Reunion, First Families, and the Question of Responsibility

In Part 4, Lynelle and Kristin explored power, identity, and the lifelong structural consequences of intercountry adoption.

In Part 5, they turn toward one of the most emotionally complex areas of adoption: reunion, first families, and what responsibility toward those families might actually mean.

Kristin

One of the questions I keep returning to is this: What would it mean for adoptive parents to acknowledge responsibility not only toward the adoptee, but also toward the adoptee’s first family?

I think many adoptive parents understand adoption primarily as a relationship between themselves and the child but over time I have come to realise that adoption also connects us to another family, another history, and another loss. That became especially clear to me when my son met his mother in Korea for the first time. Watching them together changed something in how I understood adoption.

Lynelle

For many adoptees, first families are never truly absent. Even when we know nothing about them, there is often still a psychological presence: questions, fantasies, grief, anger, curiosity, longing, or confusion.

Adoption may separate us physically, legally, and culturally from our first family, but it does not erase the existence of those relationships. So when adoptive families act as though the first family no longer matters, or should remain invisible, that can feel deeply painful.

Kristin

That is something I understand differently now than I once did.

When my son met his Omma, it became immediately obvious that she was not simply part of his past. She remains part of the human network that shaped his life. Watching them sit together, noticing similarities in gestures and expressions, was deeply moving. But it also made visible the magnitude of what adoption had done. In that moment I understood something important: my son’s life is larger than what my husband and I alone could give him. Recognising that did not diminish our family. But it did challenge the idea that adoption replaces one family with another.

Lynelle

I think many adoptees long for adoptive parents to understand exactly that. We are not blank slates arriving into adoptive families without history or connection. We already come from somewhere. And many adoptees carry an enormous internal conflict because they feel they must choose emotionally between two worlds: their adoptive family and their first family, their adoptive country and their country of origin, gratitude and grief, belonging and loss.

Kristin

I increasingly believe adoptive parents underestimate how complex that balancing act can be.

My son grew up in Norway, shaped by Norwegian language, culture, and social norms. Yet his appearance and biological origins connect him to Korea. Reconnecting with Korea therefore involves far more than meeting relatives. It can involve learning language, navigating cultural belonging, and rebuilding connections that others acquire naturally through childhood but which adoptees often have to approach consciously as adults.

That process can be emotionally and intellectually demanding. And I do not think adoptive parents can simply stand aside as observers. If adoption disrupted these relationships in the first place, then supporting adoptees in rebuilding them must also be part of our responsibility.

Lynelle

Yes and support needs to be more than symbolic. For many adoptees, reconnecting with first family or country of origin requires enormous emotional, financial, and practical effort. Searching for family, travelling overseas, translation, therapy, DNA testing, navigating records, understanding another culture, learning language — all of this can become incredibly overwhelming.

Many adoptees undertake this journey almost entirely alone.

Kristin

That is another thing I find increasingly difficult to ignore — how much labour adoptees carry on their own. And often while also trying to manage the emotions of their adoptive families around reunion. Some adoptive parents fear reunion because they interpret it as rejection. But I increasingly suspect reunion is usually about something much more fundamental.

Lynelle

For most adoptees, reunion is not about replacing the adoptive family, it is about understanding ourselves. It is a deeply human desire to want to know answers to these questions: Who do I look like? Where do I come from? Why was I adopted? Who are my people?

Adoption does not erase those questions and when adoptive parents interpret reunion as betrayal, adoptees often end up carrying guilt simply for wanting answers about their own identity.

Kristin

I think many adoptive parents fear that if adoptees reconnect deeply with first family or culture, it somehow exposes inadequacy in the adoptive relationship. But what I increasingly see is that these relationships are not necessarily competing with each other.

Perhaps the problem comes when adoptive families expect themselves to be emotionally sufficient for everything the adoptee has lost. No family can fully replace another family, another language, another country, or another history.

Lynelle

Exactly. And acknowledging that honestly can actually create more safety for adoptees.

What becomes harmful is when adoptees feel pressure to minimise the importance of first family or origins in order to protect the adoptive family emotionally. That pressure creates silence and fragmentation inside many adoptees.

Some adoptees also grow up hearing negative assumptions about their first families: that they were irresponsible, immoral, poor, or incapable of parenting. Those narratives can become deeply damaging. They often erase the realities of coercion, poverty, social stigma, lack of support, or systemic inequality that shaped many relinquishments. And they ignore the many cases where children were not relinquished willingly at all.

Kristin

That point has become increasingly important to me. Over the years I have realised that responsibility toward first families begins with recognising their humanity and dignity. Not imagining them as abstract figures from the past, but as real people whose lives were profoundly affected by adoption too. And perhaps part of ethical responsibility is allowing adoptees to love, know, or reconnect with those families without making them feel disloyal for doing so.

Lynelle

I think many adoptees would feel enormous relief if adoptive parents could genuinely hold that space because reunion is often emotionally complicated enough already. It can bring joy, grief, hope,  disappointment, connection, trauma, or confusion — sometimes all at once.

Adoptees should not also have to carry fear about whether searching for themselves will emotionally destabilise their adoptive family relationship.

Kristin

What these conversations increasingly make me realise is that adoption cannot ethically be understood as the transfer of a child from one family to another. The original relationships continue to exist, even when interrupted by time, borders, language, and systems. And perhaps part of accountability for adoptive parents is learning to live honestly with that reality rather than denying it.

Lynelle

Yes because the truth is adoption created our adoptive families, but it also created separation. Holding both of those truths at the same time is difficult but without acknowledging both realities, adoptees are too often left carrying the emotional complexity alone.

Next Week: Part 6

Lynelle and Kristin reflect on whether honest conversations can repair relationships, what accountability might actually look like, and how adoptees and adoptive parents might move forward differently together.