If you read the title, you might be thinking I am really confused. How in the world can choosing an open adoption relationship be a way that adoptive parents retain power and control? Most people feel that adoptive parents are actually surrendering so much of their control when they allow birthparents into their lives on a daily basis. I admit at times I feel like I have less control over my life than I might if birthfamily were not so intensely involved, but then I heard something crazy, on a t.v. show, and I began to look a bit closer at my motivations regarding openness.

The show was “Brothers and Sisters”, and honestly I never watch it, but it was my background noise tonight as I was attempting to clean up my room (and drown out the “I don’t wanna got to bed” screaming coming middle child’s room.) For what I could make of the plot, the mother (Sally Fields) discovered that her husband had fathered a daughter during a brief affair, and she wanted to invite the now grown girl over for dinner, and to meet the siblings, her own children.

During a conversation with daughter (Calista Flockhart) the two argue about the merits of introducing this girl, who they basically grew up never knowing about, into their adult lives now. After all, they share no history of growing up, no true sibling bond from a relationship standpoint, nothing but a bit of biological kinship. The daughter does not see having this biological stranger becoming involved in their nuclear family as something her mother really honestly wants either. She even suggests that the introductory dinner is her mothers way of controlling the uncontrollable. She believes her mother might be trying to bring this girl into the circle of their family, in order to judge what she is about, and to control how her own children react to this stranger. I know this show was not adoption based, but the concept of creating a relationship based on a DNA connection alone, and perhaps controlling it, as expressed in this episode, can be strikingly similar to open adoption.

I found myself thinking about how I might have made the decision toward open adoption arrangements for our children, more with my own control in mind than preserving any connection (which really only existed by genetics, since these children know us as their parents and family.) Was I making a plan for openness and contact in order to keep my children connected to birthfamily (people they barely knew), or in order for me to run possible damage control?

I admit that knowing who someone is, what they may be about, makes it much easier to decide if you should expect any issues down the road. Better perhaps than going along with an unknown birthparent in the recesses of your mind, someday to then show up in the flesh, and enter into an unpredictable (uncontrollable) new relationship with your grown child? Yes I am beginning to see how my opting for openness might have a lot more to do with my keeping the control, than it might be about my giving this control away.

I have believed that I simply wanted to help my children preserve a connection to their roots, by an open relationship with their birthfamily. Now I wonder if I am simply trying to gage what they (birthfamily) are about, and direct my children in how I would prefer to see them deal with those relationships.

This is something I definitely did not consciously set out to do, but I do believe I will have to think about the possibility in more detail. It makes me really begin to question why I am initiating open adoption for my children. Is it because I truly feel that they will benefit, or has it something more to do with my own need to control?

“Family Preservation” - Another Meaning

Open Adoption Spares Later Anguish?

Open Adoption - A Pattern For Disaster?