The Journey of Adoption

By Annie Herrington

Many people are very familiar when it comes to adoption but really have no idea about what an individual goes through when experiencing adoption. Adoption is a very huge factor simply because parents who are birthing kids in this world are not positioned to take care of them. These kids are put up for adoption, which most may see you as an easy way out. Adoption is not all bad. You can look at it on a positive or negative perspective.

As you read this book, you will find that there have been too many factors set for you if you are in adoption now or have experienced adoption in the past. Remember, life has nothing to do with where you came from, but it has everything to do with where you are going, so continue to trust your journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984536556

Annie Herrington

ANNIE N. HERRINGTON was born in Miami Dade County and was raised in Ft. Lauderdale Fl. With being a part of the school system for the last 15 years she has had an opportunity to work very closely with troubled youth and was able to be great access as a mentor as well. Annie is a 5-time author, Educator, and a National Motivational Speaker. In 2014 the National Writers Association honored Annie with the published author of the year award where great attention was paid to her best-selling book Damaged but Not Broken. Damaged but Not Broken was not just a book that was written but has also developed into a womens retreat where it allows women to come together from all over the world and impart something great in each other when it comes to the healing process in whatever they have encountered in their life. Annies career as an educator has allowed her to not just be active in her community but it has allowed her to also become very involved in the adoption community as well because of her experience as an adopted child growing up. Annie has traveled the world and has shared many platforms with other powerful women who have also gone through difficult times in life and have allowed their trials to turn into triumphs. Annie has set the tone over last ten years of her life as a Successful Entrepreneur, Motivational Speaker, Business Owner, and Educator. At this very moment, Annie has worked very hard and has set standards in her life and is now working in the school system where she serves as the Principal in the first black Aviation school located in Miami Dade County. Annie seeks out to make a change in every young persons life that she meets.

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Copyright © 2018 by Annie Herrington.

Edited by Horace Hord

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-9845-3656-3

                            eBook                              978-1-9845-3655-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/26/2018

Xlibris

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It was June 2, 1987, the day I was adopted into the family of

Mary Herrington, who is now deceased.

DEDICATION

I want to dedicate this book to every individual who has experienced adoption, and because of that, you have allowed life to pass by you. I want you to know that whatever has transpired for you to experience the journey of adoption, it wasn’t your fault so, stop blaming yourself. Life has so much for you, and you have so much to offer life so, stop cheating yourself and live.

Explore the possibilities that have come, and will come your way, the world is waiting to hear from you. I am convinced that you came into this world to live out loud. Remember in all that you have gone through in your life; it was for a purpose.

I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would one day share my story with the world, and so because I have experienced adoption as you have, we both have something in common.

CONTENTS

ONE

Accepting the Fact That You Were Adopted

What Is Adoption?

It Wasn’t Your Fault

It Was All in God’s Plan

TWO

Things You Deal with As an Adopted Child

Self-Worth

Shame

Identity

THREE

Long-Term Issues as An Adopted Child

Being an Adopted Child

Potential Psychological Effects

Feeling Accepted

FOUR

Struggles You Deal With

Understanding Your Roots

You Have the Right

Free Your Mind

FIVE

You Are A Winner

How Does Adoption Affect Children?

Why Do Parents Put Their Children Up for Adoption?

Visualizing Yourself as The Person, You Want to Be

SIX

You Are on Your Way

Your Past Has Nothing to Do with Where You Are Going

Believing in You

UNKNOWN AUTHOR

SEVEN

Life After

No Is Not Your Last Result

The Right Kind of Love Matters

UNKNOWN AUTHOR

Make Yourself A Priority and Never an Option

EIGHT

What’s Next

Relationships

Just Strive

NINE

The Power of Love

Pain

Discovering Our True Selves

Love Connects Us

TEN

I Survived

Pain Makes You Stronger

Better Days Ahead

Forgiveness

EPILOGUE

The Encounter

CHAPTER ONE

Accepting the Fact That You Were Adopted

What Is Adoption?

Adoption is when a child is moved permanently from one family to another family. During the process of adoption, all parental rights are given to the new parents of that child. At this point, the power that the birth parents previously had is entirely in the hands of the parents who have taken on that responsibility. As an adopted child growing up, I never really understood what adoption meant, but I always heard the discussion in my environment, that I was adopted. Adoption is not something recent in the 21st century. It has been happening for a very long time.

Every parent who has set their heart to take the responsibility of taking care of someone else’s child demonstrates an unselfish nature, and it shows the good deeds those persons are doing. This world has millions and millions of children whose parents have given them up and are just waiting for someone to come along and take them in. Adoption is always beautiful because it provides some stability in a child’s life and pleases the individual who is performing the actual adoption.

When a person is considering adoption, there are different reasons why they may have taken that route. For many years history has proven that you don’t have to be someone’s birth mom or dad to take them in and provide an excellent foundation for them, but in the last few decades taking care of someone else’s children has gone to another level because of legal responsibility.

The adoption process focuses on finding the right home for children who don’t have one. Children come from all walks, and while they are dealing with not having their birth mom in their life, different things may occur in their lives such as abuse, lack of love, and lack of care, so finding the right home is essential. The perfect home will never exist, but a great home will always be available. When dealing with adoption, there are various types from which to choose.

There is a private adoption, public adoption, International adoption, and relative adoption. As a child who has experienced being adopted, I fit the category of being publicly adopted. Open adoption is the process when a child that is in a foster home may be eligible for adoption. I remember being an innocent four-year-old, as I sat on the bench in the courtroom with my little teddy bear, who was my best friend. Not knowing what was going on at the time, I was very excited when I was finally placed in a beautiful home.

I had someplace I can finally call home. Having a stable home for any kid in this position brings calmness in their hearts, which shows them that I am loved. Adoption is a journey; it’s a journey because it’s not something that everyone gets a chance to experience.

It Wasn’t Your Fault

As a kid that has been adopted, or spent several years in the system, we at times think that it was our fault. Even an adult who has experienced adoption will carry that image with them their entire lifetime. There are many reasons why you were given up for adoption, and honestly for some of us being put up for adoption, is the best thing that could have ever happened to us. In many cases, there were some worse than others but at some point, remind yourself to thank God that you were adopted.

Growing up for me, feeling like it was my fault was never the issue, but the dominant thought in my mind was ‘who was she and why did she give me up?’ The worst thing anyone can ever do is blame yourself for someone else’s actions. It was never your fault why your mother walked out on you. Perhaps at some point, while she was pregnant with you she was on drugs, or maybe she was in an abusive relationship, or maybe she really couldn’t take care of you. So, let’s not blame yourself any longer for something that is not your responsibility.

Blaming yourself causes emotional, psychological and physical damage not only at this moment of your life but in the long run as well. In life, while dealing with this one insecurity, you will find yourself blaming others for what one person created in your life. There are two types of people in this world when it comes to this insecurity, those who blame others for their problems, and those who blame themselves. At this time, perhaps you fit into the category of blaming yourself. Blaming yourself can at some point cause you to lapse into a state of depression. The last thing anyone wants to do is look at themselves as a sick individual, and whether you know it or not, depression is on the way if you are not experiencing it already.

How do you at some point in your life pull back and think, when am I going to stop blaming myself for something, for which I had no control? When you are ready to stop blaming yourself the first thing you need to do is reframe your thoughts. Many of us go through life wondering what we should or should not do when it comes to making a situation better, and most of the time we go with what our emotions tell us instead of what our heart and mind is telling us.

Going down the right path with your decisions will always start by trusting yourself. Often people blame themselves for making the wrong choices because we were in denial about what choice we should have made. This type of outcome always happens because we do not have enough courage to trust what is really on the inside of us. When you learn how to trust yourself, you will find out that your confidence level will expand more than before. You will even find yourself aligned with your true self and innermost desires, which will naturally create a self-assured understanding and help you remove self-blame.

It Was All in God’s Plan

Have you ever thought to yourself, everything that you have ever encountered was all for a reason? Throughout my life, I must say that I have been through some very rough roads and couldn’t understand why things had to be this way. One of the insecurities that I dealt with in my life as a kid, is who was my birth mother. There were moments I would try to picture myself meeting her as a little girl. One of the questions I stayed prepared for if I ever met her is, ‘why you gave me up?’ Then, on the other hand, I would stare in awe at her because it was like a dream that finally came true. Most kids grow up not meeting their biological parents until they are an adult, and that is just what happened to me.

When God sees fit for anything to occur, then that is when and what will happen. I didn’t understand why my birth mother didn’t come along until I was in my early thirties, but now I know it was all in God’s plan. Think about it, when your mother offered you for adoption, it was already a major disappointment to you, and then to have her come back into your life with you knowing she gave you up, probably would be devastating. When we talk about it’s all in God’s plan, it includes everything that happened or is happening in your life.

Psalm 139:16 You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book!

When God created you, before you were born, you were pre-destined to be part of God’s plan, and never as an afterthought. When you took your first breath out of your mother’s womb, that’s when God’s plan for your life began. One of the things I have learned as I journeyed through the process of Adoption, is that the plan of God for our life has many challenges, as well as strength building opportunities. Don’t ever position yourself to have the mindset that there won’t be any down days. I tell people all the time just in my everyday living never look at your circumstances and allow them to judge the outcome of your life.

Life has nothing to do with where you come from but has everything to do with where you are going. As you continue your journey through life, keep in mind that we all have strengths, we all have limitations, and we all have seasons which are all part of the master plan. The plan for your life will never be the plan that you have created because God is in control over everything that exists here on earth.

CHAPTER TWO

Things You Deal with As an Adopted Child

Self-Worth

While journeying your way through life, there are a few internal things that you may experience as a person from what it means to be adopted. Self-esteem is something that many individuals focus on every day, especially if abandonment was a part of your life. When put up for adoption, it can cause many doors to open in someone’s life. Doors can open that you never thought would ever occur when it comes to your life. Child abandonment occurs when a parent deserts a child without any regard for the child’s/children’s safety or health, with the intention of entirely abandoning the child.

I want to take this moment to talk a little about abandonment because you will get a clear understanding of why you sometimes feel like no one in this world loves you. Child abandonment typically involves a child left on someone’s doorstep, left behind a garbage can, left in an abandoned area, or to have someone babysit and not go back and get the child. Most kids who are adopted will probably feel abandoned at some point in their life. More issues will develop in their self-worth when a child becomes aware that they are adopted.

Growing up as a kid who experienced the life of being adopted, I dealt with self-worth issues until I was about twenty-five years old. A lot of times we experience things that we have to endure, and we weren’t the reason why we had to go through those experiences. At some point in time when you are dealing with self-worth issues, it will eventually turn into low self-esteem. Most of the time when you find yourself encountering an adult who has low self-esteem issues, the problems didn’t start as an adult, they started somewhere down the line in their childhood.

There was that minimal concern when they were a child, and then it began growing into something big as they grew into adulthood. As an adult, dealing with low self-esteem can affect many other areas of your life, if you don’t get the proper treatment. It can affect your marital relationships, friendships, your job, your health, and your vision, as well as when it comes to things that your heart desires. I want you to position yourself with the mindset of overcoming low-self- esteem. I am telling you, this is not going to be an easy task, primarily because of what you had to endure to even get to this place of your life.

Many times, in life we are in situations that we have no idea that we are in, and what’s even more surprising, is that other people recognize that we are dealing with a problem faster than we know ourselves. The first step in overcoming low-self-esteem is acknowledging that low-self-esteem is something that you deal with daily. Hopefully, you will realize in time that you are dealing with this issue.

Here are some points regarding low-self-esteem that you should know and learn to avoid them.

• What is low self-esteem?

• How can it affect your life?

• What is it that allows low-self-esteem to continue to grow?

• How can it affect other areas of my life?

Begin now to journey your way through the issue of low self-esteem. The longer you wait to deal with it, the more you will allow yourself to go deeper and deeper into low-self-esteem and let yourself to become sick mentally and physically.

Shame

Living in shame is something that I dealt with until I began to understand that it was not my fault, that I was put up for adoption. Being shameful is something that you deal with first internally. The question that I want to present to you as someone who is adopted, ‘should you be ashamed because of what your status has become, and will continue for the rest of your life?’ Before you begin to analyze this question, allow me to help answer it for you, no, you should never allow yourself to be ashamed. Being ashamed ties in with you being an embarrassed person as well. When ashamed, it leads into self-conscious emotions.

Shamefulness and embarrassment happen in relationships through low-self-esteem. It’s usually a public emotion that you will deal with concerning you being ashamed. The question predominately occurs in the back of your mind of, who knows that I am adopted. You will feel shame when it comes to your emotions because it is normal for every person brought into this world to be with the person who gave birth to them. Yes, that is how life is supposed to be, but unfortunately, life does not always work out the