You may recall back in December when I wrote of a placed nephew who I was unexpectedly reunited with for a brief 5 hour visit. Taken from his divorcing parents (my brother & his ex) he was placed for adoption at age 7, then returned to the foster system where he aged out this last fall. It was a sad thing for me to learn after so many years of wondering about him. Our short visit was enough though for me to begin to see warning signs, and predict some of what we might unfortunately be seeing now that he had returned to our family. I wish I could say that I was wrong, but today I learned the truth of his life situation has become exactly what I had dreaded.

Today my mother let me know some of the outcome after he reunited with his father just before the holiday. It seems that as time went by, the rather one sided expectations he had were being made clear by this young man. He saw not a family who had mourned his loss, or a father who desired to make amends for losing custody of his son, but a meal ticket and a free ride. My brother let him know (after a reasonable period of time) that getting a job was expected. He refused and instead opted to return to his mother in another state. Once there things did not seem to improve much, and instead went downhill rather quickly.

Once back with his birthmother, my nephew requested a car to get to work (a job he had yet to secure.) His mother let him know that if he got work she would be happy to see he got to and from until he could afford his own car. This did not go over so well with him and he again used his ‘change of venue’ method of coping and left her home.

Not long after he left she received a phone call from a disgruntled officer of the law, reporting that he had her son at the station (not clear if he was in some sort of custody or not) and that he (the officer) could not believe what ‘kind’ of a mother she was. Well I assume she was very upset by that remark, and then she learned exactly why the officer thought she was so awful. It seems her ‘son’ told him that he was an enlisted man, due to report to Iraq bound duty the next day, and here his horrible mother had kicked him out to the curb with out even a coat. The officer was a veteran himself (no doubt that is where my nephew used his story to gain the man’s sympathies) and he could not believe that any good mother would leave her son with no coat in such cold weather! And here he was on the brink of some serious service deployment as well.

Well I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when that poor man learned how badly he had been shammed by a very fractured, attachment affected young man who both had a coat, and was not going anywhere near the enlisted forces or duty for our country in Iraq. Heck I was even angry that this kid would stoop that low, and on the backs of real service men and women who are going to Iraq, some not to return! How dare he?

From what I understand my former sister in law let the poor misguided officer know that her son was not going to Iraq, and that he was 18 and responsible for himself and whether or not he brought his coat along where ever he was. Once the sham was ended, so was the phone call. And that is where for now the story ends again, because none of us have seen or heard from him since. Sadly back when we had our little 5 hour reunion, and our empty, one-sided conversation, I could have predicted as much.

What does this have to do with open adoption? Well to me quite a bit. I can’t help but wonder if this kid had never been completely ‘lost’ to our family, and at least had some small amount of positive, ongoing contact with some of us, if things would be different today. Would his sense of self, and his messed up concept of relationships not have turned out to be so warped? That is after all a big part of what I hope my kids will get from openness. I am hoping they will see that they were not discarded or abandoned, and more importantly they will believe it, because it is true. To me it is obvious that this lost nephew learned that there was nothing and no one he could rely on or believe in, so all of those he encounters are lowered to nothing more that target for him to possibly get what he can, and move on if he can’t. There is no relationship for him, because he never learned that people can make mistakes, but still care. Maybe, just maybe a little bit of knowing over the years would have served him as much as it would have us.

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