by Dawn Friedman

"In my mind I had envisioned that I might be present at Elizabeth's birth," Jane remembers, recollecting her daughter's adoption in 1999. "But April [their daughter's birth mother] did not desire to meet with us face to face. So the social workers from our agency were the ones who got Elizabeth from the hospital and placed her in our arms. It was a great moment and full of joy and happiness and satisfaction for all of us but right off the bat it wasn't what we might had pictured in terms of open adoption."

Jane and her husband worked with a pro-open adoption agency and through their trainings and her own research, Jane felt excited about adopting in a fully open adoption. Unfortunately, her expectations clashed with the reality of her experience. Jane hoped that openness would make their lives easier; instead it's made it more complicated.

April has visited only a handful of times since Elizabeth was born and Jane finds herself yearning for more – more visits, more pictures and more letters.

"All the literature and books I'd read pertaining to open adoption described a scenario that was very different to what we were involved in," she says. "I talked to maybe one or two other adoptive parents and frankly I just muddle through."

Breaking New Ground
In the past twenty years, openness has become increasingly accepted. Many adoption professionals now facilitate fully open adoptions, where adoptive and birth parents meet and form their own relationships, including the exchange of identifying information. Adoption experts say that openness gives families – birth and adoptive – more control over
their relationships and allows adoptees to integrate their adoption stories sooner. Also, as public perception of open adoption increases through television and magazine stories, many potential birth parents come to adoption with the expectation that they can choose a family who will allow them to build some kind of a relationship even after they
have surrendered their parental rights.

For families who choose openness the challenge is learning how to negotiate and manage a relationship that is – for most of us – without precedent. While we have a cultural stereotype about open adoption – one that includes adoptive parents attending the labor, entrustment ceremonies as the child moves from one family to another, and regular
happy visits – we have not yet had time to create a more diverse social picture.

Meanwhile, the adoption industry has not caught up with our need for support after placement. Like Jane and her family, many adoptive parents wonder how to handle unexpected scenarios. What happens when birth families drift in and out of their children's lives? How do we talk about birth siblings born before or after the adoption? Birth families, too, struggle to negotiate relationships. What happens when adoption agreements aren't honored? How do they balance the demands of their lives with the needs of the children they have placed?

One-size Does Not Fit All
Families are complicated and every adoption is unique. As families build relationships, it's important that both sets of parents have a chance to examine their beliefs about adoption and why they chose openness. An agency, lawyer or facilitator should help families discover their values and their limits instead of automatically pushing them towards openness.

Dawn Smith-Pliner, founder of the Vermont non-profit adoption agency Friends in Adoption, says that this kind of work is difficult in the middle of a the emotional intensity of a new adoption and understands why some families want a pattern to base their plans on. But, she says, "A cookie-cutter approach to adoption doesn't work."

"You have to be honest with yourself," she says. "As an agency we try to inform our families so they are making decisions based on reality and not on their fears. My view is that going from the words or the commitment of the open adoption to the living of open adoption needs to go slowly."

It's helpful for families to know that their open adoption does not
need to look like anyone else's open adoption to be successful. Instead families need to get grounded in their own values.

"I was really flying blind," Jane says. "I didn't want to do something that would be negative for my daughter. Then we went to this conference and one of the presenters made the statement to the extent that children were adopted need to incorporate new aspects of their sense of self. And that it's easier to do this in a sooner phase than a later phase. So I told myself that it may be difficult and challenging but better now then later."

For Jane, reminding herself of why she and her husband chose an open adoption helps her to persevere in a relationship that is more one-sided and less predictable than she expected it to be.

Shared Hopes, Flexible Expectations
Brenda Romanchik, MSW, founder and director of Insights, an open adoption support organization, is also a birth mother who placed her son in an open adoption more than two decades ago. She says it's all right for adoptive parents to share their expectations with birth parents.

"There are a lot of self esteem issues in placing a child," she says. "And some birth parents believe they don't have anything to offer. There's not a whole lot out there and there are no role models – you don't see involved birth parents on television and you don't see them in books."

In other words, a birth parent who is not as present isn't necessarily disinterested; she just may not know how much her presence matters. Adoptive parents can actively seek more contact or more consistency by sharing why they believe it's important.

"Sometimes a little guilt is a good thing," says Romanchik gently. "If [birth parents] made promises and they're not following through and the child know the promises were made then maybe guilt is an ok thing. Children have needs, too, and it's not only about the birth parents."

Becoming Kin
Adoptive parents do need to accept that ultimately they have limited control over the other side of the relationship. Part of an open adoption includes accepting the vagaries of a brand new family. Sometimes this means taking on the additional challenges of a whole new set of extended family members.

Leah's son, Marc, came to their family is a fully open adoption two years ago. She and her husband, Jack, enjoy an easy, comfortable relationship with both their son's birth parents. However, the birth grandparents are another matter.

"I don't like my son's birth mom's mother but it's not because of adoption," says Leah. "I just don't like her."

Open adoptions can sometimes become full-fledged family affairs. In fact, some adoptive parents discover they are having more contact with extended birth family than the immediate birth parents because the birth parents may be busier with other children, school or work.

Sharon Kaplan Roszia is the program manager for the Kinship Center, a California adoption and foster care agency. She says her organization's name is meant to illustrate a greater truth: Adoption makes adoptive parents kin to their children's birth family.

"No relationship lives happily ever after and open adoption is not simple," Roszia says. "When you're making decisions about boundaries, do what you would do if it was any other kind of relative."

For Leah, this meant being clear about her expectations.

"Who doesn't have a relative that they don't like?" she says. "I mean, we all have a drunk Uncle Larry or a mean Grandma or whatever. We did need to set some boundaries in the beginning with her, like don't refer to [our son's birth mother] as his real mom and be sure to call before you come over."

Kaplan also says that adoptive parents shouldn't be afraid of being honest with their children. "Your child deserves to understand what their birth family's strength and weaknesses are."

Looking For Support
Sometimes the issues faced by families in open adoption are much bigger. Then families connected by adoption need outside support and finding that support can be difficult. Jane says she hoped to find some concrete suggestions at a conference but came home disappointed.

"There is so much effort and energy into converting people to
openness," she says. "But there's a failure to acknowledge that many of us no longer need to be converted. Now we need to know how to do it."

Sharon Kaplan Roszia agrees that post-adoption support services are too few and far between for adoptive families.

"We have marriage counselors, we have relationship counselors out there," she says. "We really don't have enough for adoptive families. We talk about post adoption services but this is a very specific kind. It's about human relationships unfolding. Unfortunately, our society doesn't quite understand the newly designed kinship relationships and so there aren't a lot of people who know quite what to do with them."

Roszia's agency, the Kinship Center, has had a post-adoption support group for families in adoption that  has met for four decades. The meetings are for birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees and she says that this peer-support is invaluable for families.

"Part of this is finding the way other people do it and finding other mentors and other points of view," she explains. "Very frequently it's the other members of the group who help folks work it out. We watch people grow up in his."

Lisa adopted her 14-year old daughter, Marjorie, in a fully open adoption. She makes a point of reaching out to other open adoption families by going back to speak at her agency.

"In some ways I feel it's my obligation," she says. "I have learned so much over the last fifteen years about adoption from adoptees, first mothers, other adoptive parents and social workers that I need to give something back. So I share my experiences openly and honestly and hope that it somehow allows prospective adoptive families or families new to
open adoption to jump the learning curve."

Lisa feels that it's important for family members to get advice from someone with the perspective that openness is worth the struggle. Members of families that were formed in closed or semi-open (maintaining relationships through a third-party) adoptions simply can't understand the unique challenges of a fully open adoption.

"Talking about it with my friends and family wasn't necessarily helpful," she says. "It was even more foreign to them than it was to me. So if I had had someone to share my fears and triumphs and just generally reassure me that I wasn't warping my child, it would have been great."

Roszia says that while she continues to be frustrated by the lack of support for adoptive families, she is inspired by the successes she sees.

"I'm heartened that open adoptions work almost all the time," she says. "I'm heartened that people have good hearts and struggle with the issues for the good of their kids."

She describes a bar mitzvah she recently attended where the 13-year old was surrounded by both his birth and adoptive family. There is a part of the ceremony where the young man is hoisted up in a chair and paraded around the room.

"There was his adoptive dad on one side and his birth dad on the other," she recalls. "He's a big boy and it took a lot of people to hold him up but they were all there, under him, lifting him up. And I thought, now isn't that a metaphor for open adoption! All these people are there to support him! That's what it's all about!"

This is the article that inspired this site. I wrote it on assignment for a very nice magazine. Unfortunately, it got killed. Happily it got killed because they hired a regular open adoption columnist based, in part, by their strong belief that open adoption needs to be supported. I thought I'd share it here.