this woman’s work

Nat’s mama said:

May 6, 2005 Adoption

The drawback about the birthparent not “moving on” actually worries me. Not because I think the trite expression “moving on” is a good way to describe what happens, but I do think there must be some coming to terms with loss and incorporating the adoption experience into a life story. I have read here and there (books and birth mothers’ sharing) that open adoption can hinder that process for a birth parent.

Here’s the summary of one study that pretty much says that:

Author: Blanton, T. L., and Deschner, J.
Title: “Biological Mother’s Grief: The Postadoptive Experience in Open Versus Confidential Adoption.”
Publishing Information: Child Welfare v 69, n 6 (1990): 525-35.
Subject: Open Adoption
Abstract: The study participants included 59 women who had placed their children for adoption through an agency at least one year before the study — 18 via open adoption and 41 via confidential adoption. The women ranged in age from 16 to 45 years. The participants were overwhelmingly Caucasian. The results of the survey indicate that mothers relinquishing a child in open adoption experience more grief symptoms in the immediate postadoption period than mothers with confidential adoption arrangements, or bereaved parents. The authors caution that all birthmothers in this survey were women who had experienced adoption through agency programs and the results may not be generalized to a broader population of birthmothers.

There are more studies about openness at the Adoption Institute web site.

I think the difficulty lies in understanding when grief and bereavement are helpful and when they are not. Is it good to have more grief symptoms? Does it indicate more pain or less denial? I don’t know — I really don’t. I don’t know if J would be better off just getting letters and photos once a month. I don’t even know if J knows for certain because it’s so much supposing.

What I always find challenging about adoption is that there aren’t any real absolute truths. Most of our adoption experiences — as adoptive parents, as adoptees, as birth parents — are dictated by social constructs about what it means to be a family. What I see for us is that the adults in our triad are trying to make sense of the ways that we are becoming kin when there really isn’t social room for this kind of kin-making. We’re kind of caught bouncing from the romantic ideal of openness to the cultural assumptions we all have about adoption, which say that we all need to move on.

There was another study that I found very very moving. (I had to get the full text of this one on Ebsco.) The title is: BIRTHMOTHER PERCEPTIONS OF THE PSYCHOLOGICALLY PRESENT ADOPTED CHILD: ADOPTION OPENNESS AND BOUNDARY AMBIGUITY. I’m going to quote a bunch from it so I’m putting it below the cut.

The belief systems behind confidential adoptions took the “happily-ever-after” stance and assumed, among other things, that birthmothers who made an adoption plan for their child “put the experience behind them” and moved on with their lives (Brodzinsky, 1990, p. 295). However, Lifton (1977) described adoption as being like an amputation for the birthmother due to the child’s being psychologically connected to her. Sorosky, Baran, and Pannor (1978) also noted that the loss and grief of birthparents does not disappear. Other practitioners also found that birthmothers’ pain did not appear to go away, and in fact the need for information remained constant or increased (Chapman, Dorner, Silber, & Winterberg, 1986). Sachdev (1989), in a research study examining attitudes of birthmothers involved in the unsealing of adoption records, reported that the majority of the birthmothers reported having frequently thought of the child and that “almost all biological mothers had vivid memories of the relinquished children and often wondered what had become of them… more significantly, their interest in the well-being of the relinquished children is reflected in their heightened concern for the health and development of the children” (p. 498).

…
There have been no studies of the boundary ambiguity which take the perspective of the birthmother. In this article, we report the results of an initial study designed to examine boundary ambiguity related to the birthmother’s perceptions of the physical and psychological presence and absence of the adopted child, across different types of adoption openness. Questions we wanted to answer included: Is the adopted child on the birthmother’s heart or mind differently according to level of adoption openness? If so, what is the nature of the child’s psychological presence in her life in different levels of openness? How does it manifest itself?
…
Examination of the interview transcripts produced clear evidence that adopted children are psychologically present to their birthmothers, not only on special occasions but also as the birthmother goes about her routine, day-to-day life. The breadth of psychological presence is illustrated in this passage from one interview:

Special occasions, her birthday, a lot of memories come back on that day… I look at the clock and I think, ‘well, it’s [certain time] o’clock and I was in heavy labor,’ and ‘[certain time] o’clock she was born,’ and it’s weird because every year, I tend to look at the clock at that time. It’s like all of a sudden I’m looking up at the clock and it’s like, well, this is the time… Christmas and Thanksgiving I think about who’s with the [adopted] family, and I close my eyes and envision grandparents and the new parents and siblings, what everybody looks like. This fall, she started kindergarten and that was…she’s got new school shoes, and she’s got a lunchbox. But those are positive feelings and there’s probably not a day or week that goes by that I don’t think about her.
…
The current trend in domestic adoption practice is toward greater openness, but it is likely that confidential and mediated arrangements will continue to exist, as well. For this reason, it remains important for adoption professionals to incorporate this new knowledge into pre-and post-adoption educational services, regardless of the level of openness selected. This study does not measure adaptation per se, but it does demonstrate that the child remains psychologically present regardless of level of openness, and that the degree to which this occurs falls in a fairly narrow range. The results inform many of the questions that have been raised about adoption openness; that is, that contact with the adopted child will somehow inhibit the birthmother’s ability to forget and move on with her life. Although psychological presence is more positive in fully-disclosed adoptions, it is not markedly negative in other levels of openness. For this reason, the decision-making process regarding choice of openness level needs to take into account many other factors. We do not yet know what all those factors are, and it is likely that there is not a single level of adoption openness best for every birthmother (Grotevant & McRoy, 1998). Therefore, when practitioners work with birthmothers, they can normalize her experience by helping her understand that there will be times when the adopted child is in her heart and on her mind, and that these occasions may produce a variety of emotions. Further, they can help her create a perspective that views psychological presence as a healthy, adaptive response, and anticipate constructive thought patterns and behaviors to manage these situations.

See, I wonder if our thoughts about how open adoption might hinder a woman from moving to the next step in her life are so steeped in our sociological presumptions that we don’t really know how to support someone who is not moving on in a prescribed way. I think that only each individual birth mother can really know whether openness is a help or a hindrance but I do wonder how it might be if there was a lot of rallying support for a woman who has placed her child for adoption. You know, if people honored her need to grieve but also her need to feel her child still present in her life.

I wrote a long time ago about the birth mothers at shelter with the keychains with their children’s pictures attached. And I thought they were being … obstinate, I guess. So many of us say to someone who is hurting, “It’s time to put aside your widow’s weeds” and we’re especially prone to do that when someone is carrying grief that we feel is of their own making. (As an aside, I just had to deal with someone in my work who told a woman who had miscarried that she was being too “negative” and since she’d miscarried early, it wasn’t like a real baby at all. Same thing, to my mind.) But what if we as a culture were able to honor the grief of women who placed their children for adoption. Would they then be able to both hold their child in their minds and move on? What if they weren’t mutually exclusive? I mean, is it possible that openness is a setback because we still don’t know what a birth mother is if she’s not mothering?

And of course, birth mothers internalize all of our assumptions about adoption and about birth motherhood and so I am sure that they feel, too, that “moving on” is done a specific way and have expectations about how their experiences should be. That’s not to say that their expectations aren’t valid only that we’re all under the thumb of our sociological precepts.

I do like that the study says explicitly that “the decision-making process regarding choice of openness level needs to take into account many other factors. We do not yet know what all those factors are, and it is likely that there is not a single level of adoption openness best for every birthmother”. Forcing openness on a birth mother is just as wrong as forcing her into a closed adoption. Then again, I feel that the possibility of adoption is always a good one because barring rare circumstances, some measure of openness is good for kids.

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