Adopted: From Shame to Discovery

Jackie Olsen
Counter Arts
Published in
2 min readAug 13, 2022

--

The search for my mother’s birth parents

Woman covering her face and looking through her fingers
Photo by Inna Podolska on Unsplash

Finding my grandmother

My mother was adopted in 1938, when it was something to hide, a terrible secret. She grew up with a single mother and lost her to cancer when she was only 23.

She always had a sense she didn’t belong, of being out of place.

--

--

Jackie Olsen
Counter Arts

Come for the insights on aging, leave with a doggie bag full of frogs and exoplanets. Now more poems about vacuuming! she/her/hers