Open Adoption Support » visits

My nerves are shot dealing with our daughter’s birth family. Help!

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:11:55 +0000

I have a fairly difficult open adoption situation. Our birth mother was very young when she gave birth and she is still unable to drive. Her grandmother brings her to the visits which are in mutually agreed upon public locations. Her boyfriend also comes along. We take our entire family as these visits are usually our one activity for our weekend. My 5-year old son is beginning to have a hard time. He’s adopted from Guatemala and is jealous because his sister is getting all of this attention from her “birth family.” I don’t want to take him anymore, but I don’t want to hurt the birth family’s feelings either. They are pretty easily upset…

The situation is difficult to say the least… The birth mother also wants my daughter to still call her “Mommy”. I can’t quite accept that. My daughter is only 2 years old. She was 6-weeks old when we were granted custody, but was 5 months old before the adoption was completed in court! Please help! My nerves are shot dealing with this family. I have nightmares of the
birth mother showing up at our doorstep in the middle of the night because she has had a falling out with her family… HELP!!!

I care about the children that my placed son first father has had with his wife. Is this unhealthy and weird?

Anonymous — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:00:50 +0000

I care about the children that my placed son first father has had with his wife. Is this unhealthy and weird? FYI, the first father and I visit together and have had all the same contact from the very beginning. When he became married, his wife came with him to the visits. So she had brought her children(2y and 1y) to the visits as well, three times now she has been at visits with the first father and myself. Just telling you so you know that I don’t just randomly care about kids I have never met.

I care about her too, the first fathers wife, as a person, really I do! Is this unhealthy and wrong? Recently I have had a issue with her, she blocked me from her commenting on her online videos that she has available to the whole world, but now, not me.

Would it be fair for me to ask for our child’s birthmother to work on her relationship with the birthfather?

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:33:31 +0000

My daughters birthparents don’t speak. She lied to him about the pregnancy and so he didn’t find out about my daughter until shortly before she was born. Since then, our birthfather has tried to be in touch with our birthmother, but she refuses to speak with him. We had to have separate meetings during the adoption process because she refused to be in a room with him. And since then, he has texted & emailed & called her and she refuses any contact. I don’t believe he has any poor intention at all .. he seems to lover and miss her and seems to want to mourn the loss of parenting their daughter together.

Would it be fair for me to ask for her to work on her relationship with him? My husband & I very much believe that they should be friends (they created our daugther together afterall) and that it would be great for our daughter to be able to have visits with them both at the same time. Not every time, but sometimes. Do I have the rite to ask that?

Is it normal for an adoptive mom to make promises but then, somehow, forget that promises were made?

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:26:55 +0000

I am a first mom who has had limited contact mostly through social media (book of faces) and have had about a dozen visits in almost six years. My question is this, what compels an adoptive mom(or dad)to say one thing, and do another?

For example, agreeing to post pictures, but then not doing that. I am currently frustrated because my requests for pictures mostly go unanswered and the other day my sons adoptive mom messaged me that she HAD posted pictures recently, this is not the case, obviously, either that or she has not realized that she likely made them private somehow.

This double talk has really bothered me from day one, where she will say something like ‘I will call you’ and then that call never happens, and when she gets a call from ME she gets all weird about it and everything, like it was something totally unexpected. I honestly think it is kind of her personality, because I can see on her profile(book of faces) that her friends are often asking for her to call them, etc.

I just do not understand why it is so difficult for her to do exactly as she promised, I did not ask for anything before she promised, but I am the kind of person, if you say something, I hold you to every single word you say. I would expect the same for me, I do exactly as I say I will do, and people are often surprised, this is annoying.

So… is it normal for an adoptive mom to make promises but then, somehow, forget that promises were made? I get that life is busy, but I really am losing my patients.

No related posts.

How do we approach grandmother about her canceling visits?

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:27:02 +0000

I am the adoptive mom of a 5 year DD. We have had an open adoption since birth although birthmom makes little effort to see or communicate with her except through facebook.

We have had visits with Maternal Birth grandmother since DD was 18 months. Birth Gram has since adopted our DD older sister whom she has had custody of since our DD’s birth. The girls love each other dearly and know they are sisters and although we usually have a little rough patch following a visit, the visit is well worth it.

My problem is it seems every time we make plans the grandmother cancels last minute and we have to reschedule. DD has been to her house to spend the night and it goes well but now that we have done that a couple of times it seems like that’s all she wants to do. We’ve always gotten along well in the past but am feeling like she doesn’t want us in the picture. I don’t want to stop visits but hate to see my DD disappointed so often and beginning to feel like maybe we shouldn’t have had her have a sleepover with her sister.

Has anyone else had to deal with this? If so, how?

Should we have our child’s birth mom come to visit at our house?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:21:57 +0000

We are in an “open” adoption where we have visits, etc., but always at a netural location. We visited the birth mother at her house before placement and although she knows what city we live in, we have never given her our address or invited her to our house (and she has never asked for either). Our child is 3 years old and I’m feeling guilty about never having her to our house: if she trusted us enough to be parents to her child, we should give her the same degree of trust. At the same time, once we go there, we can never go back and my husband is not comfortable going there yet (maybe in 5+ years). For those of you who are birth parents, how do you feel if you have not been invited to the adoptive parents’ house? And for those of you who are adoptive parents, have any of you invited the birth parent over only to regret it later?

Our daughter’s birth parents recently separated and visits are now awkward. Any advice?

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:15:19 +0000

Our daughter is 3 1/2. We have an open adoption with her birth family. Our visits have been every 3 months with birth Mom, Dad and 1/2 sister. We love them and are thankful every day for our “blessing”. Recently they have separated. Today was our first visit since the separation and it was eventually a great visit, but it was uncomfortable for me, I felt like I was in the middle. They did not talk to each other through out the visit. Should we offer to have separate visits for them? and if so how often. We try to keep a balance in our daughters life and I cannot see 8 visits/year either separate or scheduled on the same day would be healthy for her. We don’t want to make them unconfortable with forced joint visits or make them uncomfortable by offering separate visits. Any advice?

Birth mom is not respecting our boundaries. Help!

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:38:48 +0000

I am an adoptive mother of one child, age 2. We have an open adoption with her birthmother but no contact with birthfather (his choice). We have for the past two years struggled to find a happy place in this relationship with our birthmother. We have had issues with gift giving, over staying her welcome, claiming we are not making her apart of our family and even her stating she should have no boundaries. We started out three months before our daughter was born with visits to her birthmom. It was a great time to get to know each other. After our daughter was born it was visits every 2-3months. After many uncomfortable situations and some not so nice emails from our birthmother we decided to only visit once every 6 months. It became too emotionally straining to see her more often. Now we are trying to find a happy place but she keeps stating that if she cannot see her daughter whenever she wants to and is allowed to give her gifts whenever she wants to then she does not want to be involved at all. We have even tried to go back to square one- writting letters back and forth, which only lasted two months then yet another letter from her stating we changed after her daughter was born and she does not feel like family, and wants to see her often and be totally involved in our lives like family is. We still send updates monthly with tons of pictures each time to keep our communication open. We do understand we opened up too much too soon with this young lady. She was invited to the baby shower, baptism and over to our house on several occasions. But after too many uncomfortable instances where she ignores the limits we have set, we want to pull back some. We want to have family occasions with out our birthmother there. She does not seem to get that and insists she is family and should be involved. We did not invite her to our daughters birthday party it was only godparents and grandparents, not our whole family. We did visit her on our daughters actual birthday to celebrate together, but that was not good enough. What do we do if we do not feel comfortable seeing her whenever she wants a visit? How do you get her to stop sending gifts in the mail every couple months? How do we find common ground again? We have on several occasions offered to meet and talk with a social worker and she will NOT do that. Please help!

How do I make our visits work in Foster to Adopt?

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:05:12 +0000

We are in the final stages of a Foster to Adopt placement adoption of our 6.5 year old son. It has been a long and drawn out court process for this little guy and he has had multiple moves. His first mother, unfortunately for her, was born affected with FAS. This has been the cause of her losing her two children and being unable to accept and understand both the process and the end result. During our last court proceeding regarding access for the Birth mother, M, the judge has decided that 2 yearly visits are adequate for her to have access to our boy. I wish that it hadn’t been court ordered, not because we wouldn’t have tried for an open relationship with her anyways, but because the dates are pretty well set in stone so that we cannot be flexible in accommodating the visits. Anyways, I digress… In all honestly, I am very aprehensive and fearful for this first visit. I don’t want to mess it up, I don’t want it to become confrontational and I surly don’t want it to be at all negative for our son. How do we set boundaries for M when I am not sure she understands what that means? Our son has transistioned on his own over the last year from calling her Mommy M to just calling her M and I don’t know how that will confuse him if she continues to just carry on and call herself his mom. I don’t know how to deal with what will I imagine to be a huge barrage of gift giving on this visit as well. During all of her last visits with him he would come home with a trunk load of presents. Should I be getting our social worker to request no gifts, limited gifts? I don’t know. I guess what I am mostly asking is anecdotes or ideas on how to make this first visit go smoothly and as painlessly as possible when she thinks that we ‘stole’ him. Which of course is not the case, we were just the last family placed with him before he was finally released from foster care placement to an adoptive placement opportunity. Is there anything I should be doing or giving her that might help? I thought maybe making her a photo album of the last 6 months (that’s how long its been since she has seen him). Sorry that this is such a long post. Maybe I am really just over thinking things….

Explaining differences in openness to my daughters?

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:18:27 +0000

We are the proud adoptive parents of 2 wonderful little girls. Kendra is 3 & Christa is 18 months. They have different birth/ first moms. Kendra’s mom had a difficult childhood & said it was always confusing & difficult to have a lot of different adults coming & going in her life. Mom said that she would love letters & pictures, but felt like visits weren’t in Kendra’s best interest. Mom also said she wanted to make sure that Kendra knew that we were her parents, the people she had to answer to & deal with. Mom said if Kendra wanted to meet as an adult, she would be happy to meet, but not before. We assurred mom that if done right, visit could work & be an asset. Mom declined & we haven’t heard from her, although we do send pictures & letters regularly.

Christa’s mom initially had much the same idea. The plan started changing almost the second Christa was born & has evolved into an open adoption with periodic visits. The problem is that initially we didn’t include Kendra in these family visits, but since there is a half-sibling that Kendra’s age, and making other arrangements for Kendra was another level of complexity, it has become a whole family affair. It seems to be working.

The catch is that Kendra, a bright 3 year old, has started asking questions. Specifically “I’ve met Christa’s birthmom, why haven’t I met mine?” Luckily, she didn’t seem upset when she asked, but it did catch us of guard. It wasn’t even around a visit & seemed to come out of the blue. We told her maybe someday we can see her. While it is true, we extend invites to her her & they may meet when Kendra is an adult, it seems unlikely that she will meet her in the near future. We don’t want to stretch the truth and just want to do what is best for Kendra. How would others approach this?