Jane’s Calamity

I didn’t participate in the last Roundtable Discussion and I wasn’t sure I’d participate in this one. Sometimes, I don’t feel comfortable talking about my story, because I feel like my sides ‘conflict’ with each other a great deal. To be honest, it makes me feel like a hypocritical bitch, because sometimes, my feelings for my own first mom border on the edge of pure rage and hatred, while I hope that the perspective I’ve gained from that experience has allowed me to be the best possible first mom for my daughter that I can be. 

It’s just hard. 

This Roundtable Discussion topic is: Share your wish list for your open adoption(s).

For my open adoption, my wish list is pretty simple:

• Open, honest and respectful exchange of information that allows me to make informed decisions regarding my health care. 

I’ll explain. Open adoption doesn’t always mean that you have your medical history. It doesn’t always mean you have access to information regarding your heritage or roots. Sometimes, open adoption is nothing more than a superficial relationship between two people that really act as nothing more than a mild acquaintance. That is, for the most part, how my open adoption with my first mother is. We talk, from time to time. We catch up on the goings on of life. We send a Christmas Card each year and when I was younger, I spent weekends and some holidays with her and her family. 

My open adoption doesn’t include an open, honest or respectful exchange of information. Getting familial medical information is often like pulling teeth and in the past, I have even been told that it’s none of my business. I recall talking to my first mom once when we were out for dinner, after not seeing each other for a few years. I had called her 11 months prior and asked her some pointed medical questions and was again told that there was no familial medical history to pass on. I was telling her about some testing I’d had done to rule out some pretty serious genetic medical conditions when, in passing, she mentioned her father having had the exact same condition. It hurt. I was hurt. 

Several years later we had a similar exchange where I discovered that my first father (a man she refuses to identify) had a daughter who had undergone a kidney transplant and in the same conversation, she shared with me that he’d died. In passing. No consideration for my feelings. Again, I was hurt. 

So, for my own open adoption, I guess that’s all I wish I had, open, honest and respectful exchange of information. I deserve to know information about my roots and it enrages me to know that she has that control over me. 

As for my open adoption with my daughter, I don’t know. My daughter isn’t a baby or toddler any more. She’s a teen, which makes this harder, I think:

• I wish I had been given all of the information I needed to make an informed decision. If I had, I might have made a different one. My decision to place wouldn’t be different, but her parents might have been. There is so much I wasn’t privy to, but was known by the agency and that makes me angry.
• Teenagers are hard to raise, I’m doing it myself so I know, but as her first mom, it pains me a great deal to hear you complain about her every time we talk – that’s why I send you to voicemail most of the time when you call. Hearing you complain about her is just to much.  
• I wouldn’t mind getting together with you (adoptive mom) every once in a while, if we lived closer and saw each other with any amount of regularity, but we don’t so when you call and ask if you can come visit while Kiddo is off doing whatever it is she is doing, my answer will likely be no. I know money is tight and I’d rather you saved the money it would cost you to fly here for a long weekend and put it towards a visit where you can both come. It’s been 18 months since our last visit. Before that it was 3 years and before that, even longer. This isn’t a relationship, this is agony. You said I’d be an important part of her life. You were even the one who brought up open adoption to begin with. It all kind of seems like a lie.

When I first started being vocal about my adoption, I think I was in a haze of delusion regarding our relationship. I was happy with the communication, sporadic as it was, that I was getting. Then I realized, as Kiddo got older, that it wasn’t enough. I was a stranger to her, because every time we managed to get together, we spent the first few days acclimating to each other. 

I think, this is where my own open adoption with my first mother and the open adoption I have with Kiddo seem to be similar. There needed to be more connection. More involvement. 

My wish list for our open adoption really only has one thing:

• I hope she doesn’t harbor anger towards me like I do my own first mother because I’m not there for her. I want to be there for her. I would give my life to be there for her. 

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.