Chanie, who has somehow managed NOT to have a blog in this over-blogged world, asked:

i wonder about this in general, unrelated to the specificity of adoption – when you say ‘openness is an attitude’ – that’s all fine and good, but in general, we have certain values that we want to pass on to our kids – but is attitude enough if it isn’t backed up with concrete actions?
sometimes, that is out of circumstance, or laziness (seeking out opportunities v. sticking with what is ‘easier’) or just because that’s the way life is – we can’t/don’t necessarily actively provide real life examples of all we want for our kids without it feeling forced or artificial.

Well, I was speaking to the specificity of adoption so I’m going to keep doing that but I also think this could be generalized to other relationships. (And here I will give a shout out to fellow adoptive mama Deesha Philyaw’s site CoParenting101.org, which has the fabulous tagline, “Divorce ends marriage … but families endure” since I think her work is a good example of this.)

I guess I’d say an attitude that isn’t backed up with concrete action is a pretty empty attitude. I’d say, perhaps, it is a false attitude. It’s kinda like saying, “I am an environmental activist” and not bothering to recycle. At the same time, I don’t think you can always tell what someone’s attitude is with just a quick glance at their actions and that’s really what I wanted to get at in the last post.

I know some adoptive families who go through the motions — cards, phone calls and even visits — without having the attitude. These are people who keep adoption segregated in their kids’ lives by making the visits private (sometimes even from the kids’ themselves! I know of one family who didn’t tell their child who that woman was who was visiting him all that time!) or by creating crazy hoops for the first family to jump through or cussing & fussing the whole way through anytime there was any contact. On paper, that looks like true openness but it isn’t. To me, that seems like threatened openness. I don’t think those relationships are sustainable or healthy. But they fit the criteria of an open adoption.

On the other hand, those families I cited before, the ones who cannot (for whatever reason) have cards, phone calls and even visits but who have an attitude of openness, they are working that open adoption philosophy, which is about finding ways to give our kids’ connection and honoring their histories. There are A LOT of people in this category and sometimes I think it’s easy to sort of drown out their stories because they just don’t have that photo opportunity flash of adoptions like ours.

So I do think true openness is an attitude but that attitude has to be real and not just lip service.

(Note I did not focus on what makes a successful open adoption for first families or adoptees because I’m not qualified to speak to either. I focused purely on adoptive parents and I hope that when we are “successful” that we are also doing what we can to support success in the rest of our adoption family. That is to say, we cannot create “success” for our kids or their first families but we can impede it.)

If there’s one thing we all might agree on, it’s that we’d like our open adoptions to be successful. But what does “success” mean to you, when speaking about open adoption? Do you think it may mean something else to the others in your triad?

–Roundtable #14

I don’t really like the term “successful” when it applies to relationships because it seems kind of — it seems kind of like a salesman talking, you know? I think that relationships are fluid and they are sometimes better and sometimes worse and they change as we grow. But heck, let’s run with it.

I think success means different things for different families. I don’t think it’s a requisite number of visits or phone calls or cards or pictures. I don’t think an open adoption with family BBQs is necessarily more successful than one where there is little to no contact. I think that a “successful” open adoption depends so much on the circumstances of that adoption and that comparisons aren’t very helpful.

I know great moms and dads who have what I would consider open adoptions even though they don’t have open adoptions. I look at Granola Susan and her family — their daughter was adopted internationally. They don’t have an open adoption in the traditional sense but they are open to their daughter’s origins in the same way that I am open to Madison’s; their reality is just different. Likewise with Malinda and Margie. Or I look at parents who have adopted their children either through foster care or in circumstances that are similar to foster care and whose children cannot have contact with their first families for safety reasons but who still honor their kids’ connections in a myriad of ways and I see those adoptions as successful open adoptions.

You see, what I would call “successful” are adoptive parents who make their parenting decisions from a place of respect and love for their children’s realities. They don’t try to pretend that adoption is just like giving birth. They don’t try to pretend like their children don’t have histories. They don’t try to pretend that their children don’t care (or make the excuse that it doesn’t matter because their kids never bring it up anyway). They struggle to make good decisions even when they are hard decisions (whether that means to schedule a visit or suspend contact). They don’t look for the easy way out or the short cuts. They don’t try to compete with their kids’ first families and they don’t try to control their kids’ feelings.

I learn a lot from adoptive parents who are not in adoptions that look like ours because in many, many ways, openness is an attitude, you know?