Our guestblogger chooses to remain anonymous. I want to thank her for allowing me to post her comment as a blog at Adoption Under One Roof.

I've always thought it was a little selfish to fight over the "ownership" (for lack of a kinder word) of a child. However your children came to your home is exactly what makes up your family history. My children will grow up knowing that they are my children and are loved as my children, and that before they came into their family they had/have a birth mother and extended birth family who loved, and loves, them dearly. They will know that there were unique situations that brought about the decision for adoption and that those reasons are nothing to be ashamed about, even for my two children who came home to us through foster care.

I also want to repeat something that a mother wrote on her family's blog. Her children came to her home biologically and through adoption. She pointed out that she never mentions to the outside world that some of her children were adopted but not because their adoptions are not open adoptions. She said something like, when she is introducing her children she doesn't say this is Amy, my adopted daughter, and Sam, my biological son. She simply says that these are my children, Amy and Sam. Her view point really made me think about how the term adoptive mother does not define who I am, it just describes how I legally became a mother. I am a mother and I am very thankful to my birth mothers (I do consider them to be mine too) for giving me the gift of motherhood. Likewise, I am thankful to my children for giving me the gift of being a mother. I did not birth any of my children, but I do think that if I had, I would still feel grateful to my children for the same thing.

Everyone has heard the phrase, "Donating sperm does not make you a father." Which I take to mean that the role of fatherhood makes you a father and that the same would go for being a mother. I also feel that a mother will do anything for her children, love and nurture them for the rest of their lives, and make great sacrifices for them. Asking another woman to be your child's mother is the greatest sacrifice I can think of and certainly is the role of motherhood. I also feel that loving your children, no matter how they came into your family, and making them feel valued as a family member and as a person is part of the role of motherhood. I hope that I never make my children feel as though they are not my children. I also hope that I never make them feel as though they are not the children of their birth mothers.

Today Faith posted an interesting blog in response to a query from a reader about “the burden of gratefulness” placed on adoptees by some adoptive parents. The comments following this blog were varied and excellent as well.

I decided to put in my “2 quetzals” on this issue as it is one I’ve thought long and hard about. From the first month I brought my precious daughter home from Guatemala, and she was a mere 7 months old, all the way up to the present, people have remarked in her presence that she should be grateful that we adopted her.

Although I’m fairly certain that my daughter’s life would have been far from easy had she remained in Guatemala, I detest her hearing that she should be grateful to us. Like Faith, I am forever grateful to have the opportunity to raise such an amazing child and I don’t want her to live her life feeling “beholding” to us for having adopted her. What child needs that dark cloud hanging over them?

Since I rarely have time much less interest to watch TV, it was only by sheer chance that I discovered that a one hour quasi reality show about an adoptive family aired Monday night.  “Raising Bains” was aired by A&E at 11 pm and repeated in the wee hours of  Tuesday morning.  Dave and Kathy Bain are raising 13 children in all, 12 of those are adopted, with 8 being a sibling group that would have been separated if the Bains had not adopted them.

This is how the network  described this documentary/reality show:

Meet the Bain family. Dave and Kathy Bain are a big-hearted married couple who have adopted not just one or two foster children, but have adopted 13 children! Many of these children come from broken homes and terrible pasts. See how Kathy and Dave deal with some of these children and how these children's pasts affect their daily lives.

At "Adoption Under One Roof" we enjoy entertaining different opinions and voices in the blogs and comments.  For that reason we have always had guest bloggers whenever possible. For example, a whole book based on the life of an adoptee was published on our website two days a week for almost two years. Additionally we have received and posted blogs from: a birthmother (this is an ongoing series),  contributions from single adoptive father who adopted special boys from foster care,  a single adoptive mother who has adopted through intercountry adoption, same sex parents of adoptees, an adoptee in a domestic adoption, a  birth father who has "lost" his child to adoption, an adoptee in an intercountry adoption who returns to Korea to research her roots, an adoptive parent with children adopted from foster care with  specific challenges (and here), a family attempting to adopt from foster care,  an adoptive parent who has had to dissolve an adoption, to name just some of the contributions from our guest bloggers.

"Adoption Under One Roof" has been enhanced and enriched thanks to these and other  guest bloggers, and equally important they present diverse opinions from the different "angles" of the adoption triangle (birth parents, adoptees, adoptive parents) – so very important in the creation and maintenance of a dialogue between the three groups.