Section 1: Myths and Realities

When my brother was adopted in 1964, there was not a lot of conversation about it. We simply grew up knowing, and there was nothing more to it than that.

Today, we recognize in society that there are interesting conversations that adoptive families can and should have with each other over time. Questions of identity and belonging. Connections, distant or real, with birth parents. Conversations with teachers and schoolmates, especially when parent and child have different skin colors. Open discussion about race and how we define family.

Sometimes it seems simpler for the single woman who wants to become a mother to consider donor insemination. "Less sticky," "less time," "less cost," "less paperwork," "less evaluation," "less unknown factors about genetics and birth environment."

Of course, talk to any woman who has spent 7 months on fertility treatments, drugs, lab tests and doctors, using expensive sperm from an unknown donor, still waiting for 9 months of pregnancy to happen, and the emotions of adoption don't seem all that different.

Most of us want motherhood to happen easily. And we feel loss, anger, sadness when it doesn't happen the way we pictured it in our mind when we were younger.

Yet there is so much "more" that happens after we become Mom, that the process of how we got there ultimately becomes unimportant. Whether it's the amnesia that kicks in about the struggle to conceive, the pain of childbirth, or the wait for a referral, when that child comes home with us for the first time it becomes all about building a family life together. Rituals, conversations, attachment.

In the pages that follow you will learn from single women who have been in the place you might be in now: Should I adopt? What do I need to know?

You also will hear from experts with special insight about the myths and realities of transracial family building, open connections with birth parents, foster care adoption, and much more.

- Mikki Morrissette, editor