For National Adoption Awareness Month
By Dr. Abby Hasberry, LMFT, LCMFT, BCC
Every November, stories about adoption flood the internet. They arrive on our screens with a familiar arc, softened by the gratitude season, and wrapped in the language of the happily-ever-after. For most of my life I internalized that story the way we accept the weather, as something that simply happens, authored by no one in particular and therefore impossible to question. It took me a long time to ask the questions I will be asking from the keynote stage at this year’s Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference. Who holds the pen? Who gets to write the adoption story, and who has only ever been handed it?
This month is a good time to ask, because the month itself was written about us long before it was written by us.
Where did it all start? Back in 1976, the governor of Massachusetts announced an Adoption Week. It was meant to raise awareness of children waiting in foster care for adoptive families. The idea spread. In 1984, President Reagan proclaimed the first National Adoption Week, and in 1995, under President Clinton, it grew into the full month of November that we now call National Adoption Awareness Month (Children’s Bureau, 2014). Every part of that origin was well intended, and much of it did real good for children who needed families. I want to be clear about that, because reclaiming a story does not require pretending the people who wrote it had bad intentions.
And still, notice who was holding the pen. The month was designed by institutions, promoted by agencies, and carried forward each year largely by the professionals who build adoptions and the adoptive parents who complete them. Absent from nearly all of it were the two groups the story most affected: adopted people, and parents of relinquished children. November was awareness, yes, but awareness in the shape of recruitment and celebration, not of the lived experience of the people it claimed to celebrate.
What filled that space was the traditional adoption narrative, and November became its loudest month. That narrative is the cultural story that casts relinquishment as an act of brave and selfless love, the adopted person as lucky to have been chosen and saved, and the adoptive family as worthy saviors. It is a tidy story that leaves little room for anything hard. It hands adopted people a script of gratitude that has no room for grief. It reduces the traumatic experience of parents who relinquished to a single act. It even fails the adoptive parents it appears to flatter, promising them a grateful child instead of preparing them for the real and complex one who arrives.
There is a particular kind of grief this celebratory month has not acknowledged. Adopted people and parents of relinquished children often carry disenfranchised grief, a mourning the world is challenged to recognize as legitimate, alongside an ambiguous loss for people who are gone and present at the same time. A month built on celebration has almost no vocabulary for that loss, so for decades it looked past it, treating grief as an ingratitude that spoiled the happily-ever-after.
Then something shifted, and it shifted because adopted people reached for the pen.
Back in 2014, an adoptee named Rosita González, writing with the Lost Daughters collective, started a simple hashtag during National Adoption Month (Lost Daughters, n.d.). She called it #FlipTheScript, and the idea behind it was modest: that adult adoptees might be heard during the one month of the year built around their own lived experience. That November, the campaign reached about 30 million households in 30 days. It grew into an anthology (Christian et al., 2015), into panels and classrooms, and into a growing insistence across the community that November be reclaimed. Many of us now call it National Adoptee Awareness Month, precisely to move the center of the story back toward the people it belongs to.
“Telling OUR stories,” the theme AKA chose for this month, came directly from that protest. It is the same reach for the same pen. Let’s sit with the small, deliberate word at the heart of it: OUR.
OUR is the whole constellation, every person the adoption story is actually about, writing at once. It is adopted people telling the truth of their own lives. It is parents of relinquished children naming what was lost. It is adoptive parents willing to trade the comfortable story of rescue for the harder story of real work and healing. When all of OUR voices write together, something happens that no single reclaimed voice can accomplish alone.
I have felt the weight of that pen in my own work. My most recent research has meant sitting with women who were adopted and who also became relinquishing mothers. These women carried two of the constellation’s hardest experiences in a single life and have rarely seen either story written down with any honesty. When a person trusts you with a story like that and then trusts you to carry it onto the page, you are holding her pen for a while. It is truly humbling. The honor is real, and the responsibility palpable. The work is to give her words voice without letting my voice interfere. My work is to render what she lived faithfully enough that she recognizes herself in it. And my goal has been to refuse the old temptation to smooth a hard story into a comfortable one. That work taught me what this month is about. Telling our stories is the right to speak for ourselves, and it is also the care we owe one another whenever we are trusted to speak beside someone else or to just listen.
One reclaimed voice is a personal victory, and it is beautiful, and it is enough on its own. Many reclaimed voices are something else entirely. They are a narrative shift, a movement. The traditional story does not lose its grip because one of us finally speaks. It loses its grip when so many of us are telling the truth, in so many rooms, that the old narrative is exposed and replaced. This is the work I see everywhere in our community, and it takes more forms than most people expect. We are telling our stories from stages and screens and microphones. We are teaching them, so that the social workers, therapists, agency workers, attorneys, and medical professionals who shape how adoption is practiced learn from the people who have actually lived it. We are researching them, asking the questions the field long preferred to avoid. We are writing them into books and essays and poems that will outlast any single month. And we are advising the organizations that used to write our story for us, sitting at the tables where the decisions are being made.
That is not a wish for some better future. That is a narrative being rewritten in real time, this month and every month, by the people it was always about.
If you are wondering whether your voice belongs in that chorus: It does. The barrier was never whether your story is worth telling, and it was never whether you are qualified to tell it. The barrier is a silencing belief that authoring is a job for other people, the credentialed and the professional and the expert, anyone but you. That belief is itself a line in the old script. It was written into us, and like every other line, it can be rewritten.
This is why a conference matters, and why a month can be more than a hashtag. When our community gathers, whether in a virtual room this November or on the page of a blog like this one, we are not taking a break from the work. We are doing it. We are proving, simply by showing up and speaking, that the story can change, because we can already see that it is changing right in front of us.
I will be carrying all of this to the AKA virtual conference stage this November, in a keynote called “Who Holds the Pen: Raising Our Voices and Rewriting the Adoption Narrative.” I hope you will join me there. Still, you do not have to wait for a stage or the month. Consider this your invitation to pick up the pen wherever you already are, in the truths you tell your children, in the words you refuse because they never fit your life, in the details you correct in rooms that expected your silence.
The traditional adoption narrative was written for us long before November was designated as National Adoption Awareness Month. This year and every year going forward, in every story we tell in our own words and on our own terms, we get to shift the narrative.
References
Children’s Bureau. (2014, August 14). What is National Adoption Month? When is it? U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. https://acf.gov/cb/faq/adoption14
Lost Daughters. (n.d.). #FlipTheScript. Retrieved September 28, 2026, from https://www.thelostdaughters.com/p/flipthescript.html
Christian, D. R., Transue-Woolston, A. H. L., & González, R. (Eds.). (2015). Flip the script: Adult adoptee anthology. The AN-YA Project.