Hello everyone.  I've been lurking for a few months, connected with Dawn through LJ.  http://integritysinger.livejournal.com is me.

I'm an adoptive mother of three children who are biological siblings.  We are in a semi open adoption meaning the children have ongoing contact with their extended family but limited contact with their first mother.

The children are asking, nay, begging that we adopt again.  They have unanimously ganged up on my husband and me, relentlessly discussing when, who, what,where, why, and how we will extend our family.  To quote my oldest, "mom, just go to the hospital and pick out a baby like you did with Maren," because that's her perception of how her younger sister joined our family.

Truthfully, my husband and I would like to have more children too.  Before we married, we discussed our desires about family size and having both come from large families, agreed that we'd like the same. 

Growing up, we both had friendships with adoptees from China.  Our perceptions of their identity struggles and difficulties with their adoption stories made us leary of international adoptions.  As adults, we've made friendships with stateside adoptees in closed adoptions who seem to have similar struggles with identity and their adoption stories.  So it begs the question, is it international adoption that is the issue, or closed adoption?  And if the answer is the later, then just how do you create an open international adoption situation?

That's problem number one.  Problem number two may be my pontificating, but I think I might have a legitimate concern. The children have each other; sharing their adoption story and identity, working through their adoptiveness, and enjoying their first family (indeed, many times when we are with their first family, it is my husband and I who feel adopted!).  So is it logical to assume that adding a sibling or two from a different first family(or families) and even a different country with possibly a different race who don't share in their first family connections and their biological connections will create a HUGE issue for all of the children as they process their relationships with one another and their adoptiveness?  And just how do I as an adoptive mother juggle openness with multiple first families?  Holidays are already pretty chaotic going to three different family gatherings.  And we haven't even approached the issue with the children's first family to find out if they'd acknowledge and accept the kids' other adopted siblings. 

 I mean ,wow. This just looks like a loaded gun to me.  Or am I making a mountain out of a mole hill?  Is it enough to just extend our family on our desires alone and roll with the punches later?  Do we adopt internationally or press our luck again with a stateside, local adoption? 

All that and I've not even mentioned the fact that two of my kids have challenges/disabilities and would a first mother even consider placing her child with a family that has disabled kids?  Or do we just play that hand and adopt more disabled kids? 

Ugh.  I was hoping writing this out would help me sort it through.  It's only served to confuse me more. 

help please.  It's likely you've got more brains than i do at the mo.

Today marks the 6th month "anniversary" of our returning home from Ethiopia with our two sons. I haven't mentioned it to anyone, am not celebrating it, nor am I feeling overly sentimental about it. It's a prompt for thoughtfulness, and it reminded me of all of my initial hopes for openness.

Our adoption isn't open in the traditional, domestic adoption sense. We did meet our sons' family when we traveled to Ethiopia, so we "know" them as well as you can know anyone you've met once, who speak an entirely different language and live an entirely different life. One reason why we chose to adopt from Ethiopia was the potential for openness, which is unusual in international adoption. Our sons don't have to wonder who their family is. We have pictures, videos, and talk about them as often as we can. The potential for traveling there in the future and seeing them again is not only possible, but probable, depending upon how the boys feel about it.

However, nothing prepares you for meeting the family. It is so incredibly momentous and at the same time so surreal and ephemeral. We were sharing something intimate, the boys, yet we were so awkward and apart. We were linked by an interpreter and our searching eyes -- theirs to ours, ours to theirs.

There's a great, great article in this month's Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larsen titled, "Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption". I encourage you all to read it; it's a terrific piece. An excerpt from the article:

Is it ethical for an adoptive parent to push for information about her child's birth family? Or should that be a decision left to the adoptee? And what about the birth family's right to privacy? "You can't compare an open adoption in the U.S. with an open adoption process internationally," says Susan Soon keum Cox, vice president of public policy at Holt International, an Oregon adoption agency whose founders launched transnational adoptions in the United States. The child of a Korean woman and a British soldier, Cox, who was adopted in 1956, found her Korean half brothers when she was an adult. Yet she cautions against too-hasty birth family searches. "The stigma of adoption in many countries is still very powerful and very real. Women place their children for adoption and slip back into society. It's a very different thing than the acceptance of single parents and adoption in the U.S." In China, currently the greatest source of transnational adoptees—6,493 U.S. "orphan" visas were issued to Chinese adoptees in 2006—relinquishing a child is illegal, and families sometimes abandon their children to avoid running afoul of the one-child policy; birth mothers found to have done this can face prosecution.
...
Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as "rescuing" children. "There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption," he says. "But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment."

HeatherS' Half-formed Thought really got me thinking - cross-posting my reaction, originally posted here, with a couple of minor edits for clarity.