Open Adoption

This latest OAB Roundtable prompt was a tricky one. It’s all about privacy vs. blogging your heart out (so to speak): This round’s topic was suggested by adoptive parent blogger Rebecca: privacy, blogging and open adoption. Figuring out boundaries is difficult when you write about your personal life. Any on-blog mention of family, friends or co-workers risks invading their privacy. Bloggers who write about or post pictures of their children are accused of exploitation. Where is the line between your own experience and other people’s personal lives? What information is yours to share and what rightfully belongs to someone else? Add the overlapping relationships of open adoption to the mix and you’ve got yourself a potential ethical and personal mess. And… [more]

Loss is a part of any adoption. A first parent's loss of their child; an adoptee's loss of their biological parents and the life that they could have had versus the life they currently lead; and in a much more minor way, an adoptive parent's loss of the biological child they did not have. In an open adoption, those losses are much more stark, much more eaisly recognizable. Not that they're any easier to talk about. Once things are out in the open, it's at least possible to deal with reality rather than what might be, what could be - and not what's real. In our case, we've dealt with loss in many different ways, all of us. M had, I think, the most difficult time… [more]

When people talk about an adoption being open, there are certain things people expect when they hear that phrase "open adoption". Pictures and letters at least once a year, probably, but certainly more than that. Regular visits. Frequent phone calls, letters, packages from both birth and adoptive families. From the very beginning. Our adoption hasn't been that way. What our agency called "open adoption" well...wasn't. No identifying information was to be shared; and if it was, the agency officially didn't want to know about it. When visits happened, they were to be in a neutral location with a social worker or other moderator present. We were told that other adoptive families used cell phone numbers for contact, because cell phone numbers aren't associated… [more]

This is (a very belated) part of the first Adoption Carnival, hosted at Grown in My Heart. It's a pretty big topic: What did people forget to tell you about adoption? What did they omit or conveniently not tell you before you adopted or relinquished your child? There are so many things, but I'll try to keep them at 10.

• I wish that someone had told me how frightened I would feel about having a brand new baby at home. Every other mother I knew seemed so at ease and happy. I just figured that I was going to be a terrible mother from the get-go; that all my IF problems and miscarriages meant that I was going to be a horrible mother.
• I wish someone had warned me

Every adoption, and certainly every open adoption, has its challenges. Sometimes it is a challenge adjusting to the idea of growing your family larger than you had ever expected. Sometimes it is the challenges that come from every adoption, mainly the idea of adjusting to a new child in the family. And sometimes those challenges come from extended family. Not many people are comfortable with the idea of adoption in general. Our society is obsessed with the idea that "blood makes a family", and the stereotypes that we all know and love that are associated with adoption and adoptive families certainly bear that out. Open adoption is even harder in a lot of ways. The mere idea that someone could have, and openly acknowledge, having… [more]

It's been a rough, rough summer at our house. One of the most difficult days happened not that long ago. In fact, it's been a couple of weeks at least. Our family's been struggling with how to deal with it ever since. After being out of work for over two months this summer, my husband finally got a job offer. The bad news was that we would have to move fairly soon. We have since worked out the details, and won't be moving for the foreseeable future, but we didn't know that at the time. The hardest part was gearing up to tell School Girl's birth family. We don't see her birthmother all that often, but we do stay in touch with her and… [more]

The next Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable is another tough one. It's about the huge minefield some of us like to call Naming Your Child. As the social worker conducting our pre-adoption classes said, "Naming is claiming." Certainly one of the ways that we say "this is my child" is to give them their name. In a lot of cases, naming is changing. Obscuring. Or not. Some families choose to keep their child's name as it was at birth. Dawn has written eloquently about their family's decision to keep the name her daughter's birthmother gave her. Some people change it completely. I do know of at least one older child who requested to have a name change when he was adopted "because… [more]

NOTE: Just as a point of reference: My daughter, School Girl, has two families all mixed together. The members of her birth/first family are M, her birthmother, S, her birthfather, and C & J, M's parents and School Girl's birthgrandparents. Neither S nor S's family are currently in contact with us at this time. For the Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable #5, Heather picked another tough question: How has open adoption changed you? In what ways are you different because the presence of open adoption in your life? I should say from the outset that ours hasn't been the one-big-happy-family open adoption. We have had contact with School Girl's father's family exactly 3 times in the past 7 years; 2 brief visits with S himself and 1 with School… [more]

I thought I'd write a bit today about how our open adoption started. It didn't start quite as open as others' adoptions have, but it's gradually gotten more so with time. It's also involved our daughter's birthmom's parents as well. When we signed up with our agency, we were told that we'd have an "open adoption", as all of their adoptions were "open". Yes, there's a reason I put that in quotation marks... Open adoptions can be many different things, depending on the people involved. It can mean anything from "we've met our child's birthfamily" to "we send letters and pictures every year" to annual or semi-annual visits. What our agency considered an open adoption many people would consider to be semi-open: no identifying information… [more]

Good morning! My name is Karen, and I'm one of the new bloggers at AdoptionBlogs.com. I'll be writing about open adoption and domestic infant adoption - specifically our adoption, but not only our experiences. First, though, a little bit about me and my family. My husband and I started looking at adoption after we had struggled with primary infertility. He had always talked about adopting, but then wanted to wait "until we had tried everything else". So we did. Just about everything else short of IVF. We had also talked about adopting an older child or a child with medical needs (I have some special ed. teaching credits, but also have been a bit reluctant to "bring my work home"). When we finally… [more]