NBC's This Is Us tackles foster care and a mother who returns to claim her daughter

Lorraine

Are you watching America's most engaging and informative show on adoption these days? This Is Us continues to surprise and delight me with its examination of the adoption issue and most specifically, how it depicts the emotions and actions of the adopted person at the center of the drama, Randall Pearson--nerdy, successful, sensitive--brilliantly portrayed by Sterling K. Brown. It is an examination of many of the issues that are usually not fodder for primetime TV, in fact, any TV at all.

Last season we dealt with Randall's adoption and his adoptive mother's duplicity in dealing with knowledge of the identity of his biological father, who could have met Randall as a young teen when he was searching and curious on his own. But his otherwise sterling adoptive mother (Mandy Moore) prevented it. For those who haven't watched, the adult and married Randall went on a search without telling her, and found his father in one of the first episodes. The whole gamut of emotions of reunion, anger at his adoptive mother for keeping his father secret, telling the grandkids who this older guy was, the father's late-stage cancer, and his death was played out while we stayed riveted. And wept. One birth father of my acquaintance told me that he watched and cried every week.

At the hospital: The innate need to know who you are, the desire to return 'home'

Lorraine

At the hospital a certain night nurse and I bond over this story: Her husband was a foster child, never adopted so that the parents did not lose the cash payment from the state for him and his sister.* The father wanted to adopt him when the father was dying, but the man said: too late. He was told for years that his his mother had died, but intrepid wife (and my new friend) somehow did not believe the story. She knew her husband needed to have some information to close up the gap in his heart.

Through major sleuthing, and sending flowers to the people whom she knew had the information, my friend was able to learn the mother's name. Now she applied to every single state for the