate and live a lifestyle in whi...

Why are truth and trust so important in adoptive families? In all families, really? Isn’t it OK sometimes to keep some things under wraps, for someone’s own good? There's a philosophical paradox called sorites based on the idea that no grain of sand i...

Have you ever wondered how an adoption match gets made? In this illuminating conversation with Steffany Aye, Founder & Executive Director of Adoption & Beyond, one of the most mysterious aspects of the adopting process - the adoption match - is explain...

“We trust the process. We trust the woman who's making this decision. And we don't want to try to control it...There's so much you feel you can control, but, it's a bit of an illusion” – Stephanie Casaubon, Author & Empowerment Coach In this episode,...

Adoptive parenting has this in common with regular old parenting: just when you start to feel like you’ve mastered a stage, like babyhood, toddlerhood, tweenhood, or beyond, your child keeps growing and enters a new stage. And you’re back at square one...

Adoptive Breastfeeding is an incredible experience that allows mothers who have adopted babies to nourish them directly from their own bodies—just like any other mother would do after giving birth naturally. Adoptive Breastfeeding requires early preparatio...

When Kat started the adoption process: “I feared it would confuse my child. I feared that he would love his birth family more than me and not think of me as his mom. I feared that they would be too involved in our lives.”--Kat Monahan “Initially y...

There are very few people who have the multi-perspectives and lived experience in adoption that Rebecca Ricardo has. Rebecca joined her family through adoption – this means she is an adoptee. As a young teen she placed her son for adoption, embarking o...

After you’ve adopted, everyone expects it to be an incredibly joyous time. And it is! But adoptive parents aren’t immune to the vast array of emotions that all parents feel. Post-Adoption Depression is very real - just as real as postpartum depression. Aft...

Your family and friends may have outdated beliefs about adoption. They may not even support your decision to adopt! Be sure to share this podcast with them. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the adoption basics, including what your family and frie...

As we wrap up 2022, we also wrap up Season 3. This year, we have heard from seven adoptees, one birth parent, four adoptive parents, two people who got OFF the adoption roller coaster, and two people in differing roles within their interracial families. We...

It’s National Adoption Awareness Month, and we can think of no better way to honor it than to listen to an adoptee, especially one who is also raising an adoptee. Our guest this month was adopted and grew up in the closed adoption era and is now an advoca...

"In that moment I felt like he was not quite mine yet, he was the son of his birth parents. So I didn’t want to burst into a room with a suitcase full of clothes."-- Ashley Mendoza "My experience was awful at the hospital, I won’t sugarcoat it. And it is...

Learn how to tell your family and friends that you intend to adopt. While they will often be excited and want what is best for you, family and friends may not fully understand the adoption process. And their reaction may not always be what you were hoping...

Parenting is a Big Deal. But adoptive parenting? Well, that brings a whole other layer to plain old parenting. Add in a transracial element? Wrap another layer around an already wrapped Big Deal. Separation from original parents, no matter how necessary or...

“We want the confidence that we can do it and know that it’s going to work out okay. And you don’t know. But, that’s why I strongly encourage community for everybody because those people get you.” – Tim Elder, Founder of The Infant Adoption Guide In this...