When Open Stays Open

Too often I have read about Open Adoptions that don’t stay that way very long. Today a mother of loss (gave a child up for adoption) writes – I’d really like to hear from Adoptees who had or have a very open adoption. In what ways is the open adoption helpful and in what ways does it suck? What can the natural mama do over the years? All I do is obsess over adoption now – it’s always in the back or front of my mind having all this deep regret that what we did isn’t serving her or me. So what can I do, what plan can I formulate, to give my mind even the slightest bit of peace.

Another woman responds – it appears that my experience is very different from most here. My daughter is 20, and I don’t regret placing her. Yes, it was hard early on, but it truly was for the best. Her adoptive parents are truly wonderful people who have always been open to communication, etc. As she’s an adult now, I reach out to her more in a direct manner, but continue to leave the ball in her corner so to speak. I don’t want to pressure her into something. She has had a wonderful life, and I’m thankful for that. I know I wouldn’t have been happy if it was a closed adoption, so open was the best for me. I cherish her adoptive parents for being open and wonderful, and giving her the support she needed and needs. But I’ve done a bit of therapy and self reflection over the years, which has been incredibly helpful in healing who I am.

For more information on improving open adoptions, I also found this – LINK>Three Shifts to Bridge the Gap Between Birth Families and Adoptive Families for the Adoptees We Love by Lori Holden. “Adoption creates a split between a person’s biology and biography, and openness is an essential way to help adoptees heal this split.”

3 Benefits of Openness are described –

Openness strengthens an adoptee’s sense of identity.
Openness encourages an adoptee’s attachment to adoptive parent(s).
Openness can decrease an adoptee’s sense of abandonment.

Baby Box Push Back

I’ve written here before about Baby Boxes. The anonymous way to leave your baby that is popping up – not only all over the United States but all over the world. However, it appears that all is not well and good in Baby Box land and some activists are speaking out by making some realistic arguments.

Here is one example from Colorado (which seems to be out front of a lot of shifting perspectives these days). Lori Holden who writes as Lavender Luz recently testified at a hearing for Baby Boxes in Colorado. She has a lot to say – you can read it at this LINK>Colorado’s Baby Box Bill: My Testimony At The State Capitol.

It has occurred to me that Baby Boxes are a commercial business interest – the cost is $16,000 per box (plus maintenance) – while continuing an enduring failure to support mothers in crisis. And regardless of safety features, something could still go wrong related to the box itself. She notes “If we truly understood baby’s brains and what makes for secure attachment we would not encourage anonymous and impersonal Baby Boxes. We would encourage MORE connection for a vulnerable mother and her infant, not less. Baby boxes make this lifelong process of forming connection to self and others even more difficult by the disconnections inherent in such an impersonal dropoff.”

Lori shares another voice against Baby Boxes – LINK>Stop Baby Boxes Now which is “An adoptee-centered non-partisan website that serves as an educational source and tool to de-propagandize and deconstruct the Safe Haven Baby Box myth and movement.” Doubt the commercial interest ? – I found this LINK>A Scorched Earth Lawsuit – revealing. “The baby box company filed suit in Federal Court against the Miami-based traditional safe haven advocacy organization A Safe Haven for Newborns/Gloria Silverio Foundation, its founder and director Nick Silverio, the South Trail Fire Rescue District, and Amy Bollen, its public relations director, accursing them of slander, defamation, and “tortuous interference with contract or business.”

When I was trying to get original birth information for my mom, I did have brief contact with Gregory Luce – LINK>Boxes at Any Cost. He is a Minnesota-based lawyer and an adoptee rights activist. He is the founder of Adoptee Rights Law Center PLLC and the executive director of Adoptees United Inc.

Understanding A Controversy

~ from Mind Tools – Improving Solutions by Arguing For and Against Your Options

To be honest, I wasn’t aware that there was a controversy . . .

He writes – as far as I know, adoptees are primarily upset with Nancy Verrier over the fact that she made money by writing LINK>The Primal Wound. (The train of thought being adoptees own their stories and it should be our place to tell them, not the adopters.) I totally understand that train of thought but am somewhat confused why this adversarial relationship between adoptees and Verrier doesn’t extend to her successors like LINK>Lori Holden, who often doesn’t even bother attempting to center adoptees in their work and deliberately try to obfuscate the idea that adoption is traumatic for adoptees.

Blogger’s note – I am aware of and have read content from both. Since I wasn’t aware that there was a controversy, I am intrigued.

He asks – Is there something else I’m missing here, or is Verrier generally enemy no. 1 moreso than others due to the fact that her work is much more often recommended by adoptees? I also know there was some drama that went on surrounding the LINK>Reckoning With The Primal Wound documentary.

One woman writes – I always recommend ‘Journey of the Adopted Self’ (Betty Jean Lifton’s book) FIRST, it then helps validate Verrier’s findings. One adoptee responds – I honestly feel like Journey of the Adopted Self saved my life. It was big in me coming out of the “fog” and helped me to understand so many big emotions I’d had for my entire life. When the first woman was asked – would this be your primary recommendation for the support persons (parents, therapists, teachers, etc) as well as adoptees? She responds – yes, it is the first book, along with ‘The Girls Who Went Away,’ that I always recommend reading first. I have read a ton of adoption related books, some good, some meh, and some bad. Another book that I think EVERYONE should read is ‘The Child Catchers,’ for a bird’s eye view into the criminal trafficking indu$try that “adoption” truly is!

Blogger’s note – but I still don’t understand – is there a controversy or not ?

Finally an explanation from an adoptee’s perspective – IMHO, as an adopted person, the disapproval of Verrier is not so much because she is an adoptive “parent”, but rather because her book has been so highly publicized and recommended, although she has little awareness of the fact that the adopted person is an actual person, whether child or adult. Her views have been slammed, as well, because of the manner in which she has objectified her own purchased child, who quite rightly has taken exception to being used for her “mother’s” own self aggrandizing efforts. When people are advised to perceive this author as some sort of “expert” in the understanding of the complex adoption experience, who has so little awareness of the actual lived reality of the person who has been purchased, this frequently and quite rightly is seen with quite a bit of justified skepticism.

Another adoptee points out – I feel like Verrier speaks a lot of the general theoretical adopted “child” when drawing from the experiences of her adopted child and her therapeutic clients. I don’t see her as an “expert”. Adoptees are the #1 expert of the adoptee experience imo. Verrier’s theory is also often treated as scientific “fact”, but it wasn’t a scientific study at all. That being said, I believe in adoption trauma. I can appreciate that the message Nancy Verrier was putting out there was pretty “radical” to many adoptive parents, although adoptees had already been saying similar things for a long time prior. Parts of The Primal Wound resonated with me, and I know it’s an important text for a lot of adoptees. But I think 30+ years on we can start referring to other texts when recommending adoption related media to people.

Another notes – All I would add is that, in 1993, this is the book that the publishers were willing to print. That’s what it comes down to. We’ll never know how many (if any) adoptee authors pitched books and were turned down. The Primal Wound is the one that made it through, so that’s the one we got.

Field Notes from an Adoptee

This guy, Brad Ewell, now has a monthly column at lavenderluz LINK>Field Notes from an Adoptee. He also has that “mini-series” at this LINK>Empowered To Connect Podcast. There is read, “A Texas Police Officer minding his own business, Brad got a Facebook message at age 48 that completely changed his life. As he pulled the threads of his own life story, even he couldn’t have predicted the twists and turns that emerged.”

From Lori Holden’s website – Lavender Luz – Introducing Field Notes with Brad Ewell. He is a Late Discovery Adoptee. He didn’t learn he was adopted until 2019 at the age of 48. He writes – “In the four years since my discovery, I’ve reunited with much of my birth family, lost my adoptive father, hugged my biological father as he walked out of prison, lost members of my birth family, and met a lot of adoptees. I’ve also taken a hard look at adoption and how growing up adopted, and with my true story unacknowledged, may have impacted the man I grew up to be.”

It is his desire, to expand the connections he has made since then, to reach further out of the adoptee echo chamber because he doesn’t believe growth and change occur when we only talk to people who are similarly situated to us. His aim is to speak openly and honestly about adoption’s good parts as well as it’s challenging parts. He hopes to improve adoption for those we love and everyone else involved.

He invites you to email him at mpebrad@gmail.com or connect with him on Instagram: @a_late_discovery.

A Uterus With Legs ?

The issue of referring to an adopted child’s first mother as the tummy mummy came up somewhat coincidentally today but it did cause me to reflect on this again. Somehow, I always feel a bit of cringe at that phrase and the title of this blog reflects how some other people feel about it. I found that Lori Holden aka Lavender Luz did a poll. She is an Author & Speaker, Diarist & Open Adoption Advocate. She also has a podcast – LINK>Adoption: The Long View.

First what got me here. The commenter is blocked from posting/ responding for a month in a Foster/Adopt group. The reason she notes is that it isn’t ‘kind’ to mention to someone with ‘guardianship’ whose 4 year old child sees her biological parents – that agreeing/ pretending, letting child pretend that the child grew in HER belly vs reinforcing to child that she grew in ‘mama name’s ‘ tummy…. That mama ‘name’ is more respectful than tummy mummy.

Of course, there is also this – that they “saved” the child …. and have done xyz for that child – still does not change the fact that child did not grow inside her. The issue started when a photo was posted that showed a non reading age child in a shirt with letters only stating she loved her as ‘mom’… allegedly the child picked that shirt out and insisted she wear it in front of the tree….again listing all the things ‘she’ saved child from…

The commenter was blocked after mentioning that seemed passive aggressive since the sees her actual parents.

In the LINK>Poll about the term “tummy mummy”, the 300 respondents broke down this way –

66% were adopting or adoptive parents
11% were adoptees
13% had a professional or nonprofessional interest in adoption
10% had placed a child or lost a child to adoption

You might expect that with such an Adoptive-Parent-heavy sample, the results would lean positive toward use of the term “Tummy Mummy” but you would be incorrect.

61% either didn’t like the term (26%) or detested it (35%)
25% were either neutral (12%) or found it acceptable (13%)
Only 5% loved it
The remaining 9% chose “Other,” which allowed for commentary.

Some of their comments included – Feels like a white-wash term trying to sanitize truth. It diminishes the woman’s motherhood. Original family isn’t reflected in this phrase, which seems intent on removing all important connections and substituting them with a biological detail that isn’t even accurate.

This one was interesting – I hate “tummy mommy.” When people told me babies grew in their moms’ tummies, I pictured babies swimming their stomachs with all the food. And babies popping out of tummies, Aliens-style.

Another one noted – My husband is a reunited adult adoptee. I actually shared this with him and he made a vomiting noise.

Another adoptee noted – young children are not given enough credit for understanding that we can have two mothers that love us, regardless if one can’t be there at the moment. I know for me personally it would have helped me tremendously to have been able to see and talk freely about my mother as this real person.

And this – “Tummy mummy” makes her sound like [my long-gone birth mother] was a surrogate rather than a human being making a difficult decision. It reduces her down to a particular “role”.

It Was Divinely Orchestrated

So the Texas State Senator, Donna Campbell, appeared on my radar Sunday when I received an email notification from The Adoption Files blog by Ande Stanley. She writes – “One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the unrestricted access to original birth certificates in the state of Texas has been the Texas State Senator Donna Campbell – (I add, who not coincidentally is) an adoptive mother who has voted against allowing access every year since 2015.” Texas Monthly has had Senator Donna Campbell on their Worst Legislators list.

State Senator Donna Campbell as an adoptive mother shares her story in a Houston Chronical article featuring state officials that have adopted (there is a bit of an infuriating paywall but I include the link anyway). Her voice was described as breaking when she talks about promising her youngest daughter’s birth mother that she would “take good care of the baby” and calls the adoption divinely orchestrated. Pro-Life legislator Donna Campbell says also that she actually said to the birth mother, “You had a choice nine months ago, and you chose life and you will be blessed, and I will always take care of this child.” So like a politician to do double duty with their recorded statements.

It happened when she went to the hospital nursery to give a message to another doctor, and she heard people discussing a baby. “There was conversation about, ‘This baby is so cute’ — everybody wanted to take the baby home,” Campbell recalled. “They said, ‘Do you want to take the baby home?’” She said it turned out that the mother had been headed from San Antonio to Houston to find an adoption agency and went into labor in Columbus. Campbell and her husband had been talking about adoption but hadn’t moved forward on it. The decision was made quickly, and she asked to talk to the mother to thank her for the little girl she named Anna Beth after her own mother. “It happened just like that. But you know, so many others that would like to adopt, it doesn’t come that easy,” Campbell said. “This is truly divinely orchestrated.” God meant it to be – a lot of adoptive mothers will say that.

Lori Holden wrote Donna Campbell an open letter – Let’s talk – adoptive mom to adoptive mom – on the Lavender Luz website. “I understand having fears about adoption and, by extension, fears about making changes in adoption law. Change can be scary. For decades many states have had laws on the books to protect people from the humiliation of unwed pregnancy or the shame of infertility or the stigma of being born to unmarried parents. In response, we have put up walls to hide the shame and stigma and humiliation.”

“One of those walls is the practice of closing birth records for one group of people who, due to circumstances of birth, to this day do not enjoy a civil right that all other citizens in your state do. It is time to re-evaluate the existence of this wall, as so many of your Texas bipartisan colleagues in the Senate and House were eager to do at the close of the legislative session last month.”

When you say privacy I wonder if you are confusing it with secrecy, which takes simple privacy and wraps it in toxic fear and shame. Privacy is chosen, secrecy is often imposed. Secrecy exists because shame exists. With openness, by unsealing records and providing equal access for all, we can dissolve the shame and vanquish the need for secrecy. Regarding the privacy issue, accurate birth records should be kept private from the public but not secret from the parties directly involved.

As you may already realize, the Internet and advances in DNA testing have enabled birth mothers and birth fathers and their now-adult children to find each others’ identities by skirting laws that were constructed in that era of shame and secrecy. Psychotherapist Karen Caffrey, who is an adult adoptee with birth family from Texas, says, “Family genetic secrets are very soon going to be a thing of the past.”

There is more in her open letter at the link I’ve supplied.

The Open Hearted Way

Headed into the future, I will always prefer a mother raising the baby she gave birth to. That is hands down the best outcome as far as I am concerned. But as a realist, adoptions are still going to happen. Today I caught a mention of this book – I’ve not read it but the intention behind it seems to be a good one.

Prior to 1990, fewer than five percent of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, ninety percent or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering.

There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how? Open adoption isn’t just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It’s a lifestyle that may feel intrusive at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of circumstances. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the child involved is paramount.

It is said that this book offers readers the tools and the insights to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to arrive at answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up.

Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, Lori Holden (an adoptive parent) and Crystal Hass (a birth mother) share the pathways to successfully navigating the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. The most important focus to center on is putting the adopted child’s best interests FIRST as the guiding principle. It is possible for the families involved to travel the path of open adoption by mitigating whatever challenges may arise.

This book is said to be more than a how-to. More a mindset, a heartset, that can be learned and internalized. All the parents involved CAN choose to act from their love for the child and go forward with honesty. The goal of everyone involved should be to help their child grow up whole.

The take-away ? The adoptive/birth family relationship is not an “either-or.” Within the framework of an open adoption that works for everyone involved, it has to be an “and.” Adoption creates a split between a person’s biology and their biography. Openness in adoption is an effective way to heal that split when the reality is – the adoption is – and must be lived through.

Lori Holden’s website – https://lavenderluz.com/. Podcast link – The Long View.