A Surprise, and the Thoughts It Inspired about Communication in an OA Relationship

If you read this blog regularly, you might have noticed a pretty big gap in time between my last two entries. The reason for my hiatus is a happy one: On February 7, George and I welcomed our second child—a gorgeous baby boy who hasn’t yet been given a super-snazzy nickname like JellyBean, but who I’ll refer to here as “Little Guy” for the time being.

Little Guy is JellyBean’s biological brother, and his arrival took us completely by surprise. The combination of these two facts has elicited a lot of questions from—well, from just about everyone who knows that JellyBean’s adoption is open. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself having the same conversation over and over again:

“I thought you talked to JellyBean’s first mother quite a bit.”

“I do.”

“And she never told you she was pregnant?”

“She didn’t.”

“Don’t you think that’s . . . weird?”

“Not really.”

And the thing is, I don’t think it’s particularly weird. Because, to be perfectly honest, it simply wasn’t any of our business until D decided to share it with us.

Communication in an open adoption relationship—especially early on—is a strange thing. All at once you become very closely enmeshed with another person (or people, if both first parents and/or other members of their families are involved) whom you don’t really know very well. You share a child in common—you have different roles in the child’s life, for sure, but you’re intimately bonded by your common love for that child—but you’re really at the tenuous beginnings of what you hope will become a close lifelong relationship. In many ways you feel like family, but in a practical sense you start out as acquaintances working their way toward friendship.

So you share some things about your life that you might share only with those closest to you. Other things you keep to yourself, for any of a number of reasons—maybe you don’t yet feel close enough to the other, or you’re afraid of how it will be received, or it just seems like a silly or unimportant thing to share. Sometimes you share things you later wish you hadn’t; sometimes you keep to yourself things you later wish you had shared. And when you think about it, this isn’t really all that different from the beginning of any other friendship: finding commonality, getting to know each other, talking about deep things and shallow things—but not necessarily about all things.

The fact is that in an open adoption relationship—as in any relationship—each person gets to decide what parts of his or her life to share with the other. Sometimes you share big things and keep small things to yourself; sometimes it is the reverse—but always, you share only what you are comfortable sharing.

I don’t know precisely why D kept the news of her pregnancy to herself; I haven’t asked her because (and you might sense a theme here) it’s none of my business unless she chooses to share it with me. I think I understand why, based on conversations we’ve had since, but at the end of the day what is important is this: She had her reasons, and that’s a good enough reason for me.

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