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).

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