Thank you so much for reading and responding and including this list of readings. I love Gabrielle Glaser, American Baby is an essential read, as is the Girls Who Went Away.

There is no Trauma Olympics, no competition for whose adoption trauma is worse. And I disagree. Birth mothers and adoptees both have paths to healing and perspective. Binaries do not serve any of us.

The trauma birth (first) mothers experience is under-discussed, undervalued, misunderstood. The magnitude of their pain is unimaginable to me and their stories deserve illumination, just like adoptees. And just like us, they are not a monolith.

True or not, it is irrelevant that "the last thing they want is for us to be unhappy." Genuine healing doesn't come from subverting feelings to keep other people comfortable. There is room for all of our pain, all of our joy, all of our suffering, all of our healing.

In addition to your reading list, there are books that highlight the transracial and transnational adoptee experience worth mentioning. Rebecca Carroll's Surviving The White Gaze, Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know, Harrison Mooney's Invisible Boy, and Dorothy Roberts's Torn Apart. To name a few.