Sometimes it seems to me that open adoptions are as different from each other as they are from closed adoptions. People might say, “Oh, she’s A’s first mom” to describe who the first parent is in their life. I understand the objective meaning of the term, I’m living it.
But what does that relationship look like? I you had to describe it to an outsider to give them a point of reference they understand, what relationship is it like?
To the child should “first mom” be:
Like an aunt?
Like a friend?
Like a distant cousin that you know about and keep in touch with but don’t really know well?
What is the relationship like?
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I get this question, too, or more often a statement. “Oh, Pennie (first mom) is like her aunt!” And it usually frustrates me even though I understand why people go there. (I bet before we adopted that’s where my head went, too, although I can’t remember now.) I always say, “No, she’s like her birth mama.” (That’s what Madison calls Pennie.)
I do think every open adoption is different so my caveat here is that I can only speak from my experience. But here in our house, there is no way to describe the unique relationship that Madison and Pennie has except first mom or birth mama. They do have a very special bond that has been both born and built. I mean, Pennie’s love for Madison is essential and deep and Madison’s love for her is the same. They have also had to build a relationship in our adoption that suits them both and has changed over time and hasn’t been easy for either of them. Because of our cultural ideas about what it means to be mother and child, they’ve had to run up against these assumptions and the limits of their reality, which is that Pennie is not parenting Madison and so figuring out the boundaries is an ongoing process.
There is nothing else like it. Pennie is not like Madison’s aunt because their bond is deeper and more … more central than say, the bond my sister (who adores Madison) has with either of my kids or that I have with her kids. So I don’t like it when people describe it that way (even though I know they mean well) because it dismisses how deep their relationship is.
I always try to explain because it matters to me that people understand that even if Pennie isn’t mothering, she is still Madison’s mother. I want them to know it because I want them to understand that adoption is a lot more complicated than most of us are led to believe before we’re living it.
Dawn expresses my thoughts as well. It’s a very deep relationship, and our culture does not have an appropriate word for the relationship.
We grasp the concept of having and loving more than one child, sibling, aunt/uncle/cousin, but the idea of having and loving more than one mother or father seems an anathema to many.
Speaking as an observer of my daughter and her firstmom, I would say their relationship looks natural, easy, deep, primal.
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I am sure it changes over time, as the kids grow and understand more. DS is only 3.5, and his fmom lives in another state, so we only see her 2-3 times/year. So far they are close friends, and extended family. Not unlike a favored aunt or close family friend.
I have no idea what their relationship will look like in 3 more years, or 5 years, or 10 or 20, but am looking forward to seeing it develop
Maybe it depends a lot on the amount of contact and the actual people involved? I’m still struggling with this, I guess. I look for the “more” that Dawn describes in our relationship but I just don’t see it. My interactions with them are on about the same level as my interactions with my cousins’ kids – distant family members and not really very close ones. My emotions are different…but the actual interaction is the same. Should it be different? And if so, what can be done to make it different? hmmm…
@Ginger, I don’t think there’s any “should” when it comes to open adoption. Ever. All those shoulds just mess people up. I think you’re right, too, that it depends on amount of contact, definitely. I mean, heck, I wasn’t all that close to my grandparents growing up because I never saw them. They still mattered to me a lot (the IDEA of grandparents mattered to me a lot) but I wasn’t as close to them as my husband was to his because he lived in the same town as his grandparents and saw them regularly.
But I do think that first parents matter in a different way than aunts and uncles or grandparents do — not more or less, just different because of the IDEA of who they are just like my grandparents mattered to me in a specific way because they were my grandparents. They weren’t like aunts or uncles or cousins — they were grandparents and the very *concept* of that relationship mattered to me. Likewise I think first parents have a very specific weight because they’re first parents whether they’re present or not. I think likely for some kids, this is something that becomes more apparent as they grow older and they become more cognizant of the cultural value of birth ties.
(I mean, even closed adoption adoptees who DON’T want reunion still have some feelings about their first parents — good, bad or even indifferent — that is specific to those people BEING their first parents, you know?)
Honestly, I think one reason Pennie and Madison have bonded so deeply isn’t just that Pennie is her birth mom but because it’s a transracial adoption and Madison has been very focused on how she and Pennie both have brown skin and brown eyes and curly hair, etc., because she is always very aware that she doesn’t “match” us. The other day she told us she was tired of being the only black person in the family and a few months ago she told a friend who asked who Pennie was, “She is my birth mama. She’s who made me brown.”
(One day it’d be interesting for someone to do a study about how transracialness impacts open adoptions.)
I do think it completely depends on the specifics. My son’s birth mom lives in another state, and we don’t have a way to contact her at our will. Jack is only 3-1/2, so he’s not asking a lot of birth questions yet, though he knows he was in S and not me. He’s more interested in his siblings. I feel that it will be more a like an aunt-type relationship. I have a huge family, and there are some people I’m extremely close to and some that I’m not. So, one aunt relationship isn’t like another.
Cupcake is 2 1/2 so I don’t know what our long term relationship will look like. Though we live very close, I only see her twice a year. I’m an aunt to 15 children, many of whom I’m very close to – and, for me, my relationship with Cupcake and her Mom is nothing like my relationship with any of my neices or nephews.
There’s a certain weight that’s there – that’s hard to explain. Though we only visit twice a year, the gravity of the visits is so pronounced. I think even at 2 1/2 our daughter understands it as well.
It’s such a strange thing, because I just can’t put words to the emotions I experience surrounding our relationship. I agree with Dawn that the depth of the relationship is just so different than other relationships – and yes, I definitely see this even with a daughter that’s so young.