[littletraveler]

My parents were married and divorced when I was two. He gradually stopped seeing me and paying support. My mother remarried a few years after the divorce. My step father adoped me within months of the remarriage. It's a long story as to why my father was absent, why my mother and step father served him with adoption papers, and why my father voluntarily signed them. I had a step father who came to the plate and I loved, but I remembered my father and life before my step father was in it. As an adult adoptee, I have grieved over these decisions and my mother and adoptive father would give anything to have a do over with what they did based on what my own personal feelings were later in relation to what occurred. This was because family connections are very important to me and I was the victim of circumstances between people who were young and acted based on emotion and without a far reaching eye. I also later discovered my father's family was terribly upset with the decision and assumed their own connections were severed when my father signed the adoption papers. My grandmother was particularly beside herself. Some of their being hindered to persue their own contact with me was the fact that my mother's family was respected and did well and my father's family was uneducated and felt intimidated. I have been in contact again with my father and his family again, but I can never regain what I lost or potentially could have had. I feel as if my adoptive father would have been in my life and given me all he did without a piece of paper and I would have had the benefit of a father who might have later grown up and an extended family and cousins I would have never lost. PLEASE think carefully about step parent adoptions. Some are not necessary and can cause long term damage to the child who had no voice in its taking place. Please do all you can to encourage parental and extended family interaction with the child. Also consider the financial support. Money coming in for a child can pay for many things that might not be able to be afforded after an adoption. Paying child support is required and you can see it happens. Saying this, child support is the least of the benefits of having your own parent in your life. I am not saying all step parent adoptions are not good, but there are some that should never happen. Please think of the importance of heritage, extended family, and a parent who just needs to grow up. Also, please don't put your own prejudices and dislike of the parent in your decision making. It isn't about your own hurts and upset.