open adoption

OAR #51 Does it get easier?

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The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to be a showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.   This open adoption roundtable prompt #51 is … living in an open adoption, does it get easier?

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I have sat with this prompt for a couple of days before sitting down to write what my thoughts are.  I wondered since our girls are now 7 and 5 years old is our family life easier?

I wanted to look back and think about what our expectations were while starting our journey to parenthood through adoption, especially moving towards open adoption.  I think our exposure to other families already parenting children with connections to their families gave us a better sense of what it might look like in reality versus what you may read.  We were able to meet and see these families and get to know them.  We got to hear from them what it was like for them.  Through the facilitator we worked with, Ellen Roseman of Cooperative Adoption, we met a community of other families that would be just like ours.  The beauty of this was it just wasn’t families with infants, we also met families with children who could share for themselves what this meant for them.

So I think our expectation on our journey to parenthood in open adoption would be that it is relationship building and like any relationship it takes work and trust and communication.

So I have to say for us our open adoption family life is better and stronger.  Not only have our relationships with each of our girls birth mothers grown deeper but so have our relationships with their extended families.  At the same we have reconnected and developed relationships with each of our girls birth fathers.

Has it been easier now that our girls are 7 and 5 years old?  In some ways, yes!  It’s easier because we have all gotten to know each other better, it’s easier in that our girls are now developing their own independent relationships with their families.  It’s easier in that we see each other more readily as family (something that we wanted but had to adjust to in the early days).  It’s easier because we all wanted the same thing ~ a family relationship with each of us, not just our girls and their birth family.  We all are striving for the same thing ~ to be a family together.

Are their difficult times?, yes there are!  Do you have difficult times with any of your family members?  I bet you do!  It’s only natural in a human relationship to have good and bad times.  But it’s what you do during these times that will make or break a relationship.  Our mantra during a time that wasn’t that good is that we are family, family works through it and together we learn and we walk forward together hand in hand.

Connection to biology …

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#adoption #openadoption not just about the love and connection to a birth mother or birth father it is the family connection to the whole family that is important #familylove

It has become more and more important to our family that the ties our girls have and keep are not just to their birth mother or birth father but through to their siblings, to aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents even to great grandparents.

The main focus started and continues to be with visits with their birth mother or birth father.  We have come to a time where we want to make sure that our girls know and have a deeper connection to the grandparents and  other family members and to have these ties and connections.  Get togethers are looked at now not to just include them but to have separate visits when we can.  Time spent with each other is time well spent.

Why you ask?  Sometimes in your life there may be times your connection to someone may fade in an ebb and flow way but doesn’t break and you feel the need to reach over that connection and strengthen the ties above and beyond it.  Our intent is to keep these family ties and not limit them to just one or two people.  To have our girls understand the width and breadth of the love that surrounds them and the love they can share on their own through their families.  Our hope and dream is that they never feel too separated from those they are connected to by biology.

(whispered) Do they know they are adopted?

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There are occasions when someone learns our family journey to parenthood, that this question happens in a whisper to us if our girls are present.  I understand there was a time that talking about adoption didn’t happen often and even still there were children who did not know they had been adopted. 

I’m never offended, I usually smile with a bit of a laugh and say they sure do!  You see we have ongoing in-person family relationships with each of our girls birth mothers and their extended family and their birth fathers and their family.  It would be a very hard secret to keep anyway!  When we changed our path from trying to have a baby to hoping to adopt for our family building we basically sat on our rooftop and shouted it out to the world.  SO a lot of people in our immediate world know how our family came to be. 

Our girls have heard their story pretty much from the time they were born.  Each girl was entrusted to us right after their birth from the hospital.  My husband created a song/lullaby that tells them their story about our family entwined with their birth families.  Each girl can now proudly and loudly sing their song 🙂  There are many story books that we incorporate into our night time reading that talk about adoption “Tell Me About The Night I was Born” by Jamie Lee Curtis, “How I was Adopted” by Joanna Coles, “We Belong Together” by Todd Parr, “Happy Adoption Day” by John McCutcheon, and “Forever Fingerprints” by Sherrie Eldridge. 

Our girls are 7 and 5 years old now and can understand their story, that they each grew in another’s tummy.  That their birth mother and birth father made them and that’s who they get certain features and some of their personalities from.  That we were chosen by their birth parents to be their Mommy & Daddy.  That they are loved by all of us.

So it’s okay to ask in front of our girls if they are adopted, they know and they may even answer you who they were born to and who they call Mommy & Daddy all by themselves.

 

uncharted waters … sort of …

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the definition:

Doing something that has never been done before.

In some ways living with a family created through open adoption is like making our way through uncharted waters.  Open Adoption is approximately 30 years old, having started sometime in the 1980s. Before then families having adopted lived in secrecy sometimes not even sharing to the children that they were adopted. Today there are so many ways to view and live what open adoption is that everyone’s journey is different.  In our immediate family there is no other family built through open adoption or adoption at all. Ours has its own pathway and we move forward with both of our daughters’ families that we have incorporated into ours. At the same time, we take along our families in our beliefs of how we want our daughters raised and how we want them known by all and loved by all.

We have met and know as friends other families also created with open adoptions. Their children are older than ours so we do have their experience to help us through our own family experiences; but yet we have our own experiences to help guide us onward …

At the time each of our girls turned 4, their respective birth fathers realized the importance of their knowing each other.  Something we had hoped for and had always left the door open to the possibility of.  In both cases, we had met and/or talked to each of these men during the adoption placement and then in each case both stepped out of the picture, although not completely.  Both men accepted the information for our family blog where I post regular family events and pictures.  This was a place they could anonymously watch their girls grow.

And so at the age of 4 our girls got to meet and begin their relationships with their birth fathers and siblings through this part of their family.  Needless to say our family continues to grow with these families!  Over this summer,  we have been able to meet up with both of our girls’ birth fathers and their families.  Both were amazing times spent together with fun, laughter, love and great memories!

Our girls are now 7 and 5 years old respectively.  Both of our girls have ongoing in-person and loving relationships with both their birth mothers and birth fathers and parts of their extended families. As we have learned and continue to learn, these relationships have ebb and flow, but we relish in the fact that we are a family together! Our open adoption families are young so to speak and so our pathways is still in its early stages.  What we do know so far is do not count anyone out from these relationships.