What’s It’s Like Celebrating Reunification Stories While Knowing You’ll Never Have One
As an international adoptee who is not in reunion, I am often asked: How does it feel to work with clients who engage in reunification? So, with June being National Reunification Month, I thought it was an appropriate time to answer that question on a larger scale.
As in many of my counseling sessions throughout the year, National Reunification Month brings stories of connection, restoration, and the powerful healing that can happen when families find their way back to one another. I learn of these stories as an adoptee while honoring that two simultaneous live inside me: I hold pure joy for people who have the opportunity to reconnect with biological family members, and I hold grief knowing that I will never have that opportunity myself.
As an international adoptee from India, my story is a sieve of missing records, lost information, erased histories, and unanswered questions. There are no clear paths forward. No names to search. No addresses to trace. No reliable paperwork to verify what is true and what is not. Reunification isn’t just emotionally complicated – it’s structurally impossible. That reality can make National Reunification Month, like so many aspects of adoption, feel bittersweet.
Sometimes people misunderstand adoptee grief because they assume grief can only exist when something tangible is lost, but there is a unique kind of grief that arises from ambiguity, absence, and the uncertainty of wondering whether someone is thinking about you somewhere else in the world while knowing you may never find them. There is grief in having no ending to the story.
There is often an assumption that every adoptee can someday “search” if they want to. But many adoptees grow up understanding that our histories have been buried by falsified records, incomplete accounts, and missing documents long before we ever had the ability to ask questions. Wars, poverty, corruption, stigma, language barriers, and international systems all play a role in creating permanent separations that cannot be repaired through deserving alone.
And yet, even while holding space for my own heartache, I still believe whole-heartedly in the importance of reunification whenever it is possible and safe. I know that biological connections matter, origins offer grounding roots, and people deserve access to their history, medical information, culture, language, ancestry, and family relationships. I believe adoptees should be fully supported when seeking answers or connection, and honoring reunification is an acknowledgment that human beings are shaped by where we come from, even when those beginnings are painful or complex. Reunion is not a single event, and it is often some combination of beautiful, painful, overwhelming, healing, destabilizing, validating, and heartbreaking, plus a million more internal experiences. Reconnection never erases loss, and it cannot undo years of separation, but even imperfect answers can matter profoundly.
For adoptees without access to reunification, National Reunification Month can amplify the questions that do not have answers: Who do I look like? Who did I inherit my laugh from? Did someone search for me too? Would they recognize me now? Would they want to know me? What parts of myself were shaped before I was ever adopted? The questions themselves become an influence in shaping us. At the same time, witnessing reunification stories can bring hope – hope that the adoption world is becoming more aware of the importance of preserving family connections whenever possible through better access to records and resources.
While I will never know my biological family, hear the story of where I’ve come from, or receive the answers that I know that I deserve, I will always fiercely advocate for a world where other adoptees can receive the opportunities and access that I did not. Ultimately, National Reunification Month is about honoring the human need to understand where we come from, whether that means pursuing reunion or grieving the impossibility of it.