As a first mom I wonder what goes on in ’adoptive family’ social circles.
My sons adoptive family have friends and relatives who have adopted both domestically and internationally. I know about three of them. That means that my son is growing up around at least three other ’adoptees’ who do not know anything about their first parents, and from what I can tell, the adoptive parents of those children want to keep it that way.
What I really want to know of adoptive parents with actual open adoption is how does it affect you as an adoptive parent when your friends, the ones who are also adoptive parents, do not embrace openness?? Does ’peer pressure’ of the adoption community that discourage ’openness’ actually have an impact on how open an adoptive parent is willing to be??
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- Adoptive parents, would you want the first/birth mom of the child you adopted to tell her friends?
That’s a really good question. We have adoptive parents friends who have more closed adoptions for lots of reasons (because it’s international, because that’s the way the first parents want it, because that’s the way the adoptive parents want it) and it doesn’t impact how we live our adoption.
I could not be close friends with anyone whose adoption beliefs were fundamentally different than mine IF they could not support our open adoption. I have been and am friends with people who did have fundamental differences but they were welcoming to Pennie (she came to their house a few times), respectful to Madison and never rolled their eyes at me. Likewise I tried to be respectful of their choice — kinda like being friends with someone who has strong religious or political beliefs that I don’t agree with. Sometimes we talk about adoption stuff but we do it carefully.
This is a very interesting question…
My first comment would be, no; other adoptive families have not influenced the openness of our daughter’s adoption. But after thinking this through, I would have to say that isn’t true. Peer pressure was one of the things that changed my mind decidedly about openness. Without the challenging questions I was asked by both my peers (other adoptive parents) and first moms (to whom I am forever indebted) we might have been just another adoptive family sipping Kool-aid on the back porch.
Being fully open isn’t easy. In fact, there are often times I have to remove myself physically from rooms of my own family because I don’t approve of their flip comments about my daughter’s other mother or their misguided opinions of how our our contact with her first parents will only cause problems. They don’t understand, are mired in fear perpetuated by irresponsible media coverage and I don’t think they really want to come to terms with the fact that we have embraced my daughter’s parents literally as part of our immediate family.
For those who are outside our circle and don’t understand what openness entails, I try to educate them. I can’t control their opinions and don’t let it affect me if they don’t agree. I just keep my daughter away from anything they have to say that might be negative.
In our home, open is the only way to be.
It doesn’t affect the way our open adoption is. It might keep me from sharing too many details if someone is extremely put off by or doesn’t understand open adoption but I won’t let them stop us from having the relationship we desire with our daughter’s first mom and family. We learned during the waiting process why that connection is so important and we do it for our daughter.
After we brought our daughter home and we really began to see what open adoption was I started searching for other adoptive parents who had open adoptions, or at least wanted open adoptions but didn’t have it for whatever reason. This helped me to have people to share celebrations or disappointments with that really understood.
Your concern for your son though is a valid one. If he is surrounded by other children that don’t know their birth families or show any desire to it might hinder him as he gets older in having an open and honest relationship with you. I think the peer pressure on the children will be heavy. That’s a really good question that I hadn’t given much thought to.
Thank you for your reply.
I know without a doubt that my son adoptive parents social group limits the ways that they could include me in their lives.
For example, they come to my city to visit other relatives, they go to places that I am very very familar with, like the zoo, certain parks…etc.
Because they are with the people with closed adoptions, they don’t invite me because just being the person I am would make those other adoptive parents ‘uncomfortable’.
Even though it would be a very simple way to involve me in their lives and let others know about ‘openness’. It does hurt my feelings to be willfully excluded, but I know that to my son adoptive parents, these people are much more important than I am. After all, they have be friends with them for most of their lives!!
I do worry that one day, my son will be curious about the children around him.
I worry that he won’t feel comfortable himself to tell the truth or even ask questions because his experience will be so much different than the other children.
Hi Cindy.
I do not know your son’s adoptive family, but are you sure they are not inviting you to the zoo (or whatever) because of peer pressure?
When I travel to the state where I previously lived and where my son’t bmom lives, I always visit her. I also always visit my friends (who also have kids). And I always do this separately.
This is NOT because of my friend’s views on open adoption. They all know about my open adoption and are pretty supportive (though no one can fully understand unless they are part of an open adoption).
I visit separately because the visits are totally separate purposes. When we visit with my son’s bmom, it is always focused on my son and his bmom sharing time together. If there were other adults, and other kids aorund, they would not get the same 1 on 1 visit.
And then when I visit with my friends who have children, these are really visits for me and my friends. It is just convenient for the kids to play together while we visit. Yes, we go to zoos and other kids places, but really these visits are about the grownups catching up.
I hope my son’s bmom does not feel left out, and I will be more sensitive about this in the future. So thank you for sharing your perspective on this.
I am pretty sure, I asked once some time ago.
They told me that others would not be ‘comfortable’ with open adoption.
They told me that they don’t feel like it is neccessary to share(with family) that they have an open adoption, a long long time ago.
I know that in time, I will get time with my son, but I know that I am the last person on the list of people to see if they come to visit my city.
They always say that they have to visit ‘family’ first of all. Meaning of course that *I* am not really family to them. Even though they visit friends and acquanitances too, before me.
I liken it to this, I have a close friend, she lives far away from my city but comes to visit fairly regularly.
When she visits, she has alot of people to visit, but she usually invites me to visit them *with her*.
Now, I can’t usually do that, but I do visit with her otherwise. If she can’t invite me with her, she lets me know right away, so that I know that she is not excluding me of her own will.
My son adoptive parents have done social things in my city with the many friends and relatives they have here, and have never invited me to be with them, or even told me that they were in my city.
Even though they promised, many many many times to inform me if they were in my city.
It is one of the many promises they break all the time. I really think they just say ‘we’ll call you’ to be *nice* that they don’t mean it at all.
absolutely not – I’m a free agent. I’m going to be as open as we can be in our adoption because it’s what is right for my kids. We’re in a domestic adoption. I don’t know how I would manage an international adoption but I’d find a way.
We have three adopted kids (4.5, 2, and 4 months) so quite honestly, we don’t really have a social life. We do make an effort to get together with other adoptive families. Most of these families are in open adoptions with different degrees of openness. We are more open with our children’s birthmothers and love to use that opportunity to help others work on their relationships with birth families. I hope that my kids can be supportive to others in the future and that they have opportunities to talk to other children about their experiences dealing with adoption. I am lucky that my family is super supportive and completely “gets it” when it comes time talking about our openness and how important these mothers are in our lives. We do not have relationships with the birthfathers–I guess because they do not wish to be involved. (Although, It is not even an option with one of them.) They do all know about the children. Quite honestly, if somebody didn’t embrace our openness, we wouldn’t be spending much time with them. There are things that people don’t know about our adoption stories–due to respecting the privacy of our children and their birth stories and their birth parents. I love how some people want to know everything and then want to tell us how to live our lives–haha! My favorite line is, “That’s probably why she chose US to be our child’s parent and not you.” I don’t use it very often–but it does come in handy every great once in awhile. We are very protective of our birth mothers. As far as the children. . . . I think there could be some influence during different stages of life, but there will be a point when they are going to do what they want anyway. I remember a conversation once, with my son’s birthmom. She said to me–what if he hates me someday? I said to her–what if he hates me? We all have the same fears, no matter how we fit into the picture.
I will say, that in the very beginning of our first adoption, we did seek some professional counseling to talk about how to deal with all the openness in our adoption and they actually recommended to cut off contact with our son’s birthmother. I trusted my instincts on that one and ended our counseling and did what I felt was right in my heart. There is a lot of pressure out there and a lot of people who are counseling with inadequate and lack of information. So, yes, peer pressure could effect the level of openness that adoptive parents are willing to have. Just not in our family.
I suppose it depends on the adoptive family. I stopped giving a sh*& years ago what other people think or do, and just do things how I think is right.
Some people are much more influenced by those around them though.
We definately wouldn’t let our friends attitudes or adoption situations effect our decisions about openness, but our family’s feelings definately do play a part. So I would have to say that ‘yes’ peer pressure effects our two open adoptions. I have a cousin who’s childs open-adoption turned out to be a very bad experience and so my parents & siblings do not support openness. Openness is also a fairly new concept and so was already a very ‘different’ concept that caused some discomfort. We have been asked by my parents & siblings to not share family information with our birthfamilies ie: no stories or photos of my parents, siblings, nieces & nephews etc.. They ask that we only share photos of our child & us (my husband & I). They don’t even want us sending our sons photo to our daughters birthfamily and vice versa. I know that it’s really hard for birthfamilies to understand, but those feelings of our families do need to be part of the equation. They are our family and the adoption involves everybody.
I’m confused by your reply. Are you saying you no longer share pictures of the child you adopted because your family doesn’t want you too??
How would sending or not sending pictures possibly affect them?!
Just because your cousin had a bad experience doesn’t mean that you will.
Also, just because at first open adoption can be challenging, that doesn’t mean it’s time to quit!! First moms are people just like you are, your family needs to know more about your child first family. Maybe then they could understand that being in relationship with them could really benefit them!
I am very fortunate, my son adoptive parents allow me to see much of their family life through Facebook. I have seen many pictures of all the relatives and I know quite a bit about them. I wish I could befriend them, but at this time my sons adoptive parents do not want me too. It’s frustrating because my lifestyle is so similar to many of their family members and friends, I would really blend in with them!!
Oh well… such is life. I am glad you still see your child first family as ‘family’ because that is something that will always be true.
We still share photos of ourselves and our children, but we currently don’t send our birthfamilies photos our parents, siblings etc.. We’ve talked to our birthfamilies about it though, so they definately know what’s going on, and we regularly talk to our families about why they feel this way and why we believe in openness. We definately know that all adoptions will be different and one bad experience doesn’t mean that all experiences will be bad. Unfortunately, the relationships with our birthfamilies have been difficult and so this hasn’t helped. Our families were actually more open in the beginning but have changed their minds.
We’re working on it and it’s important to us that everyone can be as comfortable as possible (which may or may not be possible!)