Opening this at the request of Omega Glory in this thread. Anaamika showed interest in participating, so I hope she will stop by, to give a differing perspective.
Overall, my experience with being an adoptee has been positive, so I am coming from that POV.
Ask away! 
Is there a specific instance when your parents told you that you were adopted, or did you just always know?
Have you ever made contact with your birth parent(s), or tried to?
Anyone else in your family adopted?
Regards,
Shodan
(Who has no shame whatever about boasting of his two perfect children)
I always knew. My parents were very open about it. Which I think might have been kind of unusual at the time (this was 40 years ago).
I have not. Never had an interest.
I have an older brother who is, and a younger brother & sister who are not. My older brother also has two adopted kids and one “birth” kid.
Awesome! 
Mine has been overwhelmingly negative, but I have no issue whatsoever in sharing it. I’ll take ** Shodan’s ** questions to start with:
** Is there a specific instance when your parents told you that you were adopted, or did you just always know? **
From what I gather my adoptive parents had meant never to tell me and to hide it from me. I was adopted within the family, so it’s possible this might have worked - one sister had me, another adopted me.
When I was 14 my real mother, who had been in and out of my life and whom I knew as my aunt, showed up and told me, and then disappeared out of my life for a few years. Let me tell you, 14 is a bad age to have this happen to you.
** Have you ever made contact with your birth parent(s), or tried to? **
Like I said, I knew my mother for my whole life. We don’t talk anymore. I mean, we’re not fighting, it’s just we have our own lives and nothing to talk about. She has two sons and is happy, and she moved recently and left no forwarding address, and no one knows where she is.
My father is dead and I never met him, not even as a baby. When he found out I was a girl, he threatened to throw me on the street. I often wonder how my life would have been different if I was a boy - he might have raised me, but I probably wouldn’t have been happy.
** Anyone else in your family adopted? **
Not that I know of. There may be other secrets like mine; I was born out of wedlock (and he was married) thus the secrets.
Can this adoptee jump in, or is that considered gauche here?
In any event my adoptive parents told me as soon as I was able to understand, I’ve found my birthmother and her family (2 knockout sisters 
and one very sweet little niece with the bluest eyes), and I also have an adoptive sister-still remember picking her up at the agency, holding her in the cab, and having her smile at me, as if it was yesterday.
I don’t mind!
Can I ask if you are the same race as your parents?
Both the junior Shodan-ettes are from South Korea, so it was always obvious that they were adopted. Although my mother-in-law insists my son looks like me.
I ask because it seems to run in families. My brother-in-law and his two sisters are adopted, and my cousin and her husband have three sons by birth and two daughters by adoption.
Yes, they are.
Did I mention that my daughter got straight A’s? Did I mention my son is a certified EMT?
Regards,
Shodan
Of course you can! I am the same race, and in those days I think it was much more of a priority to “match up” parents and children so that people wouldn’t know they were adopted. Therefore, I’m not only the same race, but of very similar nationality background, as well.
I think adopted people do look like their parents a lot of times. It’s probably because looks are also about expressions, gestures, speech patterns, etc. My brother’s two adopted kids are of Mexican/South American ethnicity, so they are a little bit different-looking than their parents. The funny thing about it is that the person my niece looks most like in the family is me!
I have noticed that. I wonder if it’s because, when people have had a good experience with adoption, that they are more quick to use it as an option when they run into fertility problems? Just a thought.
You are so cute, proud papa.
Thanks for starting this thread.
Any particular reason why you didn’t? If your biological family sought you out, would you be willing to meet them and have a relationship?
Do you think it would have been better to never know the truth, or to have always known the way Sarahfeena did? Would you have considered your adoption experience to be a negative one if your biological mother had never told you the whole story (not that you would have known you even had an adoptive experience if you hadn’t but, hopefully you know what I mean)? I’m wondering if you were happy and secure as a child, then got the rug pulled out from under you, so to speak.
For everyone- Did you ever go through a stage where you felt you were an outsider in your adoptive family? If so, how’d you work through it?
All good questions, and ones I have thought about often in the years since. I would absolutely have wanted to know, but I think it would have gone much better if some of the following things had happened.
One of the clearest things I remember is after I found out, and my adoptive mom wouldn’t talk to me about it, I wrote her a long letter saying that I still loved her and that it was all OK. I put it in her purse. She never ever mentioned that letter to me, and i know she found it. It broke my heart and I felt like she didn’t even care.
Since the day I found out I’ve always thought I was the black sheep in my family and felt bitter but resigned over it. Less than two years ago I came to a truly stunning realization - my adoptive mom was the black sheep. I fit in just fine, just not with her. It was a wonderful piece of self-affirmation.
You are welcome! Thanks for requesting it. I wouldn’t have thought about starting it if you hadn’t, and I think that it’s good for people to gain some insight to adoption.
There is no particular reason, really…I just never have wanted to. I would conjecture that it’s in large part to feeling very secure in the family I have, but I can’t say for sure. If I did want to, I would consider it very, very carefully. The way I see it, it isn’t just about my feelings on the matter, I have parents and siblings who might also be affected, and their feelings mean a lot to me.
If someone from my bio-family wanted to contact me, I would be willing to hear from them. I would have to play it by ear whether or not I would meet with them. I definitely don’t think I would be interested in any kind of an ongoing relationship.
Omega Glory - I’m not adopted (unles syou believe my brother you used to say Mother and Dad found me in the gutter beside the road and took pity on me. You gotta love brothers.) but a couple cousins are. The girl cousin went through a phase in her teen years where she wanted to connect with her birth parents. We didn’t know it, but somehow she felt less like she belonged in the family because of the adoption. When she was in her early twenties she had a big wedding planned. Country club deal, no expense spared. Then a few months before her father’s business declared bankruptcy. Of course, the family picked up the ball and ran with it. Our uncles who are chefs (3 of them) did the cooking. My other cousin who made wedding cakes for a living did the cakes. My mother did the flowers and table decorations. Suddenly she realized that she was considered by us as just as much a member of the family as anybody else. Her whole outlook changed. BTW - her brother, who is also adopted, never was interested in his birth parents. He figured he got the best parents he could ask for, why bother?
StG
[QUOTE=StGermainBTW - her brother, who is also adopted, never was interested in his birth parents. He figured he got the best parents he could ask for, why bother?
StG[/QUOTE]
It’s interesting how people from the same family can feel differently about this.
I have an adopted sister who, at this point, wishes she had photographs. Her biological parents expressed interest in meeting her as an adult. If she feels the same way once she’s eighteen, it shouldn’t be difficult for them to reconnect, because of policies that were set in place by the agency. Of course, if they do meet, we’re hoping things will work out for the best. There was a series of threads by a doper who wanted a relationship with his birth family, but they weren’t interested. It was terribly sad.
Cool thread, thanks for starting this, and all your responses!
One general question for the adoptees: Are you familiar with the anti-adoption lobby, and if so what is your view of their position?
Well I could write a novel on that last question-will come back to it at the end…
I know virtually nothing about my birthfather. Any attempt by me to pry any information out of my birthmother is met either with stony silence or a quick change of subject. Thus I have (had really, over that now) horrors that I’m from a one-night stand or even something along the lines of rape. I’d love to meet him and his family-if he isn’t in prison or mentally ill or something.
My question to my fellow adoptees is whether what the adoption agency told you was true. In my case they told my adoptive parents that I was English/Irish, which just so coincidentally is what my father is. Likewise my sister is supposedly French-Canadian-again, same as my mother. Turns out I’m Slovenian/Swedish (or Norwegian), so they lied to increase the chance that we would get “chosen”.
Long story short: I always felt like an outsider; my parents are both definite extroverts (ESTJ/ESFJ for my dad/mom, adoptive sister ESTJ too), while I’m an INFP (who has worked tho a lot on his “inferior” functions in the meanwhile). Never could see eye to eye with my dad (a surgeon) as we had radically different motivations in life-he a go-getter, me an introspective philosopher. With Mom it was a little easier but even then we had our bad moments. So yeah during arguments I’d threaten to contact my “real” mother, always portrayed by Mom, in the heat of the moment, as some gutter trash (far far from the truth as it turned out). If the timing was better-my birth mom had already met her future husband when I was put up for adoption- I’d probably have been raised by them instead.
No, I’m not familiar, care to brief me a little?
Sorry, I missed this question before. I would say that I probably did have these feelings from time to time. I found that differences between us seemed a little more exaggerated because I was adopted. But as I have gotten older, I’ve realized that the differences are caused more by basic personality/gender differences/birth order types of things, and not so much by adoption.
The quick version I recall of thier arguments range from claiming that the sort of identidy issues you went through are too damaging to allow adoption to be viewed as any kind of net good.
Here’s a link to a website, but I’m not sure how representative this group is of the anti-adoption lobby as a whole. Certainly the line from the FAQ talking about “In other words, children are given one, true set of parents by nature, and these parents cannot be replaced or “switched at birth” based on a man-made legal document.” bothers me in the implication that there is a fate or destiny that Humanity is Not Meant To Tamper. I’m not trying to deny the issues that they mention - there are things screwed up with how adoptions have been handled, That one line, in particular from the website I linked really bothers me.
The movement was discussed in the Pit a few years ago, let me see if I call pull up that thread. Here it is.
I’m only vaguely familiar. I believe that their view is that adoption is harmful, but I’m not sure what their reasoning is. Do you have details?
My first reaction to that is that any group who tries to speak for everyone in a certain class of people is bound to be wrong. There is simply no way to show that everyone who is adopted is harmed by it, or somehow unhappy even if they don’t know it.
I think there are good ways for adoption to be handled, and bad ways. The fact that there are sometimes bad outcomes doesn’t mean that adoption itself is bad.
ETA: I have heard that a large part of this movement is made up of women who were forced by their parents to give up their children. Don’t know if this is true, but if I is, I certainly have sympathy for them.