Two Kinds of Love
I’m thrilled to finally share the cover of my new book, Two Kinds of Love! This memoir is a journey through the silence of sealed records to find the threads of a complete identity. It explores a framework I call the ‘Two Kinds of Love’—honoring both the family that let you go and the one who found you. Whether you’re an adoptee, a genealogy buff, or just love a story of transformation, I can’t wait for you to read it. Available through Amazon Books. #amazonbooks, #Adoption, #adoptionjourney, #DNA, Ancestry
There is a phrase that adoptive parents sometimes use, and that adopted children sometimes grow up hearing so often it becomes the wallpaper of their early lives: chosen child. Some adoptive parents tell their children immediately and openly. Others — for reasons that belong entirely to their own era, their own fears, their own particular brand of love — say nothing.
They fold the fact away into a drawer like a letter they have decided not to send. The child grows up in a life that feels complete precisely because nothing appears to be missing.
And then the questions arrive. They arrive in biology class, when the teacher is explaining dominant and recessive traits and the child realizes, with a quiet jolt, that none of the math applies to them. They arrive at the dinner table when someone comments on a family resemblance. They arrive when a classmate says — with the casual cruelty of the uninformed — “Oh, you’re the adopted one,” and the room shifts slightly on its axis.
For those children who grow up knowing they were adopted, the questions still arrive. They are simply different questions. Not why didn’t anyone tell me? But who were they? And why didn’t they keep me? And, eventually, the question that cuts the deepest and the quietest: what does that say about me?
The answers, when they come at all, take a long time.
Over five million adopted adults live in the United States today. Each year, approximately 135,000 children are adopted — welcomed into families who wanted them, chosen by people who chose to be chosen in return. Another 475,000 children live in foster care at any given moment, waiting for that same choosing to happen. Behind each of these numbers is a story. A birth. A decision. A family that formed. A question that lingers.
This is one of those stories. It is mine.
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DNA changed everything. Since testing became commercially available in the early 2000s and reached widespread consumer use after 2003, it has transformed what it means to search for your origins. It can reveal family history and ancestral origins going back centuries. It can flag health predispositions you never knew you carried. And — most powerfully, most personally — it can connect you to living relatives whose names you have never heard, whose faces you have never seen, who may be walking through their own lives entirely unaware that you exist.
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I used Ancestry.com. I used Family Tree Maker. I used MyHeritage and FamilySearch. I built trees, cross-referenced records, and waited for DNA matches the way a fisherman waits for a line to pull taut—knowing something is out there, not knowing how large it might be. Iowa, where I was born and adopted, was for most of my life a closed records state. You practically needed a new kidney before anyone would consider cracking open an adoption file.
The records were sealed by law, by custom, and by a particular midcentury philosophy that held the past was best left where it was—safely behind you, neatly closed, and not available for inspection. Adoptive families were families. Birth families were history. The two were not meant to meet.
Then, on May 19, 2021, Iowa passed a law allowing adult adoptees to request their Original Birth Certificates beginning in January 2022. I was seventy years old. I had been waiting — in one form or another, with varying degrees of urgency — for most of those seventy years.
When I finally opened that certificate, I found a name I already suspected. I found a space where a father’s name should have been, filled with a single word: Unknown. And I noticed myself standing at the intersection of everything I had always known about myself and everything I had never been allowed to know.
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What follows — what this book is about — surprised me. Not because the facts were extraordinary (though some were), but because of what they did to me when I finally held them in my hands. I discovered that both of my birth parents descended from Mayflower passengers. I discovered that one of my ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. I discovered that generations of my family served in the military before I ever put on a uniform, as though the instinct had been bred into the bloodline long before I had any say in the matter.
A friend, after listening to what I had uncovered, looked at me with something between amazement and mild envy and said: “You now know more about your origins than I do, and I’m not even adopted.”