Sherrie Eldridge
Sherrie's Story
I am an adoptee.
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That single fact has shaped nearly everything about my life's work — as a writer, a coach, and someone who has spent decades in conversation with adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth mothers trying to make sense of a bond that is both a gift and a grief.
I was unplanned, unwanted, and unnamed at birth — Baby X, on the hospital record. It would be easy to look at a beginning like that and conclude your life was a mistake. So many adoptees carry that fear quietly, even into adulthood. But I've come to believe, with everything in me, that God had a plan and a purpose for my life before I ever had a name. That belief is the foundation of everything I now do for other adoptees who are still afraid theirs might not be true for them.
​My own healing didn't come all at once. My mom through adoption, Retha, loved me — but she didn't have the skills to parent a wounded child, and neither of us understood, back then, what that wound even was. It took years, and a good deal of healing, before I could recognize her love for what it was, and let it in.
Today, my focus has shifted toward adoptive moms whose children can't yet receive their love. I was once one of those children. I know what it's like to be loved fiercely by a mother who simply wasn't equipped for the depth of what I carried — and I know, firsthand, that the wall between a wounded child and a loving mom can come down.
Years later, an adoptive father in Puerto Rico told me I had a beautiful heart — because I was willing to tell him how his daughter might feel. That moment has stayed with me. It's what I hope every reader here walks away with too: the words to say what their child feels but can't yet say themselves.
My hope is simple: that every adoptee reading this finds the courage to move toward healing, and that every mom feels less alone in loving a child who is still learning how to receive it.