The call I made Wednesday was a causal one, “How are your doing? Is everyone ok?” but the outcome was a total mess I did not anticipate. Now with a day or so to calm down, step back and evaluate, I see I have encountered a situation in open adoption that can easily result when some parties have unresolved issues and are also facing new, but similar to the past challenges. My current “problem” also relates to what can go wrong when birth families go on to parent other children, as in how it effects the relationship with the adoptive family.

The person I called was my 4 yr old’s biological great grandmother. We have always had a good and open relationship. We go to her home for family gatherings, she joins us for the same. She has even done babysitting in our home when we were in need. I would say that is close. Right now great grandma is raising my child’s 6 month old biological sibling because their birthmother has abruptly left the picture. Her health is not the best and basically if it fails the baby will be placed in foster care because no one else in the birthfamily has the ability to care for him right now either (although it is clear they do love him).

Why would our family not help out? Well we would, we offered to foster or to babysit, to help with food or clothing needs, even to adopt the baby if it came to that and it was what they desired. Anything to keep the baby from becoming lost in the foster care system, and to their family (and ours) who care about him very much. I was thinking of the babys best interests as well as my own daughter. Never did I think that those offers of assistance would meet with the anger I received. It is sad, but the resistance of great grandma has taken a some unexpected forms, many which came out in our recent phone conversation. During this talk this woman who I considered my family and who I thought had achieved an equal level of acceptance of the open adoption we are involved in said some heavy negatives. First I was told that “Children always belong with their biological family.” This is not what she felt four years ago when her grand daughter was expecting. She knew her grand daughter would be going to jail for several years right after the birth (court hearings were postponed so she could have the baby), and no one else in the family felt able (or in actuality really was able)to care for the coming child. The situation is so similar now, with the exception of adoption. Next I was told that “Adoption is never a good thing.” This is coming from someone who has always talked of how “lucky” our families were to find each other and give this child a more stable future (without her losing her past connections). The real jab for me was one of her final ones before she hung up on me, “You are not her real mother!” Well lets just say if she had not hung up on me, I was ready to on her. This is NOT what I signed up for when I said I wanted to be part of an open adoption.

Actually, looking back I might have been able to predict some of this. Great grandma had a lot of emotional trouble with our daughter’s adoption early on, but she did seem to work well with us to get to a place where she understood (or so we thought) that she had not “lost” her great granddaughter, she had just gained US as extended family. That is what we understood open adoption to be. Then our daughter’s birthmother re-entered the picture and seemed to be putting her life in order...


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Photo Credit- Kate Brooks/Polaris