This Book Is For You

Some books find you at exactly the right moment.

I believe this is one of them.

Wherever you are in your story, this page is for you.

For the woman who stayed too long.

You know who you are.

You adjusted your volume. You made yourself smaller. You performed your way through relationships that required everything and returned too little — and told yourself it was love because it was all you knew.

You are not broken.

You were never broken.

You were simply in the wrong rooms.

This book was written so you could see yourself clearly — perhaps for the first time — and know that the life you are hoping for is not only possible.

It is waiting.

For the woman who just left.

You closed the door.

You are standing in the unfamiliar quiet of what comes next, not sure what to do with your hands or your heart or all that open space.

The silence feels wrong. The freedom feels terrifying. And nobody prepared you for the fact that leaving was only the first step.

I know that feeling intimately.

The not knowing what comes next is not the end of your story.

It is exactly where your story begins.

For everyone touched by adoption.

Whether you are a birth parent who has carried a quiet grief for years, an adoptive parent who has loved a child that came to you through extraordinary circumstances, or someone who grew up knowing their story began with a choice made in love —

this book was written for you too.

Adoption is rarely simple.

It lives in the space between love and loss, between choosing and grieving, between letting go and holding on in the only way still available to you.

What I can tell you — from the other side of twenty-one years — is that love doesn’t have to choose between people.

There is enough.

There has always been enough.

To all of you —

I wrote this so you would feel less alone.

I wrote this so you would know that the life you are hoping for is not only possible.

It is waiting.

Come with me.

You belong here.

— L.A. Wright