Showing titles in Adoption & Fostering

It’s easy to feel overburdened by life’s demands. Looking out into the world as well as under the roof of our home may cause us to question, “How did we get here? And how will we get through?” Jillana Goble has been there. With honesty, faith, and a dose of humor, her debut memoir, A Love-Stretched Life, chronicles what she's continually learning on the suspension bridge between reality and hope. A mom via foster care, birth, and adoption—in that order—for nearly two decades, Jillana has experienced life’s curveballs.

The long-awaited sequel to Betty: A Memoir continues a story that waited seventy-eight years to be told. In 1947, a young nursing student made a heartbreaking choice to place her newborn son for adoption. She carried that secret in silence for a lifetime, revealing it only in a whispered confession to her daughters as she was dying. For fifteen years, Mary and Susan searched for the brother they never knew. Life sometimes pulled them away —careers, families, cancer—but the promise they made to their mother kept them returning to the search again and again. They followed every lead, ...

In this groundbreaking book, adoption advocates Betsy S. Kylstra, Lisa C. Qualls, and Jodi Jackson Tucker-an adoptee, a birth mother, and an adoptive mother-reveal that adoption is rooted in both loss and redemptive victory. And healing is needed by all in the adoption triad-adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents-to experience restoration and wholeness.

After two years of waiting to adopt - slogging through paperwork and bouncing between hope and despair - a miracle finally happened for Vanessa McGrady. Her sweet baby, Grace, was a dream come true. Then Vanessa made a highly uncommon gesture: when Grace’s biological parents became homeless, Vanessa invited them to stay. Without a blueprint for navigating the practical basics of an open adoption or any discussion of expectations or boundaries, the unusual living arrangement became a bottomless well of conflicting emotions and increasingly difficult decisions.

In Just Another Slice, nine-year-old Sarah Bailey tries to survive in a family full of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse while at the same time trying to protect her younger brother Curtis. Sarah learns that asking for Just Another Slice of toast is not the only thing in her life she will be denied. Yet, in a world full of cruelty, she finds kindness and happiness in the most unsuspecting people, places, and things.

This is a powerful true story of one young girl's struggle to survive the state-care-system in the 70s and 80s. Amelia has just one wish, to make it through to adulthood and hold her destiny in her own hands. This is a harrowing true story, one of survival and human strength. Amelia has been tragically separated from all her siblings, never to see them again for many years.

Become empowered to face your own messy, complicated life with fresh courage and bravery. Undone is author Michele Cushatt's quest to make peace with a complicated life. It is an honest confession of a diagnosis of cancer and the joys and disappointments of motherhood and marriage, ripe with...

If you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and wondering where it all went wrong — this book is for you. When children explode, withdraw, or seem impossible to reach, we’re often told to be firmer and more consistent. But for families living with trauma and neurodivergence, those approaches can make everything worse. Because the problem was never the behaviour. Trauma-Informed Parenting in Action brings together the core content of the Trauma-Informed Parenting workshops delivered by the SCVO charity of the same name, created by Suzanne Scott to share information that changed lives.

Sara Hagerty masterfully draws from her own story of spiritual and physical barrenness to birth in listeners a new longing for God. With exquisite storytelling and reflection, Hagerty guides listeners to a tender place that God is holding just for them—a place where he shapes the bitterness of...

The moment Diane Burke, an author and mother of two grown sons, received an unexpected certified letter in the mail, she had no idea her life would be shaken to its core. Memories of a past she had buried more than forty years ago suddenly resurfaced and she wasn't prepared to deal with them. Steve Orlandi, happily married, father of two and step-father of three, was living the typical middle class American life. But since the age of eight, when he discovered he was adopted, he had led that life dealing with inner questions about his self-identity and genetic history.

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

Being an adoptive parent is hard enough. But when your family is multiracial, things get even trickier. Parenting transracially doesn’t come naturally nor does it just happen with time. Love is essential, yet by itself, love isn’t enough. Cross-cultural parenting also takes intentionality, listening, learning, growing, repenting, changing...then starting all over and doing it again. It’s hard work! And yet, when an adoptive family honors the ethnic heritages of their children, the whole family gets to see the beauty of a gloriously creative God.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE “A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love...

Evie and Elliot are scrawny, filthy and scared when they turn up on foster carer Maggie Hartley's doorstep. Aged just two and three years old, this brother and sister have hardly set foot outside their own home. They have been prisoners, locked in a world of abuse, violence and neglect. Maggie soon realises that Evie and Elliot are lacking the basic life skills we all take for granted, and the outside world terrifies them. Gradually unlocking the truth of their heartbreaking upbringing, Maggie tells their shocking true story.

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well. This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth.

Fourteen-year-old Hannah comes to live with foster carer Maggie Hartley after her mum pleads with Social Services to take her into care, unable to cope with her daughter anymore. Previously a good student, a loving daughter and sister, Hannah is now playing truant, drinking and taking drugs. Angry and mistrustful, it seems that nobody can reach this troubled teenager. 

Join USA Today bestselling author Tricia Goyer and her family of eleven as they embark on a yearlong quest to eliminate grumbling from their home and discover a happier, healthier, and more grateful approach to living life. The Goyer home--with two parents, eight kids, and one...

In this coming-of-age memoir, set in Chicago's western suburbs between the 1960s and '80s, adopted twins Julie and Jenny provide their parents with an instant family. Their sisterly bond holds tight as the two strive for identity, individuality, and belonging. But as Julie's parents continue adding children to the family, some painful and tragic experiences test family values, parental relationships, and sibling bonds.

You can meet Hannah in 1 Samuel, chapters 1 and 2. The Bible says she was "barren", and we know she suffered heartache, anguish, and grief because of her empty arms. Perhaps you do, too. Hannah's Hope is for all who long for a child yet to be conceived, grieve for a baby too soon passed from the womb, or have lived through the no-man's-land of failed adoption. It is intended as a guide to assist you in making wise decisions as you struggle through your grief.

Read by the authors. Realizing how little control we have over our lives can make us fearful and anxious--or it can lead to greater intimacy with God, a richer prayer life, and a joyful eternal perspective. Seasons of grief, pain, and loss of control are inevitable. Despite our best efforts and...