A few weeks ago, Dawn contacted me and asked me to write “something specific to necessary boundaries and the emotional challenges of navigating relationships when first/birth family members aren't safe”.  Apparently she thinks I have useful things to say on this topic which is a hoot because most days I feel like I’m shooting in the dark.  I actually have a mountain of other things to do at the moment but her request has been nagging at me for awhile so I thought I’d get it off my mind.

Our open adoption story:

When we were newly married, my husband and I joined a church and curiously hooked up with an extended family almost immediately.  Typical of southern Baptist churches, the entire three generations of this family attended services with regularity.  At one of their in-home meetings, we met the eldest granddaughter, whom I’ll call Ann, who had an obvious mental and emotional impairment.  At the time, she was living with her uncle who was making an effort toward integrating her into the working world.  We enjoyed getting to know her and helping her in anyway we could.  Ultimately, she was unable to bear the burden of a normal adult life and never having been declared incompetent so she could be forced to stay, she ran away. 

Two years later, my husband and I were throwing in the towel in our infertility battle.  It was an easy decision to chose adoption when at about the same time, Ann resurfaced and announced her pregnancy.  The next obvious choice was an open adoption since in that same four years, we had already forged an indelible relationship with her and her extended family.

Ann was unconvinced that her disability made her ill-fitted for motherhood.  The desperate pleas of her grandmother and mother to surrender her child in an open adoption with us, a couple she knew and trusted, fell on deaf ears.  She ran away again.  On New Year’s Eve, 1999, 12 hours after she delivered, she called her mother to say she’d had a baby girl.  I didn’t meet that baby, now my oldest daughter Jessica, until 10 months later when Ann was expecting a second child.  By then, the state had stepped in to take custody of Jessica who had been abused, neglected and deprived.  Her back against a wall, Ann surrendered Jessica to us to protect her from foster care and then as an afterthought, asked us if we’d like her unborn son too. 

As though it was nothing new, we were headlong in an open adoption with the extended family which included weekly dinners, church activities, outings, and the whole nine yards.  With Ann, we had to create some guidelines because her emotional health had deteriorated.  We changed our number and made it unpublished because she was given to calling us in the middle of the night.  We made our address a mystery to her, listing her mother’s address on all packages as the return because Ann was prone to stalking-type behaviors.  Visits were in neutral places like parks and McDonald’s or at her mother’s house for a limited time and with limited contact between her and the children because she had a limited attention span.

Eventually, we had to suspend visits in Jessica’s best interests.  At the height of her emotional distress, she was having 6 night terrors a night so the psychiatrist instructed us to cease all physical contact with her birthmother.  After that, Ann disappeared, resurfacing two years later to announce her third pregnancy and her quandary since she was homeless and had been so for quite a while.

We resumed visits with Ann, making long trips to her city three hours away and inquiring about her plans.  We related her situation to her family that was largely disinterested.  We alerted the local social services; they said nothing could be done until the child was born.  So we watched and waited and rebuilt the precarious bridge of communication we had with Ann which is difficult at best when talking to chronological adult that is cognitively 10 years old.  Two weeks before she delivered, Ann moved into a shelter and asked that I be at the delivery.  She hadn’t asked me to adopt her third child, only that I help her deliver.  No one from her family was willing to go and she didn’t want to be alone.

I met her on her scheduled inducement date at the front steps of the indigent care hospital.  12 hours later, a social worker was interrogating us both: asking me if I wanted the child and explaining to Ann that under no certain circumstances would she be able to take her child home.  I was heartbroken for her.  Up to the very instant the nurse took her baby from her arms and put the infant in mine to wheel us out of the hospital, Ann believed she would take her baby home. 

I made the three hour road trip home, sobbing the whole way.  I was greeted at my door by Ann’s mother and grandmother, overwhelmed that once again, we managed to rescue a member of their family from the clutches of foster care.  I let them swoon over the baby, a girl, while I took the first shower I’d had in three days.  If they were so glad that Maren had been retrieved, why were they doing nothing about it themselves?  Why did I, the adoptive mom, have to intervene?  And what about Ann?  Didn’t they care about her or had they become so hardened to her antics that they didn’t care anymore?  Thus began the end of what was once a beautiful open adoption scenario.

Since Maren’s birth, we learned that our son Matthew is disabled like Ann, however, he has a genetic disorder which she does not have.  A quick inquiry to the extended family, we learned that Ann, her mother and her sister covered up the truth of his paternity, even to the extent of lying on the surrender papers, so that we would not know our son’s biological father identity or that he was severely mentally impaired.  We learned that they lied to us about Ann’s disability and how the extended family chose to handle it.  We learned that in fact, everything was a lie, including their religious faith.  Every word that escapes their lips I now consider as suspicious.

Despite our 3.5 mile proximity and the fact that Ann’s youngest sister is in my science class, we now have very limited contact with the children’s extended family.  Their grandmother has made it clear that she “cannot manage” her grandson’s disability.  She is also unresponsive when we explain that Jessica’s emotional disabilities because of the abuse will never completely dissipate.  The extended family, knowing how Jessica suffered, is also unwilling to intervene on behalf of Ann’s fourth child.  The last time the children saw Ann was three years ago because her new fiancé who has a history of violence, became combative with me.  The last time they saw their grandmother was a month ago when she showed up at our doorstep with cookies for the children and then complained that they were high strung. (She hadn’t seen them since Christmas.)  She stayed for ten minutes and then didn’t call me again until this past week, asking me to come to her new church’s pot luck supper, thirty minutes before it began.  I respectfully declined.

By definition, I still consider this an open adoption.  The children know where they came from; they know they can talk to me about any and everything regarding their first mother and her family.  They know whose nose they have or whose dimples.  They have pictures of their births and answers to questions like, “how long did it take for Ann to deliver me?”  or “did I have hair when I was born?”  Indeed, their extended family portraits adorn the walls and fill our photo albums.

Perhaps one day, we will rebuild this open adoption bridge, but for today, I am putting down my hammer and nails and taking a much needed sabbatical.  In the interim, my children have an adoptive mother who, despite the staggering adversity, will not rest until her children accept their adoption stories and all the sordid details they include.  I will not be satisfied until they are able to honor and accept their first mother and their extended family despite it all because it is what I strive to do myself, one day at a time.  After all, if I cannot accept their identity within their extended family, how will they accept it for themselves?  In short, if no one else in their family can tell the truth, then I will: they exist because Ann gave them life, something I could never do and I am eternally grateful to her for it.