Understanding Open Adoption

Whenever life takes a turn in some new direction, my response tends to be to throw myself headfirst into training for or learning about the new direction.  I submerge myself in new ideas, new ways of thinking and new practices and it sometimes borders on obsessive.  Adoption has been no different for me.  I have been reading and reading and reading and reading.  I’ve read books (and reviewed some on this blog), I’ve read blogs (a few are in my sidebar.  I”ll probably add more as time goes on), I’ve read handouts from my agencies, I’ve read through many entire threads on my placement agency’s forum, and I’ve read magazine articles.  I’ve learned so very much in the past few months from all of my reading.  It’s really been a huge time of growth for me.  I’ve tried to pass along some of the things I’ve learned here on this blog for you, my readers, but I’m pretty sure that most of you are not craving boatloads of  information on this topic the same way that I am, so I’ve tried to cull out only the most interesting, most educational tidbits to share with you.  And that’s what I’m bringing to you today.  I am still in the middle of reading one of the most extremely helpful books that I’ve encountered so far on the topic of open adoption.  It’s called The Open Adoption Experience by Lois Ruskai Melina and Sharon Kaplan Roszia and is the first book that I’ve read and thought that I should OWN for my own personal book collection.  If you REALLY want to know what this process is about–what it looks like from the adoptive parent side, what it looks like from the birthparent side, what it looks like on the day the baby is born, what it looks like when they’re teenagers, etc.–I highly recommend reading this entire book.  If you don’t really need to know that much information, but you still are curious about what “open adoption” really means and why I’m feeling so excited about it, then I recommend reading chapter 2 of this book.  It’s title is the same as this post and is only about 20 pages long and it is the best argument for open adoption that I’ve read so far.  Here are a few teaser excerpts:

“If you have reservations about open adoption, you are not alone.  Furthermore, your concerns are normal, especially since you have grown up believing adoption should be confidential.  Coming around to the benefits of open adoption requires an emotional change–not just a change in your thinking… [T]hrough open adoption you can gradually gain a powerful sense of comfort.  It is a feeling of relief that comes from grieving for the losses you have experienced as well as for those you are afraid you may experience, and from accepting that these losses are what make adoption different from other ways of forming families.”

They go on to briefly list all of the different fears that both birth and adoptive parents bring to the adoption relationship and then point out,

“Many of these fears are present in confidential [“closed”] adoptions, too.  But such worries can be suppressed more easily in confidential adoption because the birth parents are not physically present, and the risk therefore seems farther away.  In fact, the failure to directly confront the source of one’s fears often intensifies these feelings.  They become an invisible threat that is frightening.

“In open adoption, the discomfort level these fears create is almost impossible to ignore.  As a result, worries can be dealt with at the start and are not allowed to simmer and build.”

The chapter then goes on to elaborate on pretty much all of the big fears that people have when entering into an adoption situation and then either debunk the fear or say why facing the fear openly and honestly is more healthy for EVERYONE in the long run.

For me, the biggest fear used to be that the birthmother would change her mind.  After all of the reading I’ve done recently, that fear no longer has teeth.  It’s not that I think it won’t happen (it very well could!), or that I don’t think it would be extremely emotionally painful (it would!) but I have a better understanding of what a birthparent goes through when they make this enormous decision and the lifelong ramifications it can have on their lives.  I now realize that if we’ve developed enough of a relationship with the birthmother before the baby arrives, it will probably be very painful for us to witness her make this final decision.   I think the book even describes this shared emotional pain as being an adoptive parents “labor pains” and it points out that walking this path will lay a foundation for the future when we will be able to tell our child about how much his/her first mother loved her/him because we have seen how difficult this decision was, but–in the end–how she made the decision because she truly believed that it was in the child’s best interest.  But in order for her to have made that thoughtful decision, she needs to have FULLY explored the possibility of parenting her child.  If she has doubts when she signs the adoption papers, they will likely turn to regret later on and that’s not good.  So instead of being afraid of my birthparent re-considering her options, I actually WANT her to fully consider parenting her child and all of the ramifications of both decisions so that she can be absolutely certain that this is the right path for her and her child.

(Did that paragraph make sense to you?  It’s late at night as I type this, and I feel like I’ve maybe left out a lot of background knowledge, so if this confuses you, or if it brings up questions or strong reactions, please tell me in the Comments section and I’ll try to clarify.)

What fears do you have about adoption?  Even if you yourself are not adopting, what fears do you have for us?  Or just in general about adoption?