The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don’t need to be part of the Open Adoption Bloggers list to participate, or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you’re thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table. The prompts are meant to be starting points–feel free to adapt or expand on them.
Publish your response during the next two weeks–linking back here so your readers can browse other participating blogs–and leave a link to your post in the comments. Using a previously published post is perfectly fine; I’d appreciate it if you’d add a link back to the roundtable. If you don’t blog, you can always leave your thoughts directly in the comments.
Are there any things that you don’t want the other members of your triad to know—or that you don’t want to know about them? I’ve heard first mothers talk about not sharing their birth stories with adoptive parents because those are for the adoptees and for themselves only. I’ve also heard of adoptees concealing their reunions from adoptive parents so as not to cause them pain. What don’t you want shared in your adoptive relationships?
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When C was pregnant, I remember saying—many times—that if she chose to or had to raise this baby, she’d do it and she’d do it beautifully. I remember the distinct first impression I had of her was of how competent she seemed and how insecure. Surely, someone who knew how to care for horses, and who’d had steady work (albeit years earlier), could—if she wanted to—figure out how to shift priorities and gears and care for a baby. And here she was trying to eat well and smoke fewer cigarettes. She wasn’t doing other things that might harm a growing fetus. Bottom line: until she decided, after the baby was born, that is, to relinquish custody, the choice was hers; the baby was hers. And I so strongly supported her having that choice.
Let me be crystal clear here: I very, and I mean the most very ever, wanted her to feel her intended plan still worked after she gave birth. I felt attached to “our” Valentine’s baby, or the idea of “our” Valentine’s baby.
Even more than my desire, though, my belief that this was her decision and that the baby’s wellbeing was assured regardless, because it took a lot of love to carry a pregnancy with as much grace and goodwill and concern when intending to let that baby go.
The first father had wanted C to have the baby (emphatically against the idea of abortion, emphatically against the idea of adoption) despite not having helped out financially or physically or emotionally throughout the pregnancy. There’s more to that story, but what’s pertinent right now is this: we were all agreed his taking custody would be disastrous.
Over time, the more I know C and the closer I am to her—and her family—the more I know the hope that the choices—her home or ours—are somehow equally positive possible homes for Saskia, has changed. The part that changed was my feeling C did make the best decision for her daughter. And the reason I don’t want to talk about that is I feel guilty for feeling it (and knowing her grandparents, aunts, and uncle concur; C does, too, I think). Still, even if it’s true; with us she’s able to swing on a swing with an adult hanging close on any given afternoon whereas we know she’d be pulled around with C trying to scrape up money for gas for the car and diapers or milk, I hate knowing this and I don’t want to have to talk about it. I want, somehow, to be able to affirm to C that her having made that choice can remain sad for her forever, and in so doing, is a tacit assent that had she chosen differently, Saskia would still be thriving. I honestly don’t know how to reckon my wish that the choices were somehow on par with one another with my belief that Saskia is in the best place with us.
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When C gets into scrapes—financial, car trouble, friend with arrest warrant—I kind of wish I didn’t know how precarious her day-to-day life often feels. At the same time, I would rather her feel comfortable sharing anything with us—we represent relatively “together” people in her corner, after all, family—and thus I do want to know, with the caveat that I wish those things didn’t happen so routinely in her life. I wish that my first set of assumptions, that she was a competent person who’d fallen into a mini-trough in life, still seemed the case.
Hard as it is to hear when she feels wistful about her decision, I truly do want to hear that and believe I should be more than willing to do so forever if she needs.
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In terms of what I don’t want C to know, exactly, I guess it’s this—and that in writing about adoption, I write about her and that sometimes what I write doesn’t seem flattering (that’s the wrong word, but what I’m saying is I can’t only stick to the all would end well story, much as I might want to, not if I’m writing a true story from my perspective, as seems to be what I’m doing over time). I don’t want to compromise the love and trust we share. At the same time, I want to put this idea into the world: that adoption comes with inherent challenges and inexorable sadness and huge gifts. I can’t do that without sharing the why of believing all this to be true. Our experience represents a tiny part of that why.
