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I am an adoptee (adopted in 1961, during the Baby Scoop Era of adoption), who wrote a memoir entitled Congratulations On Finding Us, available on Apple Books.

https://books.apple.com/us/book/congratulations-on-finding-us/id1473059903

My first mother finished reading my memoir

My first mother (in my memoir, I call her “Mom Cathy”) sent me an email. She has finished reading my memoir and especially liked the last two chapters. That means a lot to me. She is someone who likes living in the present. I think that is a good philosophy, but it is hard to do when you are writing a memoir. One thing she didn’t like about my memoir was not the memoir itself, but that it caused her to relive parts of her past. Therefore I felt bad asking her to review it, but I wanted her feedback. All of my other parents (my adoptive parents and my biological father) have already passed away, and so I was most concerned about how she felt about the memoir. That is also why I changed her name but not my other parents’ names. Anyway, it is a big relief to me that she is happy with this version. At some point I may start charging for it, but for now it is still available for free. I want it to be free initially so friends and family can review it without having to pay. Mainly I want my fellow adoptees to read it, so I am publicizing it among the adoptee community. Once I have done that and I feel that my fellow adoptees have had a chance to get it free, I might get around to charging for it.

Description of memoir

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.