One of my annual traditions is to start the new year with a healthy outdoor activity. I did that taking a lovely hike in the green hills around Portland, Oregon. Being outdoors and in nature gave me a nice clean head and opportunity to reflect on adoptee rights in my birth state, Michigan, and on larger issues of being an adoptee at this stage in my life. This stage means people are passing away, and these inevitable losses have perhaps sharper meaning for countless tens of thousands of adoptees born in the USA, and also in other countries, who may never, ever know their family origins or be able to answer life’s great and most important question: “Who am I?”
The year 2023 ended with family loss. The year 2024 begins with awareness of who I am, how adoptee rights advocacy works in the messy world of U.S. legislative sausage making, and also how I need to focus on things I can authentically control. It is OK to be in the wilderness, as I have long known. But I am also glad my network has expanded to kin in Finland, where new beginnings with kin mean roads to places I never could have dreamed in 1989. That year I found my biological family and I first violated Michigan’s discriminatory and still current laws denying me my human right to know myself and from whence and where I come.