Open Adoption Bloggers has created a new prompt through the Open Adoption Roundtable.  It’s designed to be a showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.  SO here is the prompt for OAR #44:

What is “openness” to you?

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To us openness equals family.  What do you mean by family you ask?  Well I looked up the definition and found many but none that completely fit what we believe to be the definition except this one from the “Your Dictionary” found on the internet:

Family means a specific group of people that may be made up of partners, children, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. (noun)

This definition didn’t define family by DNA, just by relationships.  That’s how we perceive our family.  It’s not just your connection by DNA makeup but by the relationships we have together.

We can share milestones and discover when members of birth family had theirs, we can see nature vs nuture at work together, being family means we spend time together, we visit, we do things together, we talk on the phone when we want, we share pictures, we send gifts, we do all of that and more not just for us but for our girls to know where they came from and who they are …

Our girls each entrusted to us at birth, know their families not by happenstance, but because that is how we wanted our family to be.  We embraced all of our girls’ families that include their birth mothers, birth fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents as our family and in return they have embraced us.

Our girls know no better they just know who is their family and they love them and are loved by them.