How We Started

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 is ever shared (no last names, no addresses, no phone numbers that could be linked to a physical address), visits that are supervised by at least one staff member, and progress reports/letters/pictures that are sent according to a fixed schedule. That was fine.

On the day we were placed, we signed a document that contained our “progress report” and visit schedule. We were told that, as it is in most states, it wasn’t legally binding; according to our social worker, it was more of a moral commitment. M, our daughter’s birthmom, asked for 4 visits in the first year, with other years to be worked out later. That was fine too.

The next week, when we took our first letter and picture package into the agency, we had something waiting for us. It was a package from M. Inside the envelope was her graduation announcement, a set of pictures from their hospital stay with pictures of their family… and her full name, address and phone number, along with an invitation to call whenever we liked.

When we called in a couple of weeks, we wound up talking to M’s father, J. That was the start of our relationship with C&J, M’s parents. Over the past 7 years, we’ve seen them far more often than we’ve seen M; which has been her choice and something I might write about later.

The pictures from our daughter’s hospital stay, along with the official pictures of her while she was still in the hospital, are now in a lifebook. They are labeled with names, who they are in relation to our daughter, what day they were taken, etc. For some reason there were a ton of pictures taken during the second day of their hospital stay. It was an incredible, unforeseen gift that would never had happened if our adoption were closed.

Over the years, I have never been sorry that we chose to open up our adoption at M’s invitation. There have been some challenges, especially when our daughter couldn’t understand why she was unable to visit with M when she wanted. But sorry that we did all this? No.

Every open adoption is different. Some families have an easier time with all of the challenges of putting together something new and different more easily than others. There are situations when visits are out of the question for various reasons. Things happen in life that make visits more difficult; divorce, moving, deaths. But every open adoption has one thing in common: the conviction that having their birthfamily be an ongoing part of their lives is in the best interests of a child.

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