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Ordinary Days and Tender Places

How We Talk (and Don't Talk) About Adoption in America

Author: Margaret Bendroth

An adoptive parent and historian delves into the differences of families made by law, not biology—and shows us the deep value of those differences

Adoption touches on some of our most vexing social questions, about race and sexuality, abortion rights, economic inequality, even foreign policy and global poverty. More than that, it prods us in tender places, reminding us of our own questions about belonging and separation, identity and alienation, our worries about what is determined by fate and what is freely choose.

Blending personal memoir, history, and broader reflection on American culture, Ordinary Days and Tender Places offers a fresh take on adoption. As an historian and an adoptive parent, Bendroth takes seriously the criticisms and the personal pain many adoptees face, but she also invites readers to take a bigger view. This book asks us to turn the mirror on ourselves and consider the peculiarities of what we consider “normal” family life.

In the end, our questions and controversies obscure a basic fact: raising children born to someone else is a time-honored human practice. In the past and in many cultures today, our modern American ideal, the 2-parent biologically-related nuclear family, is an oddity. Within the long history of humanity our ideas about kinship and our beliefs about what constitutes a “normal” household are surprisingly narrow and, in the end, not all that helpful.

Bendroth introduces readers to new ways of thinking about adoption, exploring the history of American families and children as well as fascinating findings by biologists and evolutionary anthropologists about kinship practices, genetics and inheritance, even motherhood itself. This is, in other words, a book about adoption and much more. It is an invitation to readers to reflect on their own lives, to think deeply about our human need to connect, to love, and belong.