This book is a work of devotion. Two members of Flourish, Karri and Lora, took it upon themselves to gather essays and artwork by those who wanted to participate, get a lawyer to check on the legalities of printing individual truths, get an editor to check the prose, get a publisher to make the book, create financial channels so Adoptees On and Saving Our Sisters reap the profits of the book and the artwork (which is for sale separately), make a website (Can you even believe they did all of this??!), and who knows what else they did, making a trek up a mountain look like a walk in some pretty park.

Ann Mikeska, Catie Samantha Peck, Christine Furhman-Cameron, Coleen Nevin, Dawn Conwell Mulkay, Dominica Selvaggio, Evan Brook, Francine J. Bauer (April Gaulke), Jane Ellen Sliwka (Natalie Anne Pettigrew), Jennifer James, Julia Richardson, Julia Winston, Karri, Katie Kennedy, Kirsten Weatherford, Lora K. Joy, Michelle Madsen Hinton, Monique Florence Sarah Pangari, Rowan Dyer, Ruth Monnig, Shannon, and Susie Striker all took the time to share in some form what it was like for them to meet on Zoom with other adoptees during COVID on a weekly basis for a year.

People do better when they feel seen and valued. It’s one thing to find and use your voice, and it’s another thing to find and use your voice and to feel heard. The Flourish Experience gives the non-adopted reader the rare opportunity to see behind the curtain of the lives of adopted people, and it gives adopted people countless opportunities to see they are not alone in behaviors and thoughts they might have thought, perhaps with shame and concern, were particular to them, not to adoptees in general.

Here are some excerpts of essays you can read in the book.

In Flourishing, Lora K. Joy wrote:

“Pam and Anne wanted to see what would happen if a group of adoptees spend a year together, writing, sharing, and healing. For me, the answer at the end of the year was I had a family. My Flourish family is truly the first place I have ever belonged and felt I could show up raw, honest, and complete in my authenticity. This group became my church. We all feel seen and understood without needed to explain our emotions. There is magic in connecting so deeply with a group of adoptees. We are mirrors for each other like no one else can be. Together we uncover our truth—that and the rawness, deep honest and reflection is where you find the power and healing.”

In How to Create a Village, Dawn Conwell Mulkay wrote:

“When I joined the Zoom call that first day and saw twenty-five boxes with strangers looking back, I am still surprised I didn’t leave. The premise of the class was to met once a week, have a topic for the month to concentrate on and write about, read our writings out loud to the class and Anne and Pam would be our facilitators.

This may sound like a normal writing class and maybe it was. For this grown-up adoptee, it was terrifying and life-changing. I have never felt comfortable around other people. Growing up, most people didn’t understand what I had to say, my perspective, my reasoning. It felt like my total existence was a mystery even to the people who were closest to me; but, to be in an on-line chat room with twenty-five other adoptees was so comforting and validating. It was as if I was pulled from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, wrapped in a well-used quilt, and tucked into an old chair before a roaring fire with hot chocolate, water, chocolate covered strawberries and my favorite cat napping on my lap.”

In The Year of Flourish, Ann Mikesa wrote:

“Spending one day a week for an entire year with twenty-five adoptees, in a group facilitated by two well-known adoptees—one a writer, one a therapist—sounded amazing, terrifying, and more than a little radical. Always one to suffer from both extreme procrastination and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), I eventually signed up and as luck would have it, got the very last spot. I was both unprepared and naive to the enormous impact such a group would have on me.”

In Questions for My First Mother, Karri wrote:

“One week in Flourish the prompt was to write questions for our first mother. I wrote my questions to someone I had only seen in pictures and I spoke to her as I read to the group. I could barely get through the questions without choking up, forgetting that 25 people were watching me read.”

In The Flourish Experience, Jane Ellen Sliwka (Natalie Anne Pettigrew) wrote:

“One of the best things about Flourish was that it wasn’t all serious. There were so many moments of laughter. My favourite example, related to a prompt that Anne and Pam asked us to write about just a couple of days before my 34th birthday. It went something like this: ‘Imagine you are in full ownership of your life. You’re in your car—who is in the car with you? What three things do you throw out the window and what song is playing?’ I decided that I was throwing out the notion that I have to prove my worth to others, instead of embodying the fact that I am inherently worthy. I also wanted to throw out all the people who didn’t have my best interests at heart or who saw me as a threat or competition. The third thing that I wanted to throw out was a lack of self-care.

In The Nothing Place (a term coined by the adoptee Julian Washio-Collette), Julia Richardson wrote:

“The last two weeks I have been in my ‘nothing place’. When Pam Cordano started to talk about ‘the nothing place’, I knew immediately what she meant and I knew that it was where I was. We all knew what she meant. All the adoptees in our Flourish class. We knew. We felt it, we understood. It is our place. For some of us it is terrifying, for some of us it is a safe space, for all of us it is familiar and a place where we are familiar but where we know we are strangers in a strange land. We are the aliens in the other world, the Muggle world, the civilian non-adopted world. Right here in this space in my world, in my home, in my body, in my relationships and in my everyday life I have been living in my nothing place.”

in One Year in Flourish, Christine Fuhrman-Cameron wrote:

“I’m an adoptee. I’m also a therapist who initially read The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child by Nancy Verrier (1993), twice—once as an undergraduate and again in graduate school. I somehow managed to be so disconnected from my own truth that it didn’t even dawn on me that this book applied to me in any shape or form. It should be noted that the professional mentors I had around me often reinforced the idea that infant adoption is beautiful and not even remotely noteworthy from a clinical perspective. Fast forward 14 years to a career working with kids in foster care and young people who aged out of the system. Keep going 20 years of reunion with my maternal family and 7 years past secondary rejection with my bio father. Add on three more years to the part where I’d find out I have another biological brother. I finally read The Primal Wound a third time and just about died.”

In her book 10 Foundations for a Meaningful Life (No Matter What’s Happened), Pam Cordano wrote about the concept of call and response. When a baby is born, for example, it cries, and a parent responds by picking up the baby and rocking them. The importance of calls for infants has to do with the fact that if there is no response, infants will stop calling. This can result in a quiet baby, a baby others might mistake for a good baby, for a well baby, when really it is quiet because something essential has died.

These essays are calls. I am here, they say. Are you?

One of the best ways to support an adopted person (and another human being), is to respond by listening.

I think this book is a miracle, as are the essays and artwork it contains. The book arrived in the mail last night, and I have had it by my side ever since. When you find a miracle, after all, you don’t let it go.

To buy the book and to see/buy the artwork (the closing date for the art is July 17, so hurry!) click here: https://www.theflourishexperience.com