Congratulations On Finding Us

Ed Knight is an adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era of adoption, adopted as a baby in 1961, before there was such a thing as open adoption.  He describes a childhood beset with episodes of anxiety that bewildered his adoptive parents, who had adopted him and his sister after losing two babies (and later a third) to a fatal disease, and consequently had their own challenges and grief.  He describes his challenges as a gay teenager in a small town in the 1970s, and his initial denial that being adopted had any significance to him.  As a senior in college, he fell in love with a deaf man who gradually went blind.  This man had a young daughter by a previous brief relationship, and she was in an open adoption.  He describes the impact that this young girl had on his heart and how she came to change his feelings about adoption, and awakened his curiosity about his own biological parents.  He describes his search and Reunion with his first mother, an artist, and many years later, with his first father, who had led a remarkable career and was suffering from Alzheimer’s.  Both of his biological parents were amateur genealogists who shared a wealth of information about ancestry with him, leading him to feel well rooted.  He describes his slow evolution toward understanding the impact of childhood trauma on his life, especially relinquishment trauma, and how he learned to cope and even heal from that trauma, and become a more peaceful and creative person.