First off, the new and way improved Open Adoption Support site is up. Now you can create a social networking profile, register a blog, set up a friends list, private message your contacts and set up groups or join existing groups. It’s a little like Facebook for Open Adoption. My hope is that it makes it easier to find YOUR people — the ones who will help you in your adoption experience. And I hope this also makes it easier for people to find each other in real life (eventually) because ultimately the goal is to give people the opportunity to create real life relationships and support. Because online is good but in-person is better.
The site uses BuddyPress, which is a set of WordPress plugins, along with BBPress, which is the WordPress-centric message board software. Setting it up is very nit-picky and I had to uninstall and reinstall eight or nine times to get everything working right. The software is all still pretty young so improvements are coming all the time.
Jenna is co-administrator and Heather is on board creating the definitive Open Adoption Bloggers list. Heather has also launched an Open Adoption Roundtable and her first discussion question is,
As with so many things in life, thinking about open adoption without having experienced it and actually living it out are two very different things. What do you know now that you wish you knew then? Has the reality of open adoption as it’s looked in your life matched your expectations? What one thing about open adoption would you tell your past self, if you could?
When I first started reading about openness it was in tandem to reading about adoptee grief and so my first reaction was dismay. I was used to thinking about adoption as an unadulterated good thing — for everybody. I believed the myths about birth moms who were able to move on (grieve, sure, I never doubted the grief but I thought it was compartmentalized somehow) and adoptees who never suffered more than curiosity. The more I read — adoptee stories, birth parent stories — the more I realized that adoption was never that simple.
So when I first read about openness, I felt threatened. I had to rethink my ideas about my role as an adoptive mom. I began to realize that I couldn’t simply replace my kid’s first mom and so my kneejerk reaction was immediate posessive jealousy. But at the same time my emotions went straight to fear, I also knew that this response was all about ME and that this selfishness was understandable but still selfish. And once I realized it was selfish, I could also see that it was unnecessary.
I’m trying to think of how to explain this. But I started to understand that this is the reality of adoption — that legal contracts don’t undo family ties. And once I had this epiphany, I quickly began to leave behind my preconceived ideas about how parenting an adopted child had to look and arrived in a place where I no longer needed adoption to be “just like” having a bio child. Frankly, everything got easier.
I still didn’t expect our adoption to be as open as it’s become but we grew into it. It wasn’t something I planned or that Pennie planned — it just made sense for our family. And I do think that open adoption relationships need to grow organically and need to suit the individuals involved even as I believe that they all need to come from the same place of respect for our children’s origins.
So the one thing I would tell my past self is that it’ll be ok. That mothering my adopted child will be just as wonderful, fulfilling, rewarding and fun as mothering my born-to-me child even though they are in many ways different. I would tell my past self that having Pennie in our lives would enrich my parenting experience instead of taking away from it. I would tell her, too, that seeing Pennie in our daughter would be just as moving as seeing Brett in Noah’s eyes. Finally I would say, trust your daughter; she will lead you. It’ll be ok.
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The last two paragraphs made me cry. We are in a semi-open adoption and will likely bring our daughter to meet her first mother and half-brother sometime in the next few months.
My only advice for new parents is “the baby will teach you how to be her parents”, but it has been much harder for me to trust my daughter to lead me around adoption issues. Thanks for the reminder that I can, that this is another fact of the parenting journey and that I can do this.
Congrats on the new site, which I must visit and spend some time in.
“legal contracts don’t undo family ties”
It is really that simple.
Oh, Dawn. This was lovely.
It really does come down to trusting your child’s love for you and your love for them. Then you have to trust that that love can expand and include others. We can love more than one child. A child can love more than one parent (or two or three).
I completely agree with you that open adoptions need to grow organically, based on the individuals involved. But it’s so hard to say that to people who are just getting into the adoption process because they want clear-cut answers and descriptions!
I feel like I’ve been saying this to everyone inthe round table, but it’s true…I LOVE this post.
It’s scary at first, like you said, because there are SO MANY feelings from SO MANY people and they’re BIG feelings. But the way I looked at it was that I was willing to honor those feelings and my daughter woudl have been adopted with or without me….so it may as well have been me so that I can do it right for her and for all of us, too, at least to the best of my ability. Adoption is NOT parenting a bio kid (I’m doing that as well) and it shoudln’t have to be. People seem to think that you should be able to “forget which child is adopted” or “not remember that they’re adopted” but that’s not a reality. Adoption, especially in an open adoption, is not something that is EVER forgotten, and why should it be? Like you said, legal documents don’t undo family ties (they just expand them, really!).
I tried registering but it didn’t work…:-\
I couldn’t find this ’roundtable discussion’ thing…
Honestly I really think my son’s adoptive mom DOES forget he is adopted because we share the same ethic backround(german)and he does ‘fit in’ to their family.
I feel both good and bad about that.
If I could tell my past self something about open adoption is that just because a family lives in a small town doesn’t make them any better than a city-dwelling family.
Honestly if I had pick this other family that lives in my city something tells me that I would have ALOT more contact.
What I have learned about myself since placing my son is that I picked the kind of couple 99.9 percent of first moms are looking for. A physically attractive, socially active, financially stable, small-town dwelling couple.
If I had known how common a choice I was making I wouldn’t have done it because I really like being ‘different’
[...] of This Woman’s Work tells herself that while parenting in open adoption may be different in many ways, it isn’t [...]