More people than ever are loving other people's children--in stepfamilies, extended families, adoptive families, and other situations that have more to do with love than biology. If you are loving someone else's child, you'll face challenges-- and this book will help you meet them. In Loving Someone Else's Child, Angela Hunt talks respectfully, affectionately, and expertly to parents like me caught in an imperfect, sometimes impossible, family. She is a family expert with courage and a big heart.Dave Kopp, former editor Christian Parenting Today Newly revised and updated.

First you marry a man who does not want children. He cheats and you divorce him. Then you marry the love of your life and find out he does not want to have children with you either. The three he has are more than enough. Although you always wanted to be a mother, you decide he is worth the sacrifice, expecting to have a long happy life together. But that's not what happens. This is the story of how a woman becomes childless by marriage and how it affects every aspect of her life. This is the book of my heart, the one I had to write. Ever since I realized I was not going to have children, I have felt recurring grief and an emptiness in my heart. I am different from most women, but I have found that I am not alone. There are many of us childless women, and I think it's important to share our stories about what it's like when you don't have children in a world where most girls grow up to become mothers. I hope this book offers comfort to those who are childless and understanding to those who are not. If it makes you smile here and there, even better.

All I ever wanted was to be a mother. At the age of four, when someone would ask me what I wanted to be, I would say, "I want God to delay his coming so that I can live to be twenty-five years old, get married, and have children." But on that dreadful day in January of 1994, my doctor told me that my chances of becoming a mother were very slim due to several female problems. I hung my head in my chest and cried. There will always be a hole in my heart and questions in my mind about what my child would have looked like. Would he or she be like me, talk like me, or even stand like me? God's will in my life is more important than mine, and since then, I have learned to trust him with all my heart.Along the way, I have been blessed to be called mom by some very extraordinary children.Along the way, I have been blessed to be called mom by some very loving and generous children.Along the way, I have been blessed to adopt two extremely special children.Along the way, I have been blessed by these children more than words can express.But most of all, I have been blessed to have LOVED SOMEONE ELSE'S CHILD.

Covers all aspects of raising another person's child, discussing role definition, goal setting, making adjustments, adapting to change, dealing with stress and hurt feelings, and responsibilities and rights of surrogate parents

This book covers common open adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up.

From debut novelist Nancy Woodruff comes this chilling and beautifully wrought story of forgiveness, renewal, and the ever-elusive second chance. When fifteen-year-old Matt and his family move from Oregon to an affluent Connecticut suburb, the fact that he is home-schooled brands him as more than an outsider -- he is a town oddity. Just when he seems to have made inroads into the closed social circuit, just when he is embraced by a trio of teenage girls and feels his life might be changing for the better, he is responsible for a devastating car crash that leaves two of the girls dead. Tara isn't in the car with her best friends. Instead, she's by her mother Jennie's bedside as she gives birth to a baby girl. While Jennie and her husband Chris mourn Tara's friends, and try to make sense of their eldest daughter's loss and their own new baby, a pervasive sense of blame begins to rain down on Matt. Jennie knows the community's reaction will surely ruin Matt's life. But when she reaches out to him, hiring him to work for her high school reunion company for the summer, Jennie suddenly finds herself vilified as well. In the face of community and family derision, both imagined and real, physical and emotional, Jennie and Matt soon find themselves in solidarity. As their attachment grows, Jennie realizes that she is bound to Matt by more than just compassion -- that the broken child she sought to save is, somehow, reviving her. Someone Else's Child is a deeply moving story of guilt and forgiveness, despair and hope, and the intricacies of love and responsibility. In rich and unforgettable prose, Nancy Woodruff masterfully explores the fraying loyalties that can turn our world upside down in the face of tragedy.

Simply told but deeply affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore—and gets away with it for twenty-one years. Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood. Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.