I have so many thoughts. I'm an adoptive parent, a sibling to someone who placed her infant for adoption without even seeing her face, a baby that would have been closer in age to me than some of my siblings, my niece who I never got to meet.

In my work life I was an adoption support worker first in a voluntary capacity then in a paid position. Not a social worker luckily for me. I had a role less tied to that piece of bureaucracy. I worked with adoptive parents, adoptees, foster children and parents, parents seeking their lost children, children seeking their lost parents. Over decades I learned a lot about what was so very wrong with our systems and occasionally what was done right. In our first adoption back in 1991 we were told to treat the child as if born to us despite the fact that he was three. At the time we didn't know better.

Later, open adoption became more the norm and we opened closed and semi-open adoptions with some of our kids allowing them relationships with people they had lost in their journey through foster care. Sorry, I am blathering here. I am wondering if I can write for your publication about adoption of course sharing a perspective that is not the same as an adoptee.