Adopted Black Girl

It doesn’t always feel fair.

My birth mom battled substance abuse, and she didn’t survive whole. I think that’s part of why I’m so cautious with my freedom—why I don’t take moments, curiosity, or possibility lightly. My parents didn’t get to experience those things. They didn’t get to leave their hometowns, travel the world, or live with the kind of appetite for life that I’ve been given. I don’t want that to be wasted.

As a kid, you’re taught to live with the choices adults made for you. As you get older, you learn to honor them by understanding why those choices were made.

Being in kinship care, I know I was raised in alignment with my parents’ wishes, and as I grew, my own wishes began to form alongside them. That’s something I don’t take for granted anymore. That is a privilege that us as kinship adoptees have access to.

The interesting part is that I’ve learned to understand my birth  mom in a way that maybe only I can—because I grew inside her.

I don’t want to forget that she is human. That she was young once. That she is beautiful. That she has many lives within her. As a girl, I see pieces of her in myself, and I hold that gently. Those parts are mine too.

I think often about not wasting moments. About honoring memory. About staying connected—to her, to my older sister, to the lineage that still lives and thinks and feels.

My older sister took the responsibility so we could have these experiences. I’m in constant awe and reflection.

When we allow ourselves to see each other as human, more conversations become possible.

Anyway, I’m just a girl who moved away, thinking deeply about her lineage and how powerful the choices before her were—the choices that led me here.

Not everyone gets to connect those dots. I do. And I take that responsibility seriously. The choices made between 1994 and 2000 still echo in how I make decisions in 2026. That’s not small. That’s dynamic. That’s sacred.

So much to think about it right?

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Let’t get into this week’s upcoming blogs.

This week on the blog, I’ll be sharing:

• how to pivot when fear shows up,

• why support for Adopted Black Girls matters,

• and how I’ve been reframing my mind after a tough mental health episode.

Stay with me. I’ll see you in the next post.

From my writing corner with love,

Teish