When there’s something I want to write, it eats at me until I write it. Which is why I’m sitting her jiggling my tush back and forth in my office chair with a baby in the sling merely playing at getting sleepy. It’s hard to type like this. Forgive the typos, please. Actually from here on out, forgive all of the typos. Actually from here on back, forgive ‘em, too, especially in the previous entry also typed under awkward circumstances.

Ok, some of the hard parts about open adoption and this is so damn long that I can’t even believe it:

Adoption after infertility is hard anyway. I can’t speak to adoption for fertile folks because me, I’m not so fertile. I will leave that to the other fine adoption bloggers who chose this over producing babies themselves.

Adoption after infertility is hard because you’re coming to it from a place of great loss. And every step of the way is an opportunity to confront that loss in new and exciting ways. The agency says, “Will you take a baby who may be drug affected?” And you can’t help but think, “I wouldn’t take drugs if I could get pregnant.” Someone says, “Hey, did you know there’s a new magic pill that might get you pregnant?” And suddenly you’re reexamining this whole adoption scenario and revisiting every hard-won advance you’ve made to get to where you are.

The process itself is challenging — the homestudy, the waiting, etc. — but I’m trying to talk about the emotional impact of confronting your infertility and ACCEPTING your infertility over and over again when you’re adopting. See, when you’re in treatment, you’re trying to overcome your infertility and so you’ve got this momentum going. Then you switch to adopting and you get your period and you say, “Oh no!” and then, “Wait a minute, I mean, hmmm, how irrelevant to my emotional state.”

All of the things that keep you going during infertility — dreaming of a baby with your eyes and your partner’s nose; dreaming of being pregnant, the feeling of a baby’s kick; fantasizing about sitting beatifically at your baby shower, huge and glowing — they go right out the window. Some of this comes up when contemplating donor eggs or sperm or surrogacy but other parts of it need to be faced all brand new.

For me, I really had to mourn the loss of someone who looked not like Brett but like Noah (who looks like Brett but it was the stair step thing that had me going). I was very jealous when I would see families where the kids looked alike because there was something about it that just settled into my heart and made it ache. Brett and his brothers all look so similar and I always loved that and I always wanted a passel of kids that would make people say, “Oh you must be Noah’s brother — I see the resemblance!” It’s a petty thing but it represented all of it for me — easily achieved pregnancies, the assumption of fertility, the ability to say, “Darnit, the rabbit died! Better get the crib down from the attic!” Not that I have an attic but you see what I’m getting at here.

In considering an open adoption, it’s like we were asked to give up even more. When I first read about it I thought, “OK, so the kid won’t look like us and may not have the prenatal care I want and I don’t get to be pregnant and I have to wait and get approved by a bunch of strangers before I’m even on the list to get it and now I’m supposed to let the birth mom have visitation, too??? This is so not fair!” And I was really mad about it.

I knew about the existence of open adoption from my work at the shelter. We had some birth mothers there and they all had those keychains with the newborn picture on it, the kind you can order from the hospital. Some of them had visitation and frankly, I thought the adoptive parents were nuts. Really. I thought it all sounded so strange and it was weird to me to hear the birth moms say, “I’m going to see my son!” Or, “My daughter loves Lion King so I bought her this!” Your son? Your daughter? I thought they were kind of delusional. To my mind at that time, you place your kid and you’re not the mom anymore and they’re not your kid anymore. And I thought it was very generous (not to mention foolish) of the adoptive parents to let the birth moms visit because it all seemed very emotionally incestuous and crazy-making and rife for conflict. And wasn’t it preventing these women from getting on with their lives? Why were they still carrying around pictures of some baby they didn’t even have anymore? I mention this because it was how I thought about open adoption before I ever cracked a book on it. It’s not something I love admitting.

When I had Noah, my stance on the birth moms in open adoptions at shelter relaxed a bit. I knew, then, what it was like to carry and give birth to a child and I could better appreciate the need to stay in some kind of contact with that child. But visits? That still freaked me out.

At the beginning of our adoption journey I very much wanted to either find a baby under a rosebush left there by fairies or else go straight to foster care and adopt a lovely little child and thus “save” him or her from their awful parents. Now I used to work with the foster care system while at the shelter and I used to work with parents whose children were in the system (I even taught mandated parenting classes) and I knew that most kids in foster care don’t need saviors (even if they do need families) and I knew, too, that no matter how awful a parent might be, most kids still really love them so they don’t exactly say, “Why, thank you beautiful new mommy for buying me such a pretty dress and not beating me!” But this was a fantasy I had in my head of being purely right, purely my adopted child’s parents without any competition or concerns. This is also what made me look at international adoption. “How convenient,” I thought, “No birth parents to worry about and plus I’ll be saving a kid from terrible conditions.” I wanted it all to be absolutely free of ethical conflicts or moral ambiguity. I wanted it to go easy for once and I figured after all of those miscarriages, I deserved some ease in my damn life.

I still think that’s reasonable to think that way at first. I totally think it’s ok for infertile people to have regular temper tantrums about how unfair it all is without people getting all righteous about it. I think — and this is slightly off topic — that when an infertile woman says, “I hate my stupid cubby mate for her stupid accidental pregnancy and she sucks and she doesn’t deserve that baby because I deserve a baby more and I am NOT going to her baby shower!” I think she should get lots of hugs and nobody should tell her that her cubby mate probably has other challenges in her life and shouldn’t the infertile woman try to appreciate that, blah blah blah. And I think that at the beginning, it’s ok for potential adoptive parents to go through a time of animosity towards the idea of birth parents as they consider adoption but I also think that they need to get through that somehow (with the help of a good counselor and books of birth mom stories, perhaps) and come out the other side. It’s not fair that there’s even more work ahead when we’ve already been through so much but — as we all know so well — life is not fair and so we’re stuck with it. We have to understand every piece of the triad or we’ll be doing our kids a disservice.

Once I started tearing down my emotional barriers to adoption, I realized that domestic adoption was going to be the best choice for us. See, I finally let myself recognize that 1) birth parents are always a presence whether they are physically present or not; 2) adoptive parents are not saviors even when they are in fact taking a child from terrible conditions (I’d explain this more but I’m racing the baby here); and 3) adoption wasn’t going to make up for all of the losses due to our infertility.

It kinda ran down for me like this:
–This will not be my bio child and I won’t be able to pretend s/he is even if s/he looks just like me so transracial adoption will not be an issue to me;
–This child will have a history that precedes his/her history with me and I can’t pretend that s/he doesn’t so knowing the birth parents will not be an issue to me;
–Other people love this child even if they are never a part of his/her life and I can’t pretend that they don’t so having the birth parents participate in his/her life will not be an issue to me;
–My child will have emotional ties to that history and those other people even if I don’t let him/her recognize it, even if I try to ignore it so I may as well facilitate it.

It was very in my face that way. I didn’t know how much I was wanting to pretend until I faced up to all of that. When I first thought of those other people loving my baby, I felt defensive. When I thought about that previous history, I felt alone. This was going to be my child but in a very profound way, this child would belong to other people, too, and ultimately — most importantly — this child would belong to his or herself.

I have always said that Noah is his own person. You know that Kahlil Gibran quote? No? Here it is:

Your children are not your own. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You must strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

I always said I believed that but it was when we contemplated adoption that I realized how entrenched my views about my children being mine really were. There’s loss in understanding that but it’s wonderfully freeing, too. And, as an aside, it’s what drives our unschooling beliefs. But back to adoption…

Once I’d confronted my grief and my assumptions and started — painfully — exploring exactly what infertility had taken from me, I was ready to re-examine open adoption.

What I believe about open adoption is it makes manifest all of the things that are already there in any adoption. It gives weight to those truths that we can otherwise try to ignore. I think that in every family formed by adoption there are those basic facts but that some kinds of adoption let us hide from them and so that’s why some people choose them.

I’m not saying that every family who chooses international adoption is doing so in order to deny the reality of birth parents — I’m just saying that there are some people who choose international adoption or a closed adoption or what-have-you for the same reasons we first considered going overseas. However, if you read some of the international adoption boards, you’ll see that many of those families do reach out to their child’s birth relatives or maintain contact with the orphanage. Lots of adoptive parents know this stuff but not all of us do. We’re so busy wanting a baby that we turn away from central truths because it’s painful and we’ve had enough pain to last us a lifetime.

I won’t say it’s always easy to be in an open adoption. When I think of J. talking about Madison the way the birth moms at shelter talked about their children, I sometimes get sad. I’d like to be the only one with the right to flash her picture around and take pride in her. But you know, that’s my problem. If we had less openness, I wouldn’t have to confront that selfishness of mine (because I do think it’s selfish although understandable) because I wouldn’t have to hear what J.’s co-workers thought of Madison’s picture. But I imagine how much more difficult it is to hear about my side of it. J. looked at the cards people sent us and they all said things like, “Welcome to your family! What a lucky girl! She was meant to be yours!” And wouldn’t that suck way more?

This unites me, I think, with J. I have an inkling — just an inkling, mind you — of how she must feel. How can I deny her the pictures to put on her desk at work? How can I deny the visits to see how Madison is growing? I couldn’t. It is hard at times but it’s good. It’s a personal growth opportunity. And while I sometimes get sick of all of this thoughtful contemplation and examination (could I just lie around enjoying my assumptions for once???), I’ll admit that I’m a personal growth junkie.

You know, the biggest concession we made was Madison’s name. That was harder than I expected. At the beginning, it was a barrier to claiming her emotionally and so I appreciate those who don’t do it. Now that we’re here — 5 1/2 weeks! — I run through our short list of girls’ name and there’s not one that suits her more. But still, it’s not something I’d recommend to every family because I think it’s very loaded and symbolic. I’m extremely glad we did it and I have absolutely 100% no regrets but I mention it here to say that every aspect of open adoption needs to be uniquely examined by the potential birth mother and the potential adoptive parents who choose each other. It’s complicated and painful for everyone but really, it’s grand. Once we let go of our grief over what we lost, it was so much easier to get excited about the things we gained. Even the name, you know, the name was a blessing. Parenting a child we didn’t name may have been hard at the beginning but it was illuminating, too, that personal growth again.

Ok, baby stirs. Off I go. Hope this was coherent.

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