How the Miracle of Adoption Created A Family

These reflections on adoption have a singular outcome for the adoptive parents-complete recovery from bulimia nervosa, an eating compulsion that dominated my wife Marian's life for fourteen years, for which the Freudian psychiatry of the day proved useless. Adoption bestowed on us, through parenthood, a profound expansion of our love and our lives.

This story is a memoir, not a prescription; nor is it a catalogue of the painful experience of so many adopted children who fail in their attempts to find their birth parents...The literature of adoption is deeply moving, penetrating a wide range of emotions: anger, grief, regret, and joy as well. The most prevalent themes are those of remorseful young girls who gave up their infants, and those of adoptees who, unable to find their birth parents, are living "with a hole in my heart."

In addition, there are stories by adoptive parents and by adoptees, covering a wide range of experiences, some involving conflicts in their adoptive families, others immensely positive, especially those which describe the great joy felt by adoptive parents who could not conceive and were rewarded with the love of an adopted child....Marian and I were in our early thirties. Although we had already experienced much in our lives, adoption added a uniquely deep and fulfilling dimension.