Over and over again adoptive families talk about the joys of being a family. So why talk about grief? Because that’s where adoption has its beginning.

The pain is always just below the surface. When talking about the experiences that led to his need for adoptive parents, one boy told his caseworker, “It’s like a bruise that I don’t think about most of the time. Then something bumps it, and it hurts again.”

When a child gets his permanent family, he has already lived the loss of loved ones. It doesn’t matter whether that love was imperfect or harmful. He has lost years of learning, loving and growing.

Innocence and the chance to just be a kid is often the casualties of this hurt.

During the years I worked as an adoption placement worker I never witnessed an adoption where someone didn’t get angry at someone at some time in the process.

Adoptive parents got mad at the foster parents. Foster parents got mad at the adoption worker. The child’s worker and the parents’ worker got angry at one another. Or the judge was insensitive and said all the wrong things when we went to court.

When we love, we care enough to get angry.

When we care about the child, we are confronted with the devastating consequences of his losses. We wish we could have protected him from the experiences that left him scarred and frightened. And we get angry.

We are outraged at the circumstances, the perpetrators of pain, and the imperfect child welfare system that didn’t get it right. These things shouldn’t happen.

And what about the pain of the birth family? Parents completely lose their relationships with their child, the opportunity to be a parent and their places in the social order of the community. Grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts lose a member of their family.

I called and left a message for George to ask if he would permit me to publish the lyrics of his song in our book Adoption: Stories of Lives Transformed. He’d poured out his grief in a song for a son he’d relinquished to adoption. “One day if this child comes looking for me I’ll know I have at least left him a trail,” he’d said.

Four years later it took about 10 minutes for George to return my call. “I had to take a minute to cry first,” he explained. You can read George’s lyrics “Unknown Son” in our book, Adoption: Stories of Lives Transformed available at www.adoptex.org.

Do you have a story about how you have grown and coped with loss?