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My mother was a highschool drop out, and a product of the foster care system, herself. She and my father married young-- she was nineteen and he was twenty-something. I don't know a ton about him. But he worked construction and wanted to be a missionary. He had a limited capacity for family life.
I was living with my mom when my youngest five sisters were born.
the first sister, B--, was born a year and a day after I was, and needed medical care that we could not afford. So my mother's father and step-mother took her, to help out. It was only supposed to be temporary.
It looked like my parents were going to work things out after that, and they got pregnant again. When my father couldn't stick around, my mom decided to place this baby, L-- for adoption. She took me with her to meet the adoptive parents-- to see how they would be with kids.
I waved goodbye to that little sister at the hospital on the day she was born. I waved goodbye to three more little sisters by the time I was eight years old. My parents never told the rest of their family about placing the younger girls for adoption. They didn't think they would understand. I always knew they were our little secret.
Then my father decided that he was going to officially file for divorce.
My mom couldn't afford to keep me, and bring my sister B-- back, so she decided to send me to her father's house to be with my sister. Just until she could get back on her feet. But that never really happened. and she figured I would be better off with parents who could provide a better life for me.
After two years, my mom called and told her father and step-mom that they could adopt me and my sister B-- if they wanted. They had apparently been asking for years if they could adopt my sister; they had her since she was three months old anyway.
After my adoption, my (technically) birthmother told her father about the four younger girls.
My adoptive parents were always in love with my sister. she really was their little girl. They were skeptical about me for awhile-- considering how I lived with my (b)mom (on welfare, food stamps) they seemed to think I might have been wild somehow. By the time I left for college, we had figured out how to co-exist.
I was a sophomore in college when my first sister found our birthmom. L-- was sixteen at the time, and I was nineteen. Our connection was immediate. She had pursued music and theatre just like B-- and I had. Her parents were exactly what every birthmom would hope for her daughter. stable, loving, supportive.
I was twenty-two when the next sister, R--, found us. she was nineteen. Her afather was bi-polar and OCD, which had never been disclosed to our (b)mom. when she was a kid she couldn't even eat in the same room as him becuase the crumbs would send him into a full-blown panic attack. His parents also never accepted my sister as a 'real' member of their family, and she had grown up feeling isolated and lonely her entire life. I was heartbroken when I heard about that. It was never what my mom thought would happen. Love and affection and supportive family was a baseline expectation.
The final two girls were adopted by the same family. They didn't know they were adopted until the oldest, M--, found the adoption papers in her parent's desk. They didn't know they had other siblings (even though their parents knew about us), until the day before M-- went to college. Her mother took her into our (b)mom's work at a department store, went up to my mom and said "Well, M--, here's your birthmom."
But M-- met all of us over the following christmas, and she was awesome. Her parents wouldn't let her tell our youngest sister (S--) about us until she was eighteen, though. So for two years while M-- was in reunion with us, she couldn't tell S--.
I just met S--, my fifth and final little sister, in February of 2010.
There have been lots of ups and downs over the years. I've seen incredible love, and I've seen horrifying anger. I've seen birthfamilies and adoptive families that that seem to fear that they cannot co-exist; that their love for the same child might meet and cancel each other out somehow.
As siblings, we all connect on an incredible level. Though frequently the negotiations with all of our families get complicated-- a little like we're all involved in a giant illicit affair, but it is always interesting.
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It sounds like you have a big group of people who have been through similar situations. When all is said and done you have each other to help you understand how it all unfolded.
Insight helps to figure it all out. I found that trying to imagine what the situation for my birthparents was like when I was conceived helped me.
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The thing that has been the hardest to get over is the ways that I have seen the adoptive parents at times try so hard to shame my birth-mother.
Even my own adoptive parents (even though they were her father and stepmother), at times would say or do things that could only serve to hurt her. She was really, truly trying to give all of us the best shot at life that we could possibly have. The pain and guilt of losing all of us absolutely changed her. The woman I remember from before my adoption and the woman I see now are two completely different people.
I know that it is difficult to be an adoptive parent whose child wants to reunite with her birth family, but it is so hard to see everyone claiming to be acting out of love on all sides, and yet sometimes acting so horrible to one another.