Biography Adoption

Let the Wildflowers Grow: One Mother's Journey through Adoption, Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder is a beautiful story of mother-daughter love that turns to anguish in the challenges of mental health. It follows the poignant narrative of Brigitte Becker, who along with her husband and son, open their heart and home to a bright, beautiful ten-year-old from Ukraine named Anna, embarking together on a journey of adjusting this cherished young girl to the United States.

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well. This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth.

From the founder of This Gathered Nest YouTube channel, an uplifting story of Angela Braniff’s unusual path to becoming the mother to seven children through various methods of adoption and biological approaches, encouraging women and mothers to embrace the unique purpose that God has put in their lives.

Rebecca Carroll grew up the only Black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic - and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older. Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young White woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem.

In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting.

These are the faces that call me "mom", the three children who made me a mother. When I started my journey into parenthood I never thought it would look like this. I never planned on having three adopted children, and I certainly never imagined that two of them would have Down syndrome. But like most of the things God does, once we stepped into the craziness and confusion of the unknown and unplanned, we quickly realized that we were indeed among the lucky few.

It's the night before Christmas when Casey and Mike get the call. A 12-year-old girl, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Her father is on a ventilator, fighting for his life, while her mother is currently on remand in prison. Despite claiming she attacked him in self-defence, she's been charged with his attempted murder. The girl is called Bella, and she's refusing to say anything. The trouble is that she is also the only witness....

Sixteen years ago, Juli Boit, a 25-year-old nurse practitioner, moved from Los Angeles to a small village in Kenya to be a part of an HIV program. In 2009, she founded a hospice called Kimbilio where men, women, and children come either to heal or to be loved until they die. On an ordinary Friday afternoon in 2016, a three-pound baby boy, Ryan, wrapped in pink was brought to Kimbilio. He had been born prematurely earlier that week. His mom passed away while giving birth, and neighbors miraculously kept Ryan alive on water alone for five days until they brought him to the hospice.

Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls’ incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again.

Tim and Michelle Orr were married for 16 years before adopting their daughter, Faith, who happens to have Down syndrome. Tim's new book, We Named Her Faith: How we became a gospel-centered family, contains the story of their life together before she came to live with them. Tim weaves stories of how he overcame the childhood trauma of having multiple birth defects, a difficult home life, and alcoholism with teaching about living a gospel-centered life. Michelle's life met with difficulties early on as she was born to teenage parents. Through these experiences, Tim shares their firm belief ...

Magnanimous and charming, Bob Guterl knew that he could solve the racial problems bedeviling postwar America. Determined to stave off impending global catastrophe, the larger-than-life judge and his resolute wife, Sheryl, launched a radical experiment, raising their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx―the so-called “war zones of the American century”―in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence in small-town New Jersey.

In the much-anticipated follow-up to Sunday Times best seller Trapped, foster carer Rosie Lewis tells the heartbreaking true story of Zadie. When the young teenage girl, thrown out of her home by her strict Muslim family, is discovered hiding on the city streets by the police, it is clear that all is not as it should be. Taught to believe that Westerners should not be trusted, when Zadie is initially delivered into the experienced hands of foster carer Rosie, she is understandably suspicious of the family around her.

When a notorious lawyer, at the request of a famed composer, meticulously conceals his origins, his adoptive mother takes every measure to bury the truth. Pulling strings and enlisting influential allies—including a television icon—she constructs a carefully crafted facade to ensure he never uncovers his past. But as he grows older, cracks in the carefully constructed facade begin to show, leaving him haunted by an unsettling sense that something is being hidden from him.

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

In the tradition of The Promise of a Pencil and Kisses from Katie comes an inspirational memoir by the founder of Comfort Cases about his turbulent childhood in the foster care system and the countless obstacles and discrimination he endured in adopting his four children.

What does it take to keep a child safe? As a long-time strategist and activist fighting for better outcomes for foster children, Mark Daley thought he knew the answer. But when Ethan and Logan, an adorable infant and a precocious toddler, entered their lives, Mark and his husband Jason quickly realized they were not remotely prepared for the uncertainty and complication of foster parenting.

Michael Reagan's life is much more than just an interesting story. It is a testimony of how Christ allowed him to find healing from many of the issues that confront our culture today, such as sexual abuse, divorce, loneliness, the feeling of rejection, and the belief that God does not care about us. Michael Reagan's first adoption gave him an identity, but he did not find his true identity until he found Christ.

At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia. Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins.

Not many have lived as many lives as Archie Roach - stolen child, seeker, teenage alcoholic, lover, father, musical and lyrical genius, and leader - but it took him almost a lifetime to find out who he really was. Roach was only two years old when he was forcibly removed from his family. Brought up by a series of foster parents until his early teens, his world imploded when he received a letter that spoke of a life he had no memory of.