Melanie Chung-Sherman, together with Heather Ellis, leads Tapestry’s Adult Adoptee Group. Melanie recently began writing a regular column for Adoption Today entited Our Reflections. In this column, Melanie will give voice to many of the thoughts and emotions that adopted persons share in common. We all — adoptive parents and adoptees alike – would benefit from listening in.

“Ownership of one’s life story should never be underestimated. The human desire to seek universal understanding of self and others through storytelling can be traced back through the millennia. Perhaps some of the greatest episodic adventures can be linked to the foundations of adoption from Odysseus to Superman — with the central characters who are originally orphaned and possess supernatural strengths and abilities only to be thrust into an ongoing destiny they had no intention of entering and ultimately persevering against great odds on a quest to find their “true identity” and reconcile their own life story. It can be argued that the archetypal threads of a good story can be found interwoven throughout an adoptee’s lifespan as well. True to a classic narrative, the story itself is about the central figure, but rarely through that individual’s eyes.

As an adoptee myself, I often come away with an entirely different perspective of the hero or heroine’s journey and find that I infuse my own life story into the epic. While others can identify with the thematic quest of good versus evil, I tend to identify with the hero or heroine’s yearning to find how they “fit” into their story with mere snapshots of their identity dictated by others along the way and how they captured their narrative as their own in the end — similar to the adoptee’s story. I found that it is more than the adoption story, but the embodiment of the entire epic from beginning to end that encompasses all players from adoptee’s birth parents, the relinquishment, adoptive placement and beyond…

Adoption is definitely not a pathology that so often I see is placed upon adoptees in  particular, who are coming to terms with their story; but it is an intricate dialogue and event that forever shapes an individual and family from generation to generation. There are no easy answers just as there are no simple stories — and in that acknowledgement and support, adoptees can begin to find their own narrative.”

Click here to read Melanie’s entire column from the April 2011 issue of Adoption Today. You can also subscribe to Adoption Today (and online adoption publication) and/or Fostering Families Today Magazine here.

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Also Found In: Resources for Adoptees, Stories, Tapestry Blog