If you haven’t checked out the Adoption Bloggers Interview Project, get yourself over to that corner of the internet lickedty split. You won’t be disappointed.
The Project is a great way to get a taste (actually more like a full course meal) of how adoption — and open adoption — works, doesn’t work and what parts needs fixing.
Launched last March, this year’s edition features more than 100 interviews with bloggers by bloggers from all sides of adoption. Some of them like the R House — who interviews a birth father in an open adoption — you may know already. Others like Weaving Love Untangling Confusion — an adopted female writing about genetic attraction after finding her birth father after 33 years — may be less familiar to you. You can also check out Chris and Amy’s interview — hopeful adoptive parents from our Find A Family page — here.
How adoption has changed their lives
Despite their differences and the different paths that brought them to adoption, all of the participants have some terrific (and sometimes not-so-terrific) things to say about adoption and how it’s changed their lives. Their individual stories are definitely worth a look, too. Or, given how unusual some of those stories are, multiple looks.
Getting so many people in the same room, digital or otherwise, is never easy. So for ringleader Heather Schade (I don’t know Heather, but after following her blog for a while now I’d like to think she’d get a kick out of that descriptor) to actually get such a large and diverse group of individuals talking, togetherish, that’s quite a feat. If you don’t understand what I mean by that last bit, I’ll let Heather explain it herself.
Heather also oversees Open Adoption Bloggers, a network of about 200 blogs called the Open Adoption Roundtable. It’s another great place to hang out, listen to some interesting conversations and deepen your understanding of all aspects of adoption. And the best part is, everyone’s welcome. That includes:
- Parents who placed a child for adoption
- Adoptees who grew up in an open adoption or who are now adoptive/first parents in an open adoption
- Parents who adopted
- Parents who are waiting to adopt
- Siblings and parents of triad members
- Openness in families who used donor gametes
- Professionals working in the field of open adoption
Open adoption blogs
To join, all you have to do is grab this code, submit your blog, and away you go. Oh yeah, you’ll probably have to write something now and then, too. But that’s the easy part, right?!
I haven’t joined yet. But once I get this blog up and running, I plan to head over and take a seat at the table. As for the Interview Project, I was planning to share some of this year’s highlights here today, but I see I’m quickly running out of space. I’ll revisit it in the near future. In the meantime, dive in. And enjoy.
I’ll be adding links from the Project’s participants to our Adoptive Parent Blogs and Birth Parent Blogs. That way you can explore their stories in more depth at your leisure. After you’ve had a chance to go through some of the interviews, let me know what your impressions are. What was your favorite one? What points resonated with you the most? How has the Adoptions Blogger Interview Project or Open Adoption Bloggers enhanced your understanding of adoption or more specifically, private domestic adoption? Please leave your comments in the section below.
(Photo credit: kwixson)