Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable
I’m a little late in answering this… mostly because it took me several days to come up with anything to say. The first question in the new Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable is:
What one thing about open adoption would you tell your past self, if you could?
I realize I’m still VERY green in the world of open adoption, but there’s already so much I’ve learned (I am an obsessive researcher for one, and was unemployed while pregnant… so I did a ridiculous amount of reading!). Adoption was always a normal thing for me (I’ve known members from each corner of the triad most of my life), but open adoption was still a pretty abstract concept when I found myself pregnant.
Standing on this side of placement, I think the biggest thing I wish I’d known earlier was how much both the placement and openness would affect the (non-triad member) people I love most in my life. In some ways, I’m grateful I didn’t realize it, because seeing my family hurting has been one of the hardest parts of this whole experience… but, I feel like there was a lot more that I could have done initially to help educate them with openness and make it seem a little less scary. I know a lot of their concern has been for me, so I also think I would have talked about it a lot more in the months leading up to C’s birth. I know it’s helped them a lot to see how well I’m doing with it. I also might have set up a pre-hospital meeting with H&L (assuming they would have been okay with that) for at least my parents and grandparents. They all “really liked them” when they read the profile, but I know meeting them in person REALLY made a difference. Unfortunately, it happened in this already incredibly emotional time, whereas if we’d done it earlier, we could have all just been family enjoying the baby without the first-meeting awkwardness.
While most of my family was pretty supportive and no one ever really actively/outwardly/aggressively opposed my decision to place, I never really felt comfortable talking about it all with them. So, what I wish I’d known as I was making my adoption plans was that the reason they were initially so uncomfortable with the idea of openness was that they just didn’t have anything positive to base it on. I think it might have saved us all quite a bit of awkwardness and let us all start healing a little sooner.
See the original post and read all of the other fantastic responses here.