“I’m adopted and I think open adoption…”
One of my best friends is adopted and I always wondered if all this talk about Madison’s open adoption bothered him. We don’t see each other much (he lives in another state now) but when he’s in town we always catch up and he was supportive during our adoption process. Recently I asked him if it bothered him that Madison has an open adoption; if it reminded him of what he had lost in his closed adoption.
My friend toyed with the idea of searching when he was in college. He was loosely involved in Bastard Nation and that’s how I first learned that adoptees had fewer rights than not adopted persons. But he ultimately decided not to search in part because it would break his mom’s heart and in part because he’s afraid that he might not like them (his first parents) and then what would he do?
“So,” I asked him, “Does seeing what Madison has make you angry because you didn’t have it?” And what he said surprised me (but probably won’t surprise some of you). He said, “I’m so glad your adoption is working out but to tell you the truth, I think it’s weird and I wonder if it’s healthy.”
Sometimes I hear from hopeful adoptive parents who say that they have heard this from friends and family who have closed adoptions and that this is part of what convinces them to distrust open adoptions. I wanted to address it here and talk about why all adoptee experiences matter and how they are true and valid but how an adoptee whose adoption was closed does not necessarily have a better understanding of open adoption than do the rest of us.
See, here’s the thing. Adoptees for the most part grow up in the same adoption-positive/adoption-phobic world that the rest of us do. Many adoptees internalize the same ideas about how adoptees are “saved” from bad parents by good parents and how adoptees should be “grateful” and how it’s best to let the past be the past and move on. They might also internalize ideas about how adoptees are “less than” and how they are substitutes for “real” children (children of “your own”). But while we non-adoptees may grow up thinking or believing this without any real consequences, adoptees who internalize these negatives about adoption do so at huge emotional cost. If you have been told that there is one way to think about your life and that you will risk your most basic connections to your family if you think about it another way, you will be well-convinced that it’s best to let sleeping dog lies. If you are afraid that your mother will stop loving you if you change your mind or heck, even speak it, that will be a pretty good reason to leave things as they are.
My friend is one of the smartest, strongest, most successful people I know and when he says he would not have wanted an open adoption, I believe him but I also think it’s a question that says more about him and his adoption in particular than it does about adoption in general.
I also sometimes hear this from adoptees in reunion. There is an adoptee response to a discussion about openness on someone else’s (private) blog where she said (I’m paraphrasing) Knowing my birth mother is complicated enough for me as an adult and I can’t imagine visiting that on a child.
But what she’s forgetting is that reunion is indeed complicated but in an open adoption, there is no need for reunion and that’s far less complicated. Making sense of blood family relationships in adoption is something that happens more organically if there is contact between the child and that family from the get-go. There isn’t the anticipation, anxiety, build-up or fall down of reunion. They already make sense to each other.
Something else that I think is huge in open adoption is that the adults are forced to work out a bunch of their own anxieties and fears while the child is still young enough to be less aware of the confusion. Like I said in my last post, the awkwardness of us all going out together and figuring out our roles happened when Madison was an infant. I gotta think that’s easier on her than having to deal with it in her twenties.
I asked Sharon Kaplan about adoptees in closed adoptions suspecting the validity of open adoption and she said that we’re asking adoptees to weigh on in something they can’t even imagine. “It’s going to feel really foreign,” she said. “And it can feel like a threat to their identity.” This makes sense to me. If all your life you’ve been told (or tried to convince yourself) that your first family didn’t matter and you were better off without them, it must be very scary to look at open adoption and consider how your life might have been different if you’d had access to openness.
Anyway, I hang my hat on these reports and anxiously await the next wave of the study (where they will be looking at young adult adoptees in open adoption).
Noelle is an adoptee, her experience in a closed adoption is precisely why she chose an open adoption. She never wanted her child thinking she didn’t love her. She reunited with her birth/first parents two years after Apple. She just really hasn’t emotionally connected with her first parents. They are basically down to Christmas card pleasantries. She really thinks it’s because they had no connection to each other for 22 years and it was too hard to build because of differing expectations when they found each other. She has said to me this has more than solidified her thoughts that open adoption was the right choice for Apple.
This post and the one below…
I wanted to say that you and Jessica might as well be lesbian moms, because your family is certainly queer (in the best sense of the word). All this “confusing to a child” talk is really similar to what same-sex parents get from critics. But the child is not the one confused, the adults raising that concern are.
Family is an invented social construct. Presented in an organic way to a child it will make perfect sense. Two mommies, two daddies, three mommies, bio and non-bio parents, blah, blah, blah.
But some people just really can’t wrap their heads around either the idea that family is a construct or the idea that a child can feel comfortable and safely loved by pretty much anyone who makes and keeps a commitment to that child.
I think it’s that first step of family as construct we need to work on first. Help people see the way the post-war nuclear family is not “natural” and then open up their minds to other models.
It’s not so much Nat being confused about anything in her family that worries me. What worries me is the burden Nat might feel to constantly be explaining her family to people who just don’t–and quite possibly never will–get it.
My daughter K has an open adoption with her birth mom and we see her about every two weeks! K doesn’t understand who this person is yet, (my daughter is only three), but so far it feels healthy for all of us. I’m also grateful that no matter what happens in the future, I’ll have photos and memories to share with K of her first/birth mom.
Shannon you confuse your situation with open adoption and two mothers. It’s nothing like a marriage because the power balance is not equal. It’s only equal in as far as Dawn allows it to be.
Jessica has no legal rights over Madison. In a same sex couple the other one can adopt the child. In adoption, the natural mother has signed a document saying she has no parental rights.
In a same sex relationship you don’t have the stigma about having given your child away, you don’t have people asking you why you can’t raise your child yourself.
In a same sex couple you are not dealing with grief of separation, guilt about not having been able to provide for your child yourself and with having to not be the recognized mother.
You can’t compare being an adoptive mother to being a mother who lost her child to adoption.
People just want to assume that because Dawn is nice to Jessica that she suffered no grief and no loss. Go and read the archives ladies. Thank God she lost her daughter to Dawn and not some “forever mommy” type.
I have no problem with this kind of adoption and I don’t see it as queer.
Since when did being a decent human being and doing the right thing become queer.
What is queer is closed adoption, now that’s weird. Where is my mother? We don’t know honey, I am your mother now.
What I admire most about you, Dawn, is the prevailing attitude of “I can feel anyway I want, but feelings don’t get a vote in my actions”. You’ve demonstrated this amply over time in Madison’s adoption.
I firmly believe the world would be a much better place if only more people operated by the same parameters. Hats off.
Kim.Kim.
I didn’t say open adoption was like a marriage. I said unusual family models are not confusing to children just because they are confusing to adults.
And no, actually the vast majority of same-sex parents in the U.S. do not both have legal rights. In fact, quite the opposite.
And I am not using “queer” in the sense you seem to be reading it. “Queer” has a complex new meaning that has been evolving for the past 20 years and I meant it in a way that I guess you are unfamiliar with.
Also, I fail to see where you are getting that I think Jessica has no pain. I didn’t say anything about Jessica’s feelings.
I have a friend who has three adopted siblings (she is not adopted, her siblings are adopted from foster care). Anyway, her sister has had serious mental health issues that have also affected other members of her bio family. The sister is having a child in a couple of months and says she is placing it for adoption. My friend says that she thinks closed adoption is better, because she fears that no one would want the baby if they knew it’s biological history. (I think, too, since the adoptions in her family were closed by necessity, she is more comfortable with that model.) I don’t agree with this; I think full disclosure is best. As shocked as I was about her opinion, it did make me think. If the a-parents don’t know the sister’s history, might that be better because they wouldn’t always be scanning for problems? Can the expectation of mental illness affect its onset somehow? I don’t know, of course. I think it’s more likely that if a problem were to develop the a-parents might miss it at first, and it’s better to know.
I do hope this woman places her child for adoption. In this case, it seems very likely that she cannot parent, even with support. But then again, what do I know? It’s hard to predict how someone will react to being a parent.
I’ve had several adult adoptees tell me that they would not have wanted their adoption to be open. I’ve even had two go so far as to counsel me against seeking an open adoption. I take this counsel in context: 1) they feel an intense need to validate their own situation and the actions of their parents (both sets), 2) digging deeper, they both revealed that they didn’t think their adoptive parents could have “handled” it and that they were always on edge about their adoptive parents’ feelings about the adoption anyway and this would have been another burden for them, 3) they have a negative view of open adoption–assuming that they would have been pulled between two sets of parents, been confused over who was mom, and that they would not have securely bonded to their adoptive parents. These are all really valid concerns and opinions, BUT they are shaped by 20-30 years of politics and family dynamics. I really sympathize with the adult adoptees who have a negative view of open adoption, but I don’t use it as ammunition to discredit open adoption NOW in the year 2006, in my (or any other) situation. I do think (2) and (3) need further examination by those professionals doing open adoption research and writing. These reactions may give clues for more secure attachment in ANY form of adoption.