Jane’s Calamity

Heather wrote a post on the Open Adoptions Bloggers Blog here at OAS that she’d like for those involved in OA to answer a Roundtable Question. This is going to be a new thing for OA Bloggers and while I’ve never been involved in the OA Bloggers Blogroll, I would like to answer this question.

Initially, when I read it, I thought, “Hmph, that doesn’t apply to my situation at all, how disappointing” then I got to thinking that maybe, on some level, it really did.

Having grown up in open adoption, I don’t recall any portion of my life without ‘knowing’ open adoption. It’s always been such a huge part of who I am and while it made me stand apart from my adopted counterparts, which made me feel odd and somehow freakish, it’s always been something that’s been a part of who I am.

So, the question posed is, “Looking back to the time when you were thinking about open adoption but hadn’t yet lived it out, what one thing would you tell your past self about open adoption, if you could?”

As you can see, its hard for me to answer this question, because there isn’t a time in my life when I hadn’t lived open adoption. However, reflecting back, I know for a fact there are things I know now that I wish I’d known then. Maybe it has to do with the way the roles have been changed – I don’t know. What I do know is that I do have an answer to this question, even if I don’t meet the qualifications for giving an answer, as the question is posed.

I remember, pregnant and sitting in the living room of the intended parents for my daughter. We were still in the ‘getting to know you’ phase and they hadn’t been told, yet, that they would be adopting my unborn child in the coming months. I recall them saying something about open adoption and me thinking how ridiculous it sounded. Open adoption? What the hell is that?

This was the first time I’d ever been given an actual name for the institution which had been such a huge part of who I am from the time I was born, until the time I was sitting right there in their tacky green pleather recliner. Hmmm, open adoption you say?

They instantly knew, once they uttered the words, that I was clueless and it wasn’t until a few minutes later, when they were explaining exactly what this ‘open adoption’ business was, that it finally dawned on me that I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it was called.

We chatted, they were excited that, not only did I know what open adoption was, I had had an open adoption and that any concerns about me being adopted, thus limiting the amount of medical information they might get, was now no longer a concern. Strange, huh?

Anyway, from that point, we just rolled with things. I had had an open adoption growing up. They wanted an open adoption going forward. Open adoption is open adoption, right? What could there be to talk about?

So, to answer the question, what would be the one thing I would tell my past self about open adoption, if I could? I would tell myself that nothing about open adoption is the same from situation to situation. I had spent a lot of time worried about other, very important things as they related to me making a choice for her parents, so much so that I didn’t consider that there wasn’t some open adoption guidebook that everyone followed and that our open adoption wouldn’t be the same as the open adoption that I had had growing up.

For this reason, I get uneasy when people ask me for advice about open adoption, because honestly, every single one of them is different and everyone involved in them will have different yet equally valid experiences.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Open Adoption Roundtable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.