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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 Girl’s aunt (S’s baby sister). There are good sound reasons why I’m…reluctant to have S in our lives at all at present. I’m hoping that he will be able to have contact, safely, with her in the future. We have had sporadic contact with M in the past 7 years; in fact, the only people who we have had ongoing contact with have been M’s parents; as in visits 3-4 times a year, letters, presents, pictures and phone calls.
When my husband and I first got married, it was the most important thing in the world for me to be pregnant. Because then I would be a mother. A real mother, one who gives birth to and raises a child with a partner – only theirs and theirs alone. Certainly sharing a child with someone outside of our little family was the farthest thing from my mind.
Adoption, specifically open adoption, helped me to let go of that fantasy. The truth is, even people who are biological parents have to share their child with a lot of others – grandparents, other relatives, teachers, friends – and may or may not give that a second thought. It’s been interesting, and joyful, and in some cases heartbreaking to share School Girl with C & J, and to a lesser extent with M & S. In a lot of ways, it’s been easier to share her with her birthfamily than with many members of our “own” family. For one thing, we have more in common with them, particularly with C & J.
The idea that a child is “my own” is something that was easier to let go. Just because a child is born to you doesn’t mean you have anything in common. It’s been easier raising School Girl in that regard; she is far more outgoing than either my husband or I am, but at the same time far more shy around adults she doesn’t know. She excels at math and reading; my husband and I can barely balance the checkbook between the two of us, but love to read. We love science, science fiction and various odd and assorted geeky things; so far, School Girl is a complete and utter Girly Girl, without the slightest interest in geek things. Well, with a couple of major exceptions… She is both like and unlike M; without getting to know her and her family, we wouldn’t have seen any of that. We have never expected her to be a “mini-me”, and having M and her family in our lives have helped us see where she gets a lot of her personality and interests. It has made things easier in a lot of ways. If someone gives birth to a child that’s unlike them, it’s tough to pick up the phone, say “Hey, School Girl’s doing this, this and this – does that sound familiar to you? Did M ever do that when she was School Girl’s age? What did you do?”
In short, she is not our child – the product of me and my husband – but our child – the product of at least 6 or 7 different people, some of whom we will never meet. And that, in my mind, isn’t such a bad thing at all.
