answer bag—open adoption Q&A

In response to my introduction last week, japatt09 wrote:

Wow but what comes to my mind is the following questions:What if she wants her daugher back, what if she starts to stalk you guys or if she tries to get to involved, or what if your daughter wants to be with her one day? I know these are blunt questions and I dont mean to be rude-its just that I have thought of this method but I had these questions

I was glad to see these questions, because they’re common concerns among people considering how open they’d like a future adoption to be, and they were questions I’d planned to discuss in a future entry. I haven’t done any research to back this up, but I think many—if not most—adoptive parents in open adoption started out with these very questions as pretty big concerns; I know they were big questions in our minds when we first started on this path. So let’s take a look at them one at a time.

1. What if she wants her daughter back?

I don’t worry about this, for a very simple reason: If “wanting� her daughter had been the only consideration, JellyBean’s first mother would be her only mother, and none of us ever would have met. But the fact is that circumstances in D’s life made it impossible for her to parent JellyBean, and it was those circumstances—not a lack of “wanting� her—that led her to make an adoption plan. Those circumstances remain the same whether D has contact with JellyBean or not.

2. What if she starts to stalk you guys or if she tries to get involved?

These are, again, issues that don’t cause me much concern. Regarding the first part of the question: Stalking is abnormal, unstable behaviour, and—contrary to what TV executives seem to think makes for compelling drama—first parents are not typically abnormal, unstable people. They are women (and men) who found themselves unable to parent their child and who made an adoption plan, generally after long and thoughtful deliberation. The reality is that D is no more likely to stalk us than we are to stalk her.

Regarding the second part: D is involved. We want her to be involved. Part of the point of open adoption is that a child’s first parents are involved, in some way, in the child’s life. That said, different people have different ideas about what “involved� means in open adoption, so it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page.

3. What if your daughter wants to be with her one day?

You mean someday when she’s a teenager, if she decides we’re too *insert complaint—and a huge eyeroll—here* and D would be much cooler to live with? Well, that’s just not going to be an option for her—any more than it was an option for me to go live with my friend who had “coolerâ€� parents than my own when I was a teenager. But I have no doubt that someday JellyBean will think George & I are hopelessly clueless and that her life would be so much better/easier/happier/more fun with D. In fact, I think I’ll be a little disappointed if that doesn’t happen at some point, because if it does, it means she’s developed a close relationship with D, that she loves her and trusts her and looks up to her—all things we hope she’ll feel about her first mother as she grows up. One of the beautiful things about open adoption is that it means there isn’t an either/or dichotomy between first parents and adoptive parents—JellyBean doesn’t have to choose between us; we may play different roles in her life, but she gets to be with all of us.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.