Our adoption was supposed to be open.
We made it explicit in our prospective adopter profile (what many people call a “Dear Birthmother” letter) and to our agency. In fact, because our desire for openness matched our daughter’s mother’s desire, we were chosen ahead of several other families waiting for placements.
Our agency had received word of our daughter’s birth only after the fact, however. Her first mother kept her pregnancy, birth and desire to place a secret from all but one close friend of her family. She walked into our agency one day post-partum and sat through an intake interview in which she heard about open adoption for the first time. She indicated a strong desire for contact after placement, just as we had done. And so, with the guidance of a social worker, she chose our family for her daughter.
We met our daughter at three days old and brought her home. In our state, this means the relinquishment had been signed and was immediately effective and permanent. There is no revocation period here. Two days later, we went back to the agency and met our daughter’s mother and she held her baby for the first time.
This was not how we had imagined an open adoption would begin. Based on the preparation we were given by our agencies and based on the stories we had read of others’ adoptions, we had expected more time to get to know our daughter’s first mother. But when we met her, we loved her immediately. As is so often the case in adoption, we found amazing coincidences between her family and ours right down to the middle name she had chosen for our daughter.
We met for three hours, hugged with happy tears in our eyes and left her with the expectation that we’d be hearing from her soon. The following week the agency called. They had heard from our daughter’s mother and she promised be in touch again soon. Meanwhile, she wanted to know if, god forbid, she fell pregnant again, would we adopt that baby too? We told them to let her know we would.
Still, we anticipated hearing from her directly soon. We sent all the pictures and letters we had promised, and more. Rather than every two months, we sent custom-made photo books and letters about every three weeks. We waited to hear that they had been picked up at the agency. They never were. In fact, after six months, the agency requested we not send any more extras or any more photos in books. They didn’t have room to store them.
Our daughter turned eighteen months old recently and we still haven’t heard from her mother. The agency hasn’t heard from her either. Our dutiful letters and photos still pile up in the file they set aside for her. Due to the deeply private, secret nature of her decision to place her baby, she refused to give any contact information to us or to our agency, promising instead to take the initiative to use the agency as a go-between when she wanted contact with us.
So far, this hasn’t happened.
Whenever I write her a new letter, I include all of our contact information and an appeal that she call us collect any time. I let her know we love her and we are raising her daughter to know and love her to the best of our ability. But we are saddened by lack of contact and the loss of our original vision of an open adoption in which we would get to know the first mother and her family, including our daughter’s older siblings, who are being raised by their first mother.
Our daughter is young, and we continue to hope that things will change for the better and she will meet her mother again someday soon. Whenever the phone rings, there is a tiny glimmer of hope that it will be her, or maybe the agency, giving us news of her. We have the information we need to contact her. We know her full name, the full names of her children and a friend of a friend — a police officer in the city where she lives — even found her address and a satellite photo of her home. We fantasize about driving by, calling anonymously or otherwise forcing contact. But we have chosen not to do any of these things.
Given the private nature of our daughter’s mother’s decision, we have decided to let her continue to take the lead in contacting us when she is ready. Someday, when our daughter is older we may change our position, but for now, we respect her mother’s privacy and judgment about the best level of contact.
But perhaps the title of this article is misleading. Because in spite of our lack of contact, we still consider our adoption to be open. We don’t define openness by level of contact in our family. We define it as the state we are in — and plan to be in for the foreseeable future — of leaving our door wide open for our daughter’s first mother to walk through at any time.
Openness at this stage of our daughter’s life (when she is too young to clearly understand birth or adoption yet) is like any other respectful, adult relationship. Both parties to it have the power to make serious decisions about it. If we regard our daughter’s first mother as an equal in an adult relationship, we have to respect the space she has taken in the relationship, much as we wish she were closer.
Meanwhile, we do our best to live in the spirit of openness regardless of the level of contact we have. These are some of the ways we keep our adoption “open” while not being in touch with our child’s first family:
1. The whole story — to the extent we have it — is in our daughter’s baby book. We have recorded pictures of ourselves preparing to adopt (down to a smiling shot of our home study worker), text that explains why we wanted to be parents, copies of the adoptive family profile our daughter’s mother was given and pictures of her mother from the day we met. We also have all of the original hospital records on our daughter’s birth. Photocopies of her footprints, her mother’s fingerprint, her hospital bracelet and the name tags on her nursery crib are all in the baby book as well, along with an account of the day we met her mother and everything her mother told us about her family. We have pictures her mother gave us of her older children, her own mother and grandmother and all their names and nicknames. We read the book often — our daughter has begun requesting it frequently — and we talk at length about all the people who love her and waited excitedly for her arrival in the world.
2. Three pictures hang over my daughter’s crib; one each of each of her mothers (she has two adoptive mothers) holding her as a tiny newborn. Every time she goes down to sleep and every time she wakes, she looks at the photos, points to each one and names the people in the photos.
3. We have given her first mother a name similar to the ones she calls her adoptive mothers. We chose “Mama [First Name]” because “mama” is what her first mother’s other children call her.
4. We include our daughter’s first mother and her family in the bedtime prayers our daughter says each night. (We also include the baby we are waiting for and his or her mother too!)
5. We talk openly about our daughter’s first family with our own families and other close friends. We make it clear to them that she is a beloved family member, with whom we may yet be in touch, even if we are not now. A picture of all three parents and our newborn daughter was included, with her mother’s permission in all the birth announcements we sent to friends and family, as well as her mother’s first name —a gain, with her permission.
6. We remark, when we notice them, on similarities between our daughter and her first mother. Though we don’t know her well, our daughter’s mother described her personality on an in-take form at the adoption agency and our daughter bears her a strong physical resemblance.
In these ways and others, we prepare our daughter for potential contact with her mother. If we see her again before our daughter is 18, we want our daughter to know who she is, have an appropriate name to call her and understand how her first mother fits into the story of her family and her origins.
For us, having an open adoption without contact boils down to living as though we will certainly have contact tomorrow. We maintain an atmosphere of openness, honesty and love in which our daughter will be encouraged to explore her origins with our full support. Openness is our default attitude toward adoption in general. As we wait for a new baby, we expect openness again. Of course we hope for more contact next time. And we realize that different levels of contact between siblings and their first families may be hard for our children to understand. But we also believe that maximizing the possibility of contact is in the best interests of our children and we do not want to compromise on anything so important. Different children always have different needs, regardless of how they come into a family. No two siblings will ever be the same, emotionally or intellectually or physically. Once we made the decision to have more than one child, we took on the challenge of parenting people who will require different things from us. This will be true with two open adoptions that have different levels of contact, as it will be true with many other things in years to come.
We feel that remaining open in our attitude will work out for the best for our family, even if it is impossible for us to see the exact form this will take in the future. Saying “yes” to parenting a newborn baby, over the phone, sight unseen, medical condition unknown, was the greatest leap of faith we’ve ever taken. Since that day, we have learned that parenting is more or less small leaps of faith strung together throughout the days, weeks, months and years of our children’s lives.
And we have faith in open adoption.
