Guest Blog Post -- Art and Adoption -- by Terri Nelson

I spent years of my life trying not to think about being adopted, and now I can’t stop. 

I am a closed record adoptee from a domestic private adoption in California. After my adoptive parents had decided to take me, the social worker from the Children’s Home Society of California had put my six sentences of non identifying information on the table in front of my adoptive mother.  She told my soon-to-be next mother,  “I’m going to leave the room now and I can’t give you this information but I can’t stop you from copying it when I'm not here.” And then my adoptive mother borrowed a pen from her, and the social worker left and closed the door.

Years later, my adoptive mother allowed me to see what she had copied down that day. My biological mother had been English and German, just like my adoptive mother, and my biological father had been Swedish, close enough to my Norwegian adoptive father. Both of my adoptive parents always marveled at how miraculous it was that the agency had a baby that matched them so perfectly the moment they applied.  I was just waiting in foster care for them to come get me. It had been meant to be.

But a few years ago, emergency medical genetic testing for cancer markers and then my DNA results revealed something entirely different. Now, after I have found both of my biological parents, after my biological mother sent me back a letter refusing to speak to me, after I surprised my biological father with the news of my existence, after I discovered my secret ethnicity, I am still working through all of this. 

These paintings are my way of processing all of these complex emotions and facts. And since my biological mother still won’t speak to me, these are the ways I have conversations with her in her absence. 

The symbolic elements are not easy to understand unless I explain them a little. In the interest of doing that, I started recording videos of myself painting, and explaining what each animal or element means. You can find all the videos at tinyurl.com/adoptionpaintings and on my Instagram feed at terridrawsstuff. 

My YouTube channel with videos explaining why I did my DNA, what the Baby Scoop era was, why I had multiple names, etc., is all up here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSIC_wmwCk1n3itvMqm0AE0Xi-zRrlVMh