When a Door Closes

First off, no, it's not a Chinese baby joke. 


It is a real fortune I received at our favorite Chinese restaurant.  It's kind of like adoption.  You know you're going to get a cookie out of the deal (er, um, I mean a baby), but exactly what the fortune will say (how that baby will happen) is something of a matter of circumstances.

I will start this entry by saying making an observation: adoptive parents are never experts on adoption, they are only experts on their adoption(s).  No matter whether a person adopts once, twice, ten times or 20 times, that person cannot tell you what your adoption will look like, and isn't that what you really want to know?  He or she might be an expert on the laws in certain states (because they vary widely), might be an expert on parenting (his or her own kids, as those also vary widely), might be an expert on everything you might think might be important.  That person could share with you everything they know, you could absorb all of it . . . and still you could have an entirely different experience.

Why do I bring this up?  I bring it up because I'm about to describe briefly topics on which I don't have all the information.  I did enough research to satisfy myself.  No matter who swears what when it comes to adoption, always look it up for yourself.

So how did we come to open adoption?  What does that even mean?


From my own reading, there are three large categories into which fall the vast majority of adoptions: international, domestic infant, and foster care.  Some situations, like the adoption of a relative, don't fall into any of these categories, but most do.  We considered them all.


I struggle to describe adoption from foster care.  I have already stripped away so many stereotypes in regards to adoption in general, yet I wonder if my feelings regarding adoption from foster care are anything more than just more stereotypes.  I can only tell you how it turned out.


I had my concerns about parenting a child who might have emotional or behavioral issues as a result of the treatment in their life (in and out of foster care) up to that point.  I do not, even now, feel confident in my ability to parent an older child with those issues.  Perhaps once I am already a parent, that will change.  That we are pursuing one type of adoption this time does not mean that if we adopt again that we will automatically do things the same way.  In the end, though, how I felt about it didn't matter.  At just about the same time we were making a decision, the agencies involved in foster care expressed their support for allowing same-sex couples to be foster and adoptive parents.  The state shot it down.


Our next option was international adoption.  We all have the image in our heads, don't we, of Chinese orphanages overflowing with unwanted baby girls? Filthy, freezing Soviet bloc asylums with infants sitting in desperate need of touch?  Starving children lying in the dirt in Africa?  Given the chance to save a life and find a family, how could anyone not feel good about that?  Even if you were just removing a child who was already safe, it would mean making room to save another.  You could truly give a child opportunities they might never have.


This was one of the many images I had of international adoption, one of those ones that proved not to be entirely accurate.  It probably was at one time.  Since those images that fill our minds were made, however, things have changed.  Some countries, following abuses of both children and power, will not work with the United States.  Others require lengthy stays in the child's home country, not necessarily an obstacle to some, but to most, yes.  Some have incredibly long waiting periods.  The wait time you've no doubt heard, five years, eight years, those aren't necessarily the case anymore.  When I did hear about waits like that, though, they were in relation to international adoption.  The expense can easily approach that we discovered for surrogacy.  After all that, we'd still have to find a country willing to work with a gay couple.


You can guess what conclusion we came to there.

This isn't to say that international adoption or adoption from foster care are bad.  Those children do need families.  There are families for whom one of those types of adoption are entirely suitable.  As far as we can tell, we're not one of them.


What did that leave us?  Domestic infant adoption.  The first thing we had to do was not to decide upon this or that, but to simply find an agency that would work with us.  It was Eric who stumbled across the Independent Adoption Center (IAC) during a Google search.  We were stunned.  On their website and in their literature (and we would discover at their office, also), gay and lesbian couples were represented anywhere from 10%-50% of the time.  We did find another agency, one actually in Virginia, which would have made things a whole lot easier for us.  They were also willing to work with us, but we had to ask them first.  Why?  Because their willingness to work with same-sex couples was buried in a paragraph at the bottom of a page of by-laws.  Which would you choose?  To be the accepted norm or to be the singular exception?  We thought we might be treading shaky ground with a same-sex adoption.  We went with the agency we thought would be best prepared for that.

Why use an agency at all?  There are other ways to go about an adoption.  For us, though, given how many preconceived notions we'd already been disabused of by this time, we thought we'd allow ourselves to be shepherded in the right direction by folks who had been there and done that, since we had no idea of where there was or what that might be whatsoever.  Next time, should there be a next time, again, things might be different.  We won't know until we arrive at that proverbial bridge.


It was only after we decided to use IAC that we discovered they did open adoptions.  What does that mean?  Here's my simple definition: an open adoption is an adoption in which the child's birth family and adoptive family have equal and identifying information and access to one another.  In a traditional closed adoption, neither set of parents would be given any identifying info, and very little non-identifying info about one another.  In our open adoption, we will (probably) know our child's birth parents' full names and how to contact them.  That may mean an address, a phone number, e-mail addresses.  It may mean even more information than that.  It doesn't mean that info is always used.  Despite the best intentions, some open adoptions wind up with little or no contact, though the vast majority will start out with the intention of some kind of contact.


Sounds scary, right?  I envisioned a drunk and enraged birth mother, screaming profanities and pounding down our door in the wee hours of the morning, wanting her baby back.  Pretty scary, yup.


And it is scary, but you have to be honest with yourself about the nature of your fear.  It is scary to trust her when she says her baby will be yours.  She can change her mind (up to a point).  That is her power.  She (and possibly him, too) will be someone in your life that matters, will always matter.  They cannot simply be dismissed now that you got the baby you always wanted.  If it's too scary, perhaps an open adoption is not for you.  Ultimately, you will be the one who will have to feel happy or sad, satisfied or disappointed, in your adoption, so make the choice that's right for you.  If you're not comfortable with something, that's okay, but I'm discovering that adoption in America is not for the faint of heart, no matter which road you take.

I'm totally aware of having left out some big practical considerations regarding open adoption in these last couple paragraphs.  I'll talk about those next time.  This entry will just be about the "why."


Why risk it?  There were many reasons, but they all came down to one big reason: it's what I think is best for my child.


Have you seen the talk shows where adoptees search for their birth families?  That's what started me thinking.  Sometimes they find them, sometimes not.  Sometimes they're dead.  Sometimes they're horrible people.  Even when they can reunite and establish a good relationship, remember why they're searching.  They're searching because they felt something was missing, because they felt a need to know where they came from, who they look like, who they act like and, maybe biggest of all, why they were adopted.  No, not all adoptees want to know, but how do you tell which baby won't care later in life?


Like it or not, birth parents will always be my child's parents.  They will not be my child's only parents, of course.  What the word "parent" means won't be the same, either.  Open adoption isn't some weird communal co-parenting relationship.  But they will be an undeniable part of my child (and they would be in a closed adoption, too).  I can give my child everything I have, but I cannot give them what their birth parents can.  Even if we never see one another again after they hand their child to us, by coming to know them even just a little, we will already have more to inform our child's questions later on than in a closed adoption, and that's worst case scenario there, folks.  And there will be questions, even for the adoptees to whom adoption becomes less important.  

I don't want to saddle my child with that uncertainty those talk show guests feel.  I can't control everything, I can't promise everything, but by choosing an open adoption I can try and provide the most that I can.  Isn't that every parent's responsibility?


There's also this: I don't think anyone finds adoption of any kind an automatic fit.  There are always parts that makes us uncomfortable.  If ever there were a better reason to grow as a person and forge new relationships even though it might be scary, to face your fears and do what you think is best even though it's hard, would it not be for your child?


Thanks for reading!  This isn't really as thorough as I'd like, but it's also hard to separate feelings about X part of adoption from the feelings about Y part and write just about those.  Hopefully the picture will come together as I share more.  If I wrote everything I thought, it would also be 70 pages long!  Next week I think I'll tackle the process, how open adoption works for us and our agency.  Some things here will make more sense then.