Rachel E. Thiessen

Adoption has shaped my life from my very first days when my own birthmother made the painful and loving decision to place me for adoption.  There was a brief stay in foster care and then I joined my adoptive family as their first child and the apple of my father’s eye.

My experience as an adoptee fueled my desire to build my own family through adoption.   I am the proud parent of two elementary school age daughters who were adopted from the foster care system.  Now in reunion with my birth family, my journey is enriched by relationships with both my biological and adoptive families.

My career has revolved around foster care and adoption from the start.  My first glimpse of children involved with “the system” occurred when I worked at a crisis shelter for children while still in college. These were babies, the shelter only served children under six, but there was something very different in their eyes.  Some vacant, some piercing, some dark, some glazed- many I have never forgotten.  I wondered what would become of ones so fragile in the storm of generational poverty, domestic violence and neglect. I would soon find out.  After graduating from college I worked a children’s home in California. Here, their bodies were bigger and their behaviors were more extreme, but those eyes were familiar.

I went on to work for a private adoption agency where I trained foster parents.  Eventually I became a foster parent myself.  From this experience I learned that while it was impossible to save them all, I could profoundly influence a few. I noticed a lack of quality, practical training opportunities for foster and adoptive parents and launched Real Moms in response.  Real Moms brought trainings to various foster and adoption groups across the state.

In law school I continued to focus on adoption and foster care issues.  After law school, I did a year long fellowship with Dickinson Law School’s Center for Children and the Law.