The Lives of Others

It took hours last night to fall asleep.  My brain was latched on to something and wouldn't let go.  This isn't really anything new for me.  Since I was very small I've had difficulty falling asleep.  This particular subject made it much worse than usual, though.  What's worse is that it isn't really something I can just push away.  I feel it deserves my attention.

We're really only still in the beginning of our adoption.  With our home study halfway finished, we're closing in on the middle part, the waiting.  So I'm not exactly an expert yet.  But I'll tell you what I think is the hardest part of adoption: hearing about other adoptions.

What's the most helpful thing in an adoption?  Hearing about other adoptions.

Yes, those are the same thing.  It's like that.

A little over three months ago, as we were about to sign on with IAC, I got the itch to learn more.  Up until that time, it had all been about Eric and I communicating with each other, it had been a personal search and a private decision.  I know a handful of people who are adopted, and one adoptive parent.  My friends who were adopted were born between 30 and 70 years ago, all of them adopted in closed adoptions.  My friend who is an adoptive parent adopted internationally.  The point being that while I very much value what they have to share, I also wanted to find people in situations like mine.

Ah, the internet.  So much information.  So much of it plain wrong.  Some entirely irrelevant.  Some of it occasionally correct.  And it's really hard to tell which is which.


The truth is that the same adoptive family could adopt twice from the same birth parents and using the same agency.  Everything about the two adoptions could be identical on paper, and yet the experiences of everyone involved could be completely different for each adoption.

So trying to find what's useful to you in a situation that's only somewhat similar to yours is kind of like seeing someone else winning the lottery and running out to buy tickets using the same numbers they chose.  Those numbers will probably get you nowhere.


And yet . . . they played the lottery and they won.  Few people know better.

And so I feel compelled to read about the lives of others.


IAC has its own forum just for clients who have officially signed on with them.  It's awesome to have such a place.  It's the only place I feel safe posting in addition to reading.  On other sites, I feel like I have nothing to share because we're still so near the beginning.  On the IAC forum, it's easy to see how each and every user was once in our shoes at the same point in the road.  The other adoptive parents there are also exceptionally helpful and understanding.

Yet it would be unwise of me to ignore the experiences of those outside our agency.  There are more than 300 families on the books with IAC; perhaps 15-20 post regularly.  Its forum is a useful emotional and informational tool, but it certainly doesn't have all the answers.


On other sites, though, there exists the possibility of anyone coming along and saying anything they like.  And believe me, if it can be said, they will say it.  I had no idea there were anti-adoption people out there.  They are insane.  I still read their stuff, so I know what the worst case scenario might be with people I may come across in my life.  Occasionally, I find small glimmers of a good point in their raving.

Most of what I find is helpful.  Other adoptive parents, sometimes birth parents and occasionally adoptees chime in to inform others.  I've gotten to experience vicariously the uncertainty of a contact and the elation of a match, the excitement of the birth and, yes, the bitter disappointment of a reclaim.  Contrary to what you might think, these stories really help.  I see others dealing more or less successfully with their disappointment and I discover their strategies for coping and learn which might help me most should we face that same disappointment.  The fear of a birth mother reclaiming her child is diminishing.  Should that happen, it will be disappointing, of course, but we don't want a child whose mother wants to parent him.  At the end of the day, we'll know she will grieve, we'll know that she will probably wish things could happen differently, but at the end of the day I still want to know she feels she made a good choice.  We can't know if it was the "right" choice, but if it was a good one, we will all be able to live with it.

There are some stories that are not helpful, however.  Rather than contribute, these stories cause fear.  I'm all about things that don't cause fear; if it causes fear, it's bound to be bad.  A healthy skepticism is positive.  It also works both ways.  A story can cause me to use my healthy skepticism to re-examine our choices.  It also makes me look close as hell at the stories themselves.

Strangely enough, both these stories that have impacted me the most in a negative way involved IAC.  (Maybe that's why they had such an impact.)

The first story is about an adoptive couple.  They were contacted by a birth mother and got to the point of having a match meeting between themselves, the birth mother and an agency counselor.  All the parents thought the meeting went great.  After the meeting, however, the counselor called Child Protective Services on behalf of the birth mother's older child.  What was it about?  I don't know.  The adoptive parents, though they wrote extensively about their upset, did not say.  They may not know.  I have to do a fair bit of reading between the lines with these stories.  They may not be willing to say.  At any rate, the birth mother called off any contact with IAC and it can only be assumed that, although they say they left IAC as well, this couple did not adopt that baby.

They were furious that the agency's actions cost them their baby.  I have to take a step back and think.  I've been that mandatory reporter.  I've made those phone calls.  I didn't do it lightly, and I don't know any professional who does.  It could have been a million things.  It could have been someone in the home with the child who was unsafe.  It could have been the home itself.  She may have said she left her toddler unsupervised for this or that amount of time.  I'm willing to believe it could have been something the birth mother didn't think of as wrong; no one likes being told she's endangering her child.  It could have been something the adoptive parents, perhaps unversed in the social services climate, didn't even recognize.  I'm willing to bet it's something they wanted to ignore.


And they wanted the agency to ignore it, too.  They were willing to put the birth mother's child in continuing jeopardy so they could have her unborn child.  It made me sick and angry.  To know that they did successfully adopt a different child and, at the time of my reading, were trying to adopt again just disgusts me.  I feel sorry for the birth mothers of their children.  Those women will never have their respect.

That one was a bit easier to put behind me than the next one.  After all, I know we're better people than that.  I know that for us it will not be a baby at any cost.


This, however, threw me for a total loop.

This is a long story.  If you'd like to read it all, you can message me and I'll be happy to provide you with the link to this woman's website.  I'll try and share only the most important parts.


This woman is a birth mother.  She was married with one child when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant again.  In dire financial straits, she and her husband decided to place their daughter in an open adoption.  They found a couple and the adoption went forward.  Up until the adoption was finalized, everything went smoothly and nobody had any complaints (that they were willing to say out loud, anyway.)  After finalization, the adoptive parents began to restrict the contact the birth family had with their daughter beyond what the birth mother could bear.  Although the adoptive family lives in California where open adoption contact agreements are legally binding and not merely a tool for communication, she discovered theirs was not filed at the child's finalization.  So she sued.

Every adoptive parent's worst nightmare, right?  This is what they tell us can't happen.  The birth parents cannot years later come back and change their minds.  Even if they can't win a legal case, who wants birth parents who feel like that?  Like I said, I want us all to be able to live with the decision.

Time for reading between the lines, boys and girls.  The birth mother did not win.  She was not suing to file the contact agreement and enforce it.  She was actually suing to get the girl back.  I can understand how she might feel betrayed as the adoptive parents closed her off from their daughter, but to try and win the girl back?  There's more.  For five years, up until she filed her suit, they still allowed her to visit the girl.  It was on their terms, true, not hers, but it would have been entirely within their rights to say no altogether, since the contact agreement wasn't binding.  Not until she filed her suit did they cut her off completely.  Who wouldn't?  There's still more.  Ultimately, the birth mother and her husband had another child and then divorced.  The adoptive family gave the birth father and the other children not only continuing visits after the birth mother filed her suit, they actually got more than the bare minimum.  Although this birth mother publishes extensive quotes and often entire e-mails of what she says to the adoptive parents and how they respond, I have to give the adoptive parents a lot of credit.  They never get nasty.  I would be so tempted to tell this woman who also has not kept a promise (to allow these people to parent her child) where she could stick it.  If anything, they try to be understanding while trying to maintain what's best for their daughter.

So here's my version of the story.  The birth mother was never about the adoption.  She says she would never have placed the girl if she had not been able to keep in contact.  Later on, a judge actually tells her the contact she wanted from an adoptive family was just absurd.  She wanted someone else to provide for her daughter while she couldn't, but in such a way that she could still be Mom.  The adoptive parents may have picked up on this earlier or later.  They may have thought her husband and other children would help in her grieving as their daily lives moved on without this child.  They may have thought this was a part of the grief we all hear will happen.  They may even, at first, have considered themselves lucky to have such an involved birth family when so many want so little contact.

At some point, however, the nature of the birth mother's motivation for contact became apparent.  They had not been given by her that all too important permission to parent.  That they kept it to themselves until after the adoption was finalized is understandable, if not exactly how you or I might have done it.  Even if they had begun to close the adoption sooner, the birth mother would have had a difficult time, having signed relinquishments and with months gone by, blocking the adoption.  After that, like I've said, they dealt with her as best they could.  I would cut someone off for suing me, too!

The only thing on which I can fault the adoptive parents is accepting a match in the first place when they came to feel so uncomfortable.  I don't really believe they didn't pick up on it sooner rather than later.  I would have, and I would not be able to move forward.  Once the baby arrives, it's so hard to say no.  Not to mention it paints you as the bad guy for seeming to have misled someone in the one moment when you finally do the right thing.  And these folks are downright covered in paint.

Really, this story isn't about what happened, which is pretty damn unfortunate for everyone involved.  For me, this is about whether we'll be able to avoid this same situation.  I think I'm a good judge of character, but I also know I've been wrong.  If ever there were a time when it was important to get it right!  I'm sure these folks thought they'd gotten it right at first, too.

I lay awake last night, reviewing this woman's story and responding to it in my head.

In 2009 I flew back to California and spent a week driving around all my favorite places.  In the late afternoon, I went south from Point Reyes Station, a road I'd never taken before.  There was nothing between me and San Francisco, and I thought to find a motel outside the city and stop for the night.

The road was nothing like I thought.  It hugged the cliffs.  The speed limit was 35 miles an hour, which, if you really went that fast, felt absolutely reckless.  The fog was so thick it looked like my headlights weren't on.  I was driving a car that was strange to me.  And the road went on forever.


It felt like hours.  I thought I would never get there.  I was exhausted.  Oh, and I had no cell signal.  And I probably had to pee.

 When I read this woman's story, I think of that drive.  I think of how we don't know what's ahead, only that we're still on the road.  At least, we think we're still on the road.  The next curve can run up at any time, though, and we have to make a split second decision as to which way to go and hope like hell we haven't just driven off a cliff like the emotional and legal one those adoptive parents drove themselves off of.  How to navigate?

I landed somewhere safe that night.  I came down out of the hills above San Fran and the next thing I knew I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

Exquisite, huh?

I promptly got lost again.  Three interstates later, I called Eric in tears and begged him to use the last bar on my cell phone to find a motel online and direct me to it.  And he did.

And here ends the metaphor.  Between Eric and I, we guided me to safety, got really scared, almost drove off 30 cliffs and suffered through some really intense awesomeness.  Together, we might be able to do this.

For the record, he says I'm not allowed to go back to her website.

No problem.