Child's Birthparents

My wife and I have two beautiful children, both of which came to us through the miracle of adoption. What a blessing. What a joy. Still, though, it’s been quite the bumpy road to get to where we are now. One of the toughest things we’ve had to deal with was the feeling of guilt and debt. I mean, our children’s birth parents gave us the most wonderful gift—the gift of parenthood—which came through a big sacrifice on their part. Our adoptions are very open and we’ve communicated freely and often all along the journey, which means that we saw the heartbreak in their eyes when they made the hard decisions. Even though they had their minds made up and they had their… [more]

Well before my daughters reached the age of reason (which I mark as that Easter Sunday they refused to wear those adorable matching dresses) their adoptions were a regular part of the daily conversation in our kitchen, right up there with nail polish and ponies and the tooth fairy.  Lucky for us, in our community they were surrounded by children from all sorts of complex, un-matching, created families.  Many of their friends are also adopted.  They attended adopted family picnics at their elementary school.   Now in their twenties, they are in the vanguard of the new generation of adoptees who have grown up with openness-in which adoption is definitely NOT a family secret. Both girls came into my life as infants, both… [more]

I read a lot of blog posts. I enjoy blog hopping, especially with different adoption blogs. I don’t always agree with what I read, so it’s nice to see the other side of people’s opinions, especially from people somewhere else in the adoption triad. I read one the other day that I just can’t seem to shake out of my head. It was from a birthmother who had placed a child for adoption a number of years earlier. Her adoption was a closed adoption and she sort of “moved on” after placement, I guess. I don’t really know. Something brought her interest back into the adoption world and when she went blog hopping, just like I like to do, she encountered the term “birthmother” for the first time. I’m not really… [more]

I was anything but excited my when my phone beeped to tell me I had a text message. It’s not that I didn’t like getting text messages from my wife- to the contrary. In fact, I was really looking forward to hearing updates about what was going on at the hospital, but her message rattled me a little bit. “The birthfather is here. Don’t worry, he’s really easy to talk to and you’ll like him,” her text said. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting him. Of course, he had a right to be at the hospital. After all, his daughter was the one being born that day. If anything, I was the one who didn’t have any right to be there. So I sat at work all morning that day thinking about the… [more]

“No, actually,” she said. “That’s the only thing that’s been going right.” The birthmother from our second adoption was talking to her caseworker recently and told her that everything in her life was going crazy. “A lot of case workers have to work out the issues with the adoptive couple,” her caseworker told her. “Don’t worry, you guys will get it figured out.” And that’s when she said that we were the only thing going right at the time. We appreciated that more than she knows- knowing that she thinks we were a little ray of sunshine in her cloudy days. That was a few months ago that she told us that, and now that placement is a little further into our past, her days have been a lot brighter and she has been… [more]

I received an email from a reader recently, a birthmother who was frustrated with trying to build a relationship with her now grown child. She mentioned feeling that the adoptive mother was being overprotective and that this was somehow slowing down the process. She asked what she could do to keep things moving towards a more open relationship with her children. I think my answer surprised her. I told her to be grateful for the overprotective mother. In this particular case, the children had been in the social system a couple of years before being placed with the adoptive family. How lucky for those children to now be in the care of someone who is willing to defend them, protect them, and advocate… [more]

“I’m going to vote for him because he reaches across the aisle,” some people say. I hate politics. I hate it but I can’t help but follow it. Following politics is one of those chores that I do because it’s my civic duty, it’s what I think everyone should do, it’s yada yada yada. I ask myself, “What would it be like if politicians really had the public’s best interest in mind?” I mean, I think they want to do the right thing, but when push comes to shove their first priority seems to protect their career and their second is to protect their self interest groups. Instead, the laws and regulations that get passed all depend on what party is in charge-… [more]

I peel the top half of a banana and hold it out to my little boy. The little man, who is about two months shy of his second birthday, claps his hands and takes it from me with a smile. He bites off the top inch then holds it out for me to take a bite. I tell him that I don’t want any, so he chomps off another piece and chews on it. He makes his way over to his baby sister, lying on a blanket, and holds the banana out for her to take a bite. Of course, Baby Sister doesn’t even have teeth, nor has she started on solid foods, so she just looks up at him… [more]

What determines success in adoption? Is it when the adoptive families feel they’ve forged a new family with tight bonds and lasting love? Is it when a birthmother can honestly say she has no regrets? Or is it when an adoptee grows up to be a self-confident person, secure in their knowledge of being adopted and secure in their feelings of being loved? How an adoptee feels regarding their adoption is almost completely dependant on the adoptive parents and birthparents that enter the agreement in the first place. It is because of this that I believe that success is best measured by the adoptee’s point of view. As a birthmother, I made my choice based on loving my child and wanting to choose what… [more]

This post is an addition to my last post entitled "Hook Me Up To Some Electrodes, I'm ready for adoption..." Our second adoption was night and day different from our first adoption when it came to the birthfathers. In our first adoption, he did nothing but cause trouble. He paid no attention at all to the baby that was about to be born all through the pregnancy, and then after we’d had the baby in our home for a month, he decided to cause a ruckus. We later found out that the ruckus began after his mom found out that he’d fathered a child. Anyway, when our second adoption rolled around, Caleb, the birthfather, did want to be part of things. Let… [more]