I finally told my Mom the other day about my writing this blog for Adoption.com. She quickly passed the word on to my sisters and father even before I could click my heals together and say, "There's no place like home." There's also no grapevine in the world as effective as that of my mother!

I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell my family about my blog as I suspected there were some things I would have been willing to write about under the anonymity of my pseudonym that I wouldn’t necessarily want my family to know. Try as I may, though, I couldn’t find a way to work the whole, "I have a friend" bit that people tend to use when they don’t want anyone to know that they are talking about themselves. You know, something like, "I have a friend who is also adopted and she is writing this blog that I think you would find interesting."

With my astounding power of deduction, I quickly realized that clearly, this was not going to work. I decided, after some reflection, that the benefit of telling my family about my blog completely outweighed the few private things that would not, as a result, be revealed.

I was/am hoping that at some point, maybe someone in my family can share their insights and perspectives on my having been adopted and what they thought about the whole thing through the years. Judging from the subsequent conversation with my sisters, however, I am not sure they have any thoughts on the topic whatsoever, so I may have blown my cover for nothing.

My mother said she had read through all of my blog entries the same day that I told her about it. She didn’t, however, give me any feedback, as this was our annual Christmas phone reunion. Every year when I call from wherever I am, each family member gets on a different phone throughout the house. Everyone talks at once, trying to figure out what is being said and who is talking to whom through tricky time delays and unavoidable echoes … all the Chritmas chaos spread from one continent to another for less than the price of a turkey dinner.

One of my sisters asked me what my blog is about. I explained that in the Internet world on adoption, most adoptees that have something to say are usually angry, frustrated and generally not well-adjusted to having been adopted. I told her I was recruited simply because a happy, well-adjusted adoptee’s perspective is something that many adoptive parents (and maybe even some birth parents) are desperate to know exists … and maybe even how a "happy adoptee" got, well, happy.

My other sister’s reaction was, "Oh, now I get it. It seemed strange when Mom told me what you were doing. I mean, it never seemed to matter one way or another to you. I completely forgot you were even adopted."

I laughed. There it was. The ultimate goal for siblings, family members and to some extent, even the adoptee him or herself: to feel so much like a family that how they came to be together ceases to consciously exist. It becomes a story from the family’s history that gets brought out, dusted off, referred to, maybe even laughed about, on occasion, but is not ever the first thought that comes to mind when someone looks at the adopted member of the family or hears their voice.

It also sums up what I have often been trying to say in some of my previous blogs concerning how to make adoption not a big issue in an adoptee’s life: no secrets … no overkill ... lots of love. Simple.