This is a pic of my mom and I taken on my trip to Arkansas this week! I’ve missed her.

As I’ve talked about in a previous post, if you tell yourself you are something or you feel something over and over your whole life, even when you don’t experience it, you eventually make that perception your reality and it becomes part of who you are. This can be good, or this can be bad. It works when we use it to make ourselves successful. There is a theory that you can have what you want if you visualize it and tell yourself you can have it over time. The same can happen if you’re telling yourself something negative. So the question for adoptive parents is this: How much focus do I place on the fact that my child is adopted? This is a great question and a great balance. My parents only told me one time and then unless I had questions, it was never talked about again. I grew up knowing I was adopted but my reality was that my parents were not adoptive parents, they were simply mom and dad. Even after I found my birth mother I didn’t say to myself, well, I found my real mom so goodbye Brenda and Howard! No! They’re mom and dad and always will be. On the other hand, what if they had told me quite often that I was adopted, that I came from someone else’s belly? What if they read “you were adopted” children’s books to me all the time? The “I’m adopted” statements would echo through my brain so often that now my focus isn’t on my parents and living my life like a normal child but that there’s someone else out there that is my mom and would cause me to be even more curious about that, which might develop into negative feelings about how that “mom” didn’t want me. Obviously, it’s healthy to tell your child they are adopted but I don’t believe it’s healthy for the child to be constantly reminded that they are adopted. Once again – if you tell yourself over and over that you had burned your hand, one day your reality will be that you burned your hand. Adoptive parents also believe their perceptions. My mom would actually say things like I inherited a certain trait from her side of the family. Inside, I smiled when she said things like that but it really solidified the fact that she believed with all her heart and soul that I was all hers. Those beautiful feelings got transferred to me. I was still curious but not because I felt like I didn’t belong… it was clear that I did. It was clear.