Reinventing my adoptee narrative: a memoir of race, relinquishment, and reclaiming the story that was told about me.
The Premise
The adoption narrative is traditionally dominated by adoptive parent and agency voices. Left out are adoptees and birth parents. Dr. Hasberry happens to be both.
Privilege, in adoption as in life, refers to advantages granted not by merit but by belonging to a class, a race, a financial position. In adoption, those with privilege shape the narrative. Those without it live with the consequences. This memoir turns the lens inward on the privileges Dr. Hasberry was afforded as a transracial adoptee raised adjacent to whiteness and affluence, and the profound costs those privileges extracted.
“I believed in nurture over nature. That's why I adopted you. But recently, your choice in music, the way you dress, the guys you're dating… I'm starting to believe I was wrong.” From Chapter One
From the Book
At seventeen, my white adoptive mother pretty much confessed that she thought she could nurture my Black identity out of me.
My challenge, beginning in early adolescence, was to figure out how to move from the eight-year-old who affixed a yellow towel to her head and danced around singing ABBA into her hairbrush, to a fifty-something affirmed, self-assured woman who loves her Black skin, is a member of the first and finest Black sorority, and has immersed herself in Black culture.
My memoir details the struggle and the successes of being a transracial adoptee, a birth mother, and a Black female professional. It is a story of the naïveté of well-intended parents and the resilience of my inner Black child. I wrote it as a conversation starter for anyone who is part of the adoption constellation.
Inside the Memoir
Growing up as the only Black child in a white family and school, learning what it means to be Black from peers, because her family had no connection to that culture.
Dr. Hasberry coins the term to describe the coercive, identity-exploiting process she experienced as a teenage birth parent relinquishing her child.
The gaps in narrative and in self: the adoptee's particular experience of incompleteness, and the work of building wholeness without access to one's own origin story.
Reflect, Release, Reinvent. Each chapter ends with an affirmation designed to take the reader's trauma and rewrite it as agency.
The complexities of reunion with both biological families: the joys, the complications, and the ongoing work of a life that doesn't resolve when the book ends.
Not resilience as compliance. Resilience as refusal to accept the adoption industry's narrative as the final word on her life.
Reader Response
“There are many adoptee voices emerging through written narratives, which is wonderful. THIS ONE, however, pulled me in and I didn't just read it, I devoured it. Dr. Hasberry gives the reader an opportunity to pause at the end of each heart-wrenching, insightful chapter with an affirmation. Not a corny affirmation, but one that takes the trauma she experienced and rewrites the narrative in a way I have not seen before. Many thanks for such a beautiful, heart-wrenching, exhilarating tale of resilience, reclamation of identity, and affirmations that are necessary and nurturing.”
Diane S. · Adoptee“A tremendous gift for every transracial adoptee who feels alone in their journey, and equally a gift to child welfare professionals, therapists, foster and adoptive parents, and the public.”
Rhonda Roorda · Award-Winning Author on Transracial Adoption“Hasberry's contribution to the conversation is raw, honest, difficult, uplifting, profound, and reflective… with the space to Reflect, Release, Reinvent.”
Katie Wynen · PACT, An Adoption Alliance“A well written, articulate, beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-crushing, exhilarating tale of resilience and reclamation of identity.”
Adoptee Reader
Press & Media
Available in print & audiobook · $20
Print from Muse Publishing · Audiobook on Audible & Amazon. Order your copy today.
Adoption Narrative Shift is an 11-episode documentary series currently in production. If this book moved you, the series goes deeper. Contributions are tax-deductible through Charm City Impact.
Reflections on adoption, identity, and healing; documentary updates; and resources for adoptees, families, and clinicians, plus a behind-the-scenes look at building something that has never been built before.