Dotsie, how do your children from Korea feel? I have a writer friend, Jane, who was adopted from Korea. We met when we both won a creative non-fiction award. Jane went on to have her memoir "The Language of Blood" published. She's got some anger issues over her adoption and about the whole Korean adoption practice. I think adoption from another country is different now. There's more resources available to help adopted children stay in touch with their culture, sometimes even with their birth family.

I myself was quoted in Jane's book as saying, "Your parents will always hate you on some level because you are not who you are supposed to be." What I actually said is what Jane mentions later, that I felt like a replacement child and a disappointing one at that because I am not very much like my adoptive parents. Now, I realize that all the sadness and anger going on in our house was not about me.

What meeting my birth family gave me was an answer to all those questions rolling around in my head all those years, like why am I so weird compared to everyone else? I stopped feeling like a freak after hearing my laugh, my exagerated arm waving manner of story telling, seeing my facial expressions, and hearing that my whole family loves animals and most of us own horses. Plus, the biggest help was learning that we are all prone to depression (and a little screwed up) so I can stop feeling so guilty about not being able to always be a ray of sunshine.