Adoption – Open or Closed – What’s Best ?

Today, in modern adoption, there are more open adoptions than there were in the past.

In an open adoption, a young adoptee may grow up alongside the parents who conceived them and gave birth, though these parents are not part of the family household the adoptee grows up within. Even so, there is sharing time together, visiting and writing to one another. In an open adoption, you see and get to know your original parents but you don’t have them as your parents.

Up until recently, most adoptions were closed and so, in order to know the people an adoptee was born to, they had to seek a reunion after they became an adult; or at the least, a much older child, as in a teenager.

If it were actually possible for any adoptee to compare the outcomes they would have experienced with each method, what would they choose in full awareness ? Would they want to know their original parents throughout their whole lives ? Do they think that knowing them would make their lives better or worse ?

Of course, there is no such choice for adoptees. Open adoption seeks to make the adoption experience better by taking away the secrecy and shame.

Are the issues the same for an adoptee whether it was an open or closed adoption ? Or does an open adoption simply create a whole new set of issues that didn’t exist within
the close adoption system ?

In a good reunion process, the adoptee is able to explain to the original parent(s) – their feelings of hurt, abandonment and/or anger – which were all caused by the decision of their original parents to surrender their child for adoption.

Can any child go through something as traumatic as being given up and still process it all at the same time – are they able to talk to the original parent about the feelings common among all adoptees at the same time as they are being experienced ? This is not an answerable question as the two kinds of adoption experience do not allow such comparisons.

It can be quite painful for an adoptee to hear about a birth mother who is satisfied with having relinquished her child for adoption. Yet, many such mothers were absolutely convinced at the time they made that choice that they were doing the best thing for their child.

Years later, many birth mothers wish they had kept their child, and that is why there are groups of adoptees actively working to encourage young unwed or troubled expectant mothers to make an effort to parent first before making a decision to relinquish their child to adoption.

The fact is – adoption exists – and it will likely always exist because there is a need and/or desire for that in some circumstances. The hard truth is that not all parents to be actually want to devote themselves to raising a child.

In seeking to reform the practice of adoption, the more we are able to ask piercing questions, explore with those involved the reason for their decisions and just plain understand at a very deep level all aspects of the experience, the better we will be able to shape the future of adoption into better outcomes for all concerned.

Blame

I recently read an essay about “blame” in adoption. Many adoptees struggle with the realities of their childhood. It is not only the adoptee or their original parents who suffer but the people who adopt these children sometimes suffer as well.

Adoptive parents may feel they should be able to take the grief of adoption away for their adopted child or may even wrongly believe they could have somehow prevented it in the first place.

When I met my nephew’s adoptive mother (who is a loving, caring and supportive person in his life), she expressed that she had had such feelings as well. Learning about my youngest sister’s reality, helped lessen her feelings of guilt.

I am able to see how in the case of all of the adoptions in my own family, thankfully, the outcomes have been good. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky that all of the people involved have been good people.

Goodness does not alleviate the suffering. It does not worsen the suffering and that is a kind of blessing under the various circumstances.

Motherhood – Post Adoption

An infertile couple unable to conceive are generally focused on their own needs. Some have a rescue complex. They hide their own issues behind a desire to save some poor child from a fate worse than death.

What is rarely talked about are the long-term mental and physical effects upon the original mother from surrendering her baby to others for adoption.

It would only be natural to expect a woman who has carried a baby in her womb for nine whole months to experience some short-term grief.

The reality is that there is often a long-term lasting impact. How long you ask – 4 years, 25 years, forever ? Just as every person is different, every mother who loses a child will have differing abilities to put the loss behind her and go on with her life. Never does she ever truly forget.

So, a relinquishing mother may go on, will certainly have some kind of life but she is generally forced to live a code of silence that carries with it a toxic aftermath of effects upon her physical and mental health continuing throughout her life.

Some mothers feel compelled to search for their child. These women may be prone to a lowered self-esteem, anxiety and may worry about the well-being of their child. These women may require more doctor visits and most will attribute their physical and mental problems over the years to the loss of their child to adoption.

Many of these women had parental pressure to surrender their child to adoption. Certainly, one of my sisters did. One of my grandmothers may have. The indications are there – she was married but separated from her husband for some unknown reason. She was sent away from Tennessee to Virginia to have that baby. I doubt she was supposed to bring my mother back to Tennessee with her but she did.

I would say that ALWAYS, these women had little or no emotional support during the pregnancy and after the relinquishment. There would have been few, more likely no, opportunities to talk about their feelings related to the surrender. There is overall a lack of social support for their depression.

In letters written by natural mothers post-adoption, there is an intensity of feeling and a need to describe the emotional pain they continue to carry within them.

Even when comfortable with their decision to relinquish, as my youngest sister definitely was, very proactive, very concerned about the outcome for her baby – I do not doubt that she still felt a loss, some pain and mourning (even if not consciously aware it was that) and based upon a letter she sent to her son during his teen years, she did have a continuing sense of caring for that long vanished child.

Many wounded mothers live then for decades with shame and a societally enforced silence over their “secret” children because no one really wants to hear about it after a short period of time. For the mother, there is no end to it except her eventual death.