This week we sat down with Dr. Abigail Hasberry, a transracial adoptee, birthmother, executive leadership coach, licensed marriage and family therapist associate, and author, to talk about her new memoir, Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing my Adoptee Narrative, which was released on February 18th, 2025. With a rich background in education, including roles as a teacher and principal across diverse school settings, she holds a Ph.D. in curriculum & instruction, along with multiple degrees in African American studies, sociology, teaching, organizational psychology, and counseling. Dr. Hasberry's research delves into identity development and the experiences of Black teachers in varied school environments, while her personal journey as an adoptee and birth mother drives her passion for supporting others in their paths of healing and growth. This book is an unflinchingly honest memoir, and we are so grateful she was able to make the time to speak with us about it today.
In the introduction of your book, you say this: “while we have not and do not talk about my adoption experience and their experiences as biological siblings of an adoptee, I hope this book acts as a conversation starter for my family, adoptive and biological.” What does that do to you if this huge, defining part of your life is never talked about?
It has definitely been the catalyst of more conversation, not necessarily always about adoption, but at least more opening up. With one of my adoptive brothers, particularly, we’ve talked more, but I think it's been more of him saying that he recognizes that he didn’t have those conversations with me, and now that the book is out there, he’s apologized, and said some things that are just kind of awesome, but still not really the conversations that I would like to have.
I think that, because I learned so early how to put up borders around who I am – my whole self – it’s just one more of those borders, so it hasn’t really been a thing I’ve been harping on, but I don’t feel like they know a lot about me. I don’t feel like they know me as a Black woman. They don’t know me in a lot of ways, because this silence has just kind of been the status quo. I also recognize that part of it is that my family really wanted me to not feel like the adopted sibling and just feel like the sibling. I recognize that attempt to just make it normal, which had the adverse effect, unfortunately, because it made me feel like, are we not going to talk about this elephant in the room? Why is this not something we discuss? But I recognize that the intent was not that. The intent was just, you're just my sister, so we don't have to talk about how you came to be, because you just are.
As an adopted person, how do you carry the weight of those unspoken conversations? It sounds like it must be such a huge burden to carry alone.
I agree. I definitely agree. It's one of those things that, in order for you to heal, you have to be the one to start the conversation and do all of the work, which is really unfortunate. But I do think that that's a lot of our healing.
Think about it like this: if someone wrongs you, it's really up to you to heal from that. It's not up to them to come back and be the cure; you've got to do the work yourself. And I think that's just how life works: when things happen to us, it's up to us to reframe it and find our way through it, and other people can't do that for us. So I see it as just one of those burdens that we have in life as human beings and interacting with other people, that we have to be responsible for our own healing while navigating our own relationships.
The title of your book is Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative. Can you unpack the phrase, “Adopting Privilege” for us? What does that mean to you?
I think about the act of adoption, first. When I think about adoption, I think about the fact that there are certain people who are more privileged to adopt than others. There are people who are just deemed as acceptable parents and people who are not, and for me as a birth mother, my being teenaged and unmarried and too young and all of those things, versus a family who had all the things that I now have.
And so, you know, ultimately, there was no reason for it. So I think part of it is who we deem as privileged to be a parent. But I also wanted to look at my privilege as an adoptee, of being adopted into a family that was very well educated and able to give me lots of experiences. I don't want to come into this conversation not acknowledging my own privilege, so part of it was about that privilege. Part of it was about navigating the world of privilege which I navigated as a child of parents who were able to put me into a very affluent, private, elite school, and living around people who were extremely affluent, and understanding that privilege, too, was part of my adoption experience as well.
It's also about the privileges that we don't have, and so I talk about biological privilege, and what it means to have access to your biological information, and that lack of access when you're an adoptee, and not having privilege to information that is a basic human right. The book employs a lot of different lenses of looking at privilege, and that's why I decided to call it adopting privilege, because I just feel like privilege, or the lack thereof, is such a huge part of the adoptee experience.
There are a lot of surprising moments in your book, and one that stands out is when you write about how, when you finally get some identifying information about your birth family, that what you were handed is a fictionalized version, instead of the truth you need for your own identity formation and knowledge.
And they don't tell you that it's fictional. They give it to you like it's fact. I found out decades later that the information I had been provided was not necessarily all true. Facts are altered so that you can't do any more meaningful searching. It’s more of a “based on a true story” kind of document than it is your factual personal history.
In your book, you wrote, “It is painful to hear my adoptive parents talk about me like a trendy thing to do at the time. It is also unsettling to know that I was not their first choice. First was a biological child; second, a Vietnamese child. I was the third, but fastest and most economical option.” Did you feel like that as a child? Was it something you internalized?
No, because I didn't know that until about seven years ago. The story that my mom told me was that they just wanted a baby, and they were told that I was available, and so they got me. My dad told me the truth about seven years ago, and so no, that wasn't something that I felt, but I wish I had known because I had this whole adoption narrative that I've told people and believed myself over all these years that wasn't true. And to find out this true story in my 40s about why and how they adopted me was heartbreaking.
A common thread throughout your book is your parents wanted to adopt and raise a Black child, but only raise that child in a color-blind family, with their (white) traditions, culture, food, values, etc., making adoption a kind of soundproof glass separating you from your Blackness and leaving you to cobble together a Black identity from peers and pop culture. What was that like for you?
It was kind of an erasure, and it's understanding that my parents loved me, but they didn't love anything that I came from. Not even love, I would say, in my mom's case, because I don't think she even liked anything about the culture that I came from, and that's hard. It was so hard when I realized that as a teenager, and when I was developing my identity, to realize that my mom really does not like Black culture, Black music, Black hairstyles, Black anything. It was really, really hard to reckon with as a teenager and try to still love myself and love her. That was really, really difficult.
In your book, you say that, rather than learning to love and respect and honor your Blackness, they felt they were saving you from it.
There were times when I was told, you're different from those kids, you're different from other Black people in general. And so that was the message, is that they had saved me from this different place. Even as I became a teacher and began working in private schools and working specifically in the diversity network, I recognized that a lot of the private schools did the same thing. They wanted Black kids who were from very high socio-economic status to come into the school, so that they were just Black skin with the same money in the same kind of lifestyle, living in the same neighborhoods. They did not want kids who were actually culturally different from the majority of their students. And I thought, oh, wow. I know what this is. I recognize this from my family.
In writing about your mother you say, “the woman who saw herself as her daughter’s champion against racism and racist social institutions was capable of racism herself, with no awareness of her own prejudice.” How do you feel safe in your family when that is your lived experience?
One of the things that my mom did really well was have me question societal institutions and norms as they pertain to Blackness. And in her mind, it was because I was different, and so they should not look at me that way. When I was growing up, I didn't recognize that. It was probably not until I was a teenager that I recognized the dichotomy of what she was really saying and believing. But because she instilled that in me so young I have this critical lens of looking at people, which I then used to look at how she was responding to things. It allowed me to do the thing that most people aren’t able to do until they're adults, which is to start to see our parents as real human beings. I started as a teenager, being able to see my mom as this amazing person who will protect me from these things, but also a super-flawed human being who does not recognize that my Blackness is the same as anyone else's, and I just accepted her for who she was. That's all you can really do. I couldn't change that. I couldn't do anything other than just kind of say, this is who she is. There are things about her that are absolutely amazing, and there are things about her that are super, super flawed, and it's her job to do that work, and if she doesn't, then there's nothing I can do about it.
There is a very illuminating anecdote in your book describing how your mother was angry with a teacher because the teacher excused you from doing a project about your roots, because she had taught you about your Irish and Polish heritage, which she felt were your roots.
I still love pierogis. It's one of my favorite foods. So in a way, it's traditionally part of who I am, but it's not my roots. And when they would flip through family photo albums filled with photos of these very white Irish people, they would talk about them like, your great-grandfather, the banker and all of that. No, these weren't my people. They aren't my people, and I didn't know them. It's not even like someone who was alive that I could remember. Yes I have this familial connection, but I’d think, these are ancestors of yours that possibly would have owned mine in some cases, and my mom never got any of that.
That sounds tough, reconciling the idea that they are your relatives, but not your people. Does that leave you feeling rootless in the world?
It is a hard place to be, although being Black and understanding the rootlessness, which is a result of slavery, normalizes it a little bit within the African American community. While I couldn't tie my roots to anywhere until I met my biological family in 2017, I also recognized that my African American friends mostly couldn't trace their family roots beyond the deep south and slavery, too, and so there's this common kind of loss, collective loss, that I still felt a part of.
You are both an adopted person and a birthmother, and in the book, when you talk about the birth of your first child you say, “if I named him, if I'd made him mine, I'd never be able to let him go,” as part of your description of what you call birthmother grooming. What is birthmother grooming?
I coined this term one day when I was thinking about the fact that I was a child, and adults were coercing me into making decisions that, while being convenient, may not have been in the best interests of me or my child. I thought about the fact that I was a product of the adoption industry – with all the narratives of happiness and sunshine and roses and giving you a better family than you would have been in – all of those narratives and beliefs. At the time I was pregnant I was still completely in the adoption fog and not seeing adoption for what it is, and coupled with the trauma of becoming pregnant at 16, it was so easy for me to be talked into relinquishing this child, because the emphasis was on how I was adopted, and look how great my family is, and how I don't have all the things that I need to be a good parent, and here are all these families that will have all these things that you don't have at 16. They never once said I had to do it. They never once said they wouldn't support me if I didn't do it. But they also never gave me a plan to say how I could do it, so it was just really coercion and in my mind, my parents and the agency worker really grooming me in those two months to relinquish my son but calling it my choice.
Is it really a choice if you aren’t presented a viable option to parent that you feel like could work?
It definitely was not. There was no choice in it. It was binders full of prospective adoptive parents with full bios and how they will raise your child, and the money that they have, and here's a picture of the nursery they've already set up, versus no real help or support for me if I chose to keep my child.
As a pregnant 16 year old, you looked through those binders and you chose a family because they looked like the Cosbys; a family where the mother was a lawyer, and she was African-American, and it felt like your son would have racial mirrors and that she would understand his racial identity. How did that work out?
It didn't, and because I did not get therapy after I placed my son – because the expectation was just everything back to normal – I stuffed it all away, so deep that when I met him, I didn't even realize that it didn't go as I planned. I met him virtually in 2011 and spoke with his parents – his white adoptive parents – and his adoptive siblings, one from India and one from an Asian country. It didn't dawn on me until about five or six years ago when I had a conversation with someone and it just flooded back, that I had chosen this Cosby-esque family, and that is not at all who he went to. The agency owner, who has now passed away, had put a picture up on Facebook with the caption, “my godson, the stud,” and it was just a punch in the gut to realize that she had placed him with her friend instead of the family I had chosen, and she had been named his godmother, and she had completely ignored all the things that were important to me and that I asked for. And because she had passed away, I couldn’t even say anything, and there was no resolution.
That’s a big part of cultural adoption narratives, this idea that birthmothers get to choose exactly who will raise their child, and that they are empowered to choose a person or family that matches their values, or ethnicity, or other parameters that matter to them. That must have been shocking, discovering that the agency owner just gave him to her friend to raise, instead.
It was heartbreaking. Heart wrenching. She got to watch him grow up, too, and I did not.
In your book, you say that you and adoption have been in two long-term toxic relationships, and that for years you believed that placing your son was your choice, but now you do not. How did you come to that realization, and what do you do afterward, once you are there?
I think I got there by being a parent and seeing the children that I raised grow up and seeing my daughters as teenagers, and thinking, there's no way I would have done to them what was done to me. Looking at them at 16 and 17 and thinking about where I was at those ages, and then about my relationship to them, it just dawned on me that I was definitely coerced into placing my son up for adoption, and as a parent now, thinking about doing the things to them that my mom did to me is just unfathomable, and that's how I rid myself of the feeling that I made a choice, and recognized that all of the adults involved, and what they did and how they were involved in it, that was not based on supporting me, or giving me a real choice, other than adoption.
Can you talk to us about your own parenting style, and how it came to be?
As a parent, one of the things that I've always wanted to make sure of is that, no matter what the situation might be, my children would come to me first. That was a parenting choice I made starting when they were teeny-tiny babies, and continued throughout. My husband was raised very differently, and was spanked as a child, and I decided, absolutely not. We will never spank our children because I never want them to be afraid of me. I wanted to make sure that they weren't so afraid that they hid their true identity, or hid a pregnancy for seven months, as I did. I wanted to make sure that there was always open communication, and I wanted to make sure that it was mother-child communication. I never wanted to be their “friend”. I wanted them to feel confident in me as a mother and confident that I would provide support, a plan, whatever was needed, and that has always been my number one goal as a parent: making sure that my kids can rely on me and believe in me and have faith in me so that they can develop fully as good human beings, with support and guidance. It's why I tell people that parenting is the one thing I know I did right. Anything else in my life you can question, but parenting is the one thing that I made sure I got right.
You’ve been through adoption reunion twice; once as an adopted person, and then as a birth parent. What advice do you have for people considering (or in) the reunion process?
Boundaries were really important to me. I knew I wanted to find my biological dad, and when I found him, I also found seven siblings, which really turned out to be 10 because they had siblings who now call me their sibling, although we're not biologically related. They also had grown children because they were all older than me, who also wanted to know me and understand me. I wanted to find this one person, and then I found this whole community of family. In order to not feel overwhelmed, I used a video app, where I could record my story one time, and then they could watch it when they wanted to, and they would respond by recording their responses or questions, and then I could watch it when I wanted to or when I was ready. That way there was less pressure, because my phone wasn’t dinging all the time with text messages or phone calls. Controlling that boundary was really important for me, in order to not feel overwhelmed, or feel resentment.
I also focused on just meeting people and understanding where they are mentally and emotionally, but also not excusing them for their chosen behaviors. My birthmom not being able to connect and refusing any kind of communication with me is her issue, not my issue. I'm not going to own any of that. She hasn't done her work, and that's a her thing, so I'm not internalizing any of that. Instead, I am allowing her to be where she is and just not pushing her anymore. I’ve let her know that I'm here, and then how she reacts is how she reacts, and it's not a reflection on me. Making sure that I was healed enough to accept whatever I found and to allow people to be who they are and give them ownership of their behavior, was really important, because it's hard, it's a secondary rejection, being rejected again by this woman, and so I had to make sure that I was ready for that rejection and ready to let her own it and not take it on as my own.
Your book has an interactive component in it, with prompts to reflect, release, and then reinvent, turning the reader from passive observer of your story to actively reflecting and comprehending to their own. How did you come up with that framework, and why did you include it in your memoir?
I did it because it is part of my story. Originally I wasn’t writing a memoir; I was just writing my experiences in reunion and wanting to capture everything, so that I could reflect on what was going on. I wanted to meet my family, and decide who I wanted to be and how I showed up in life, and the reinvent part of the framework came out of that, but most importantly, I didn't want to be a person who held ill feelings. I didn't want to be negative. I didn't want to just be angry; and there's so much to be angry about. Releasing the negative emotions was really part of my journey and my healing. It was a framework that I developed for myself before I even wrote a book, and as I was journaling, I ended up writing a workbook with that framework, which I self-published on Amazon as The R3 Framework, The Workbook: Learning to Reflect, Release, & Reinvent through difficult times and problematic relationships, and so it was important for me to include it in the book, because it really was how I coped with a lot of what I went through.
You tell your story in an absolutely unflinchingly honest way. How do you write a memoir with that level of honesty?
When I started writing I realized, wait, maybe this isn't just a journal. It's actually a book that I'm writing. My dissertation committee chair is one of my mentors and one of my favorite people in the world, so I reached out to her and said, I'm writing this thing, and I'm writing all of it, and I don't know what I should write and what I shouldn’t. And she replied, write it all, and you can take out whatever you want later, but just write it all. And that's what gave me permission to just write it all, and then I didn't take anything out because I felt like it was all just so important.
I have felt like a secret so many times in my life, whether that be when I was pregnant or being a secret for my birthmother, and there are just so many times where I felt silenced and forced to be and keep secrets, and I wanted to be able to say everything I wanted to say, and talk about all of my experiences, and not let anyone silence me. I think that's how I got there, by just saying this is who I am, and who I am is okay. I want other people to recognize that who they are is okay: we've made choices, and things have happened, but we shouldn't be silent about it, because silence breeds shame, it breeds isolation, it breeds fear, and I don't want any of those things in my life. That was how I got to the place where I decided, I'm just going to write all these things. There’s a famous quote that says, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better,” and I leaned into that although I was careful to only write about things that were my personal experience, and not stories I heard from other people that weren’t mine to tell.
The other thing I'll say about writing my memoir and writing it so raw is that I had to have conversations with my siblings about the things that I was going to tell, and it was important to me that they then had conversations with my nieces and nephews about the things that I went through and how they understood it and how they were a part of it. That was really important to me, to have all that done a couple of years before it was finally released, so that people had time to process it, and deal with it, and they could ask me questions about it. I think that that's really important when writing transparently, to also be having conversations with the people who may be affected by what you are writing, so that those people don't have to feel the shame and the silencing I did, and can get to where I am.
Do you have any advice for other adopted people and birthparents about how they can find their own voice, and use it?
Just write for you. I think that's what I did first. I was just writing to capture the reunion, my feelings about it, the experiences, and then I wanted to kind of fill in the back stories. How did I get here? How did I get to this place? What was the process? It was really just for me to understand my own identity, and how I got here. It really wasn't for anyone else, until it took on a life of its own and I realized this isn't just for me. But writing doesn't have to be for anyone else, so I’d tell people to just write for yourself, because getting those things out on paper gets them out of your heart, and it gets them out of your brain, and out of your bloodstream. Put your story down in a place where you can interact with it and understand it and read it again and make sense of it. Just do it: just write it down, or record it orally, or however you need to do it. Just do it.
Dr. Hasberry's book, Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative, was released in February 2025, and is available now. To learn more about Dr. Hasberry and her work, please visit her online, at Dear Abby Counseling or through her Executive Coaching practice. You can also find her on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. To hear more from Dr. Hasberry, you can also find her as a guest on the podcasta, Adoptees On and Zen Career/Adoptees at Work, interviewed by the Fordham Institute, and as a featured speaker for Adoption Network of Cleveland.
Her first book, Living Life on Purpose, for a Purpose, and with a Purpose: 15 Identity Affirming Lessons, is available on Amazon, as is her workbook, The R3 Framework: Learning to REFLECT, RELEASE, & REINVENT through difficult times and problematic relationships.
