Jill Krementz is a writer and artist known for her simple but powerful black and white photographs and for the word portraits which accompany them. She has written the series “A Very Young..[Dancer, Musician, Gymnast,] and also the series “How it Feels..[to have a Physical Disability, to be Fighting for Your Life, When Parents Divorce]. How it Feels to Be Adopted contains the stories of 19 children, told in their own words and accompanied by photographs.
As with my last review, Why Was I Adopted?, I hesitated to read this book because it is twenty years old. Like Why Was I Adopted, How it Feels to Be Adopted has some things of timeless value and some things which may not apply as much as usual. The human spirit doesn’t change very much,after all, and it is valuable to read the thoughts of 19 children assembled in one book.
Although the children in the book are between eight and sixteen, there is only one child each who is eight, nine, ten or eleven years old. Therefore the majority of the voices are from 12-16 year-olds. I enjoyed this, however, because I’d like to see what my kids may feel as they get older. (I also suspect that it is due to parents being less likely to allow a writer to interview and photograph their younger children about an emotionally-charged subject.)
Most of the children were adopted in infancy, but a few were adopted as older children from foster care and one girl, the eight-year-old interviewed, came from Korea at age three years. (The other adoptions in the book were all of American-born children. In 1988, adoptions from China had not yet hit their peak and Russia and Guatemala were not open to international adoption.) One boy profiled in the book was adopted from foster care by a priest who encouraged his parishioners to adopt African-American children in need, and finally told them he would do it himself, finally adopting or fostering half a dozen African-American children.
Most of the children in the book were in closed adoptions, as you might have expected twenty years ago. Nevertheless, even then several of the teenagers were wondering about searching for their birthparents and a few said their adoptive parents planned to help them search when they were older.
One girl told how her birthmother found her when she was in her early teens. Her birthmother called the house and told the girl directly that she was her birthmother. (The teen states definitely that she does not recommend this kind of a shock, although she says she, her adoptive parents and her birthmother have a good relationship now.)
Most of the kids in the book, while they may express some puzzlement or longing to know about their birthparents, seem very positive about adoption, very sure that their adoptive parents are their real parents, and generally free from angst.
It is recommended that parents read the book first, then read it together with children aged eight and up. Interestingly, one birthmother commented on a website that she found this book helpful in choosing the arrangements she wanted to make for an open adoption. The participants’ stories enabled her to anticipate questions that her child might have as he grew up. She also found the profiled kids’ positive statements about adoption and about their lives in general to be reassuring.
Please see these related blogs:
Book Review: The Open Adoption Experience
Should Adoptive Parents Search For Their Children’s Birth Parents?