Around the Internet

A few bits from around the internet:

Item #1:
Open adoption blogger Lori is working on a book about open adoption parenting and looking for stories from the community to include. Through February 10, she is collecting insights or cautions about problems in open adoption relationships, especially around boundaries, communication, and contact agreements. If you have an anecdote from your personal experience to share, use this form.

Item #2:
I wanted to point you to a powerful post on Offbeat Mama about identity and open adoption from a prospective adoptive parent thinking about openness from his perspective as a transgender man:

We can't help our histories — they are what they are. But often, the world comes along to tell us who we are because of those histories. When that happens, I will hold my child's hand and yell back at the world. Our given names, our taken names, our birth certificates are simply pieces of our stories. The whole story is so much more. I am not just a man who transitioned genders. I bake cakes, I climb mountains, I sewed my wife's wedding dress, I work towards providing equal access to higher education for all students. And, if given the chance, I will parent a child. 

That child will be so much more than an adoptee. She will dance or sing, she will love math or books, she will play the trumpet or the drums, she will have her mother's passion, her father's relentlessness, her first family's strength. She will always know where she came from, where she is headed, her whole self. From the moment she enters my life, I will honor, love, and protect that self with my entire being.

Item #3:
I also loved "Not on the Menu" by Jay over at Two Women Blogging as she parents her adopted daughter through some big emotions and admits that she, at times, asks herself if open adoption is worth it.

Wouldn't it be easier if we didn't have to deal with this? Wouldn't it be simpler if we said "we are your parents" and left it at that? Isn't this all just more confusion?

She comes to the same conclusion I've told myself time after time when things have gotten hard.

Item #4:
If you live in Southern California and like thinking about the cultural, political, and sociological meanings of adoption, this conference in March, Mapping Adoption: Histories, Geographies, Literatures, Politics, looks fantastic. I can't find the list of speakers I read somewhere earlier this week, but it is swoon-worthy. Early registration ends on February 28.

Do you have something you'd like to point us to? Leave it in the comments!