Comments on: No such thing as closed

By: wavybrains

wavybrains — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:43:10 +0000

Oh. I also wanted to say that my Mother frequently sends thick packets of strange articles and clippings. She sends packages of dollar store doo-dads that we absolutely don’t need or want. We have absolutely no taste in common. This is a common ailment on her side of the family, and at x-mas time, we get many strange boxes filled with odds and ends. I have no doubt that this will continue when we have kids and only get worse. Am I going to mark the boxes return to sender just because it is stuff I wouldn’t buy? Clutter I really don’t need? Cheap n Trashy n hardly educational? No. I want to teach my children what I have learned–a gift is a gift because it comes from the heart, not because it is expensive or exactly what we would have picked out. You write your thank-you’s, pick something true and nice to say about the gift or effort, then decide if an item is going to be kept, sent to bless a donation box, or re-gifted to someone who can use it more. I have heard of adoptive parents refusing gifts because they were cheap or cheesy or age inappropriate. To me, this is simply rude behavior. How hard is it to say thank you and encourage ongoing communication? Perhaps dealing with my wacky family has uniquely prepared me for this, but you simply can’t control every aspect of your kid’s environment. Age innappropriate toys can be stored, cards can be saved, and a few extra pieces of treasured clutter are hardly going to ruin my house. When the kids reach adulthood, they can decide what to keep and what not.

By: wavybrains

wavybrains — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:30:24 +0000

I wrote on Kim.Kim’s post on her daughter’s B-day too. It and the subsequent posts were achingly beautiful. I just don’t understand the fear that drives so many people. What Tatajana writes makes me so sad–”to loose the privelege of continuing to send gifts.” HOW could this EVER be a bad thing. A privelege to be revoked? If any family memember, ours or birth, wants to send gifts, then by all means, send on the swag, pictures, and cards. This is not emotional anthrax in the mail, just gifts. You can make a huge deal out of it, or you can simply say “look what came today! Isn’t it lovely?” If long-lost Aunt Millie sent a card, would these people send it back to avoid “confusion”? I also simply don’t understand making tons of promises that are not kept. DH and I are actually slowing our process down so that we have plenty of time to learn as much as we can and to get on the same page re openness. If we promise something, we are going to follow-through on it, so we feel it is really up to us to spend the time right now deciding what our joint level of comfort is, how much we can promise, and how we will handle conflicts both between us, and with the first family. We want our role as primary parents to be absolutely clear, but to me, I don’t see why, if proper boundary setting is used, that desire would exclude an open adoption. There has to be a middle ground between unlimited access and no access and that is what we are trying to find as we stumble through this process.

By: Tatjana

Tatjana — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:53:35 +0000

Oh, the first couple of years after my niece “disappeared” were *awful*! I’d scrutinise the face of every girl her age - I’d last seen her just before her second birthday, so this is probably different from at-birth adoptions. I know that her aparents were terribly anxious about being “found out” and decided to ignore our repeated questions about receiving updated photos forever.
The guessing, the subterfuge, it was awful. A motorbiking friend of my niece’s first foster family saw her once after she switched placements, he was sure about it because she had called out his name (all motorbikers being referred to by his name at the time).
He recognised the aparents as people his parents knew. So technically we could find out where she was. We never dared to, though, for fear of losing the privilege to continue sending gifts …

By: kim.kim

kim.kim — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 07:21:40 +0000

I think it also shows that there is nothing to be afraid of. She knew where her daughter was but she didn’t go running in and snatch her back. We love our children, we wouldn’t disrupt their lives. We just want to know how they are doing and to be able to let them see that we love them.

By: Lisa V

Lisa V — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 01:50:14 +0000

When Apple was 8 or 9 we saw a woman that looked just like her in the grocery store. She looked more like her than Noelle. Even Mallory noticed. If we didn’t have an open adoption, moments like that would have made me weak in the knees. It’s hard to trust something or someone you don’t know. I think both sets of parents in closed adoption must live with a “what if” kind of thing, constantly looking over their shoulders.