Image courtesy of http://lavender.luz.com
When Roger and I embarked on the journey of adopting a baby several years ago, everything we “knew” about adoption was from decades past:
- You waited on a long list until the agency matched you with a situation. Top of the list of criteria for the match? Your place in line.
- You tried to make the building of your family as close to “normal” (read: biological) as possible. You didn’t talk much about the adoption, either inside or outside of the family, and you certainly didn’t have any contact with birth parents. The goal was to make it seamless, almost as if adoption were never part of the story.
- As the child grew, you continued not talking about adoption. Surrounding my friends who had been adopted was an air of secrecy. When we did speak of adoption, it was in hushed voices. These friends didn’t know much about their birth families, their birth story, or their origins. And it would hurt their parents too much to wonder too much. So they tried not to.
Nearly 9 years ago, our agency introduced us to this newfangled thing called “open adoption.” Wikipedia, at the time of this writing, says that open adoption simply “means that the natural mother and adopted family know who each other are.”
Wikipedia further explains, “Although open adoptions are thought to be a relatively new phenomenon, in fact most adoptions in the United States were open until the twentieth century.” I had always thought that closed adoptions were the “default setting” of the ages!
Far from being newfangled, it turns out that open adoption had always been the norm, with closed adoptions a 6-decade aberration(anyone else surprised by that?). Adoptions became closed when social pressure mandated that families preserve the myth that they were formed biologically.
Rob and I learned all that we could about open adoption. Over the years, we replaced the myths with these ideas:
- Open Adoption isn’t about waiting passively in line — it’s about who we are. A couple in an unintended pregnancy would make a conscious decision about us parenting their baby. The criteria for their decision would be our values, our bundle of experiences, and our vision for the future — US!
- Why try to deny that our family was built by adoption? Is my ego so fragile that acknowledging the birth mothers of my children takes away from me? Loving and respecting our children’s birth parents is just another way to love and respect our children.
- Walking a fine line between dwelling on adoption it and denying it, we tell our children (now ages 8 and 6) their adoption stories once in awhile. We encourage them to talk with us about it as their cognitive skills grow. I believe that anything kept under a rock can get moldy, and I want their adoption tales to bask in sunshine.
- There are many more benefits to open adoption. Our children have access to their medical histories and to clans who look like them and love them. Also, our children will not have to go through the potential minefields of search and reunion just to get answers to their wonderings.
So to summarize my answer to the question, I would tell myself pre-adoption, “Lori, don’t be scared to open up your heart to this experience.”
There is another answer I would give myself about parenting in open adoption. But that’s for a future roundtable.
Lori Holden blogs at LavenderLuz.com and can be found on Twitter @LavLuz. Her book, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption was written with her daughter’s birth mom and is available in hard cover and Kindle formats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). She’s an award-winning speaker, blogger and author who lives in Denver with her husband and two tweenagers. She appreciates dark chocolate, red wine and children who are asleep by 9 pm.