Note: The question below was submitted by an adoptive parent, (AP) and the resulting advice is intended for adoptive parents. APs hold the power in open adoption relationships and therefore have the responsibility to wield that power with both wisdom and compassion.
Should I Close Our Open Adoption?
Question: I thought I was ready for open adoption. We chose an agency that specializes in it for all parties. I read all the books and research about the benefits of open adoption. I was committed to making ours be warm and welcoming to the expectant parents who would choose us, and I just knew I had what it took to keep things wide open, no matter what.
As we prepared to become parents, I could see it in my mind’s eye. We and our future child’s birth parents would keep him or her at the center of our relationship and make sure they always knew we are all here for them.
In recent years I’ve followed the advice in Adoption: The Long View podcast: do your own work, parents! by having my own therapist for awhile. But even he didn’t know how to help with our situation. His advice was to close the adoption!
Here’s the gist of it. We were chosen by a mom and her boyfriend (now husband) just before our daughter Chloe was born 11 years ago. The early years were OK, but recently it’s been harder and harder to understand what is going on and what to do. I want to be kind to them, but I also need to factor in other things these days, like Chloe saying she doesn’t want to see them anymore. Also, sometimes, I feel like our kindness is not returned.
For example, her birth parents sometimes no-show for visits, which devastates Chloe and throws our home into chaos for hours or even days. For another, when we do see them, they overwhelm her. They get into her physical space, and I can tell she is not OK with it. Nothing is “inappropriate,” but birth mom strokes her hair and birth dad calls her things like my lost angel.
This is so much harder than I thought. What do I do? I can’t really close it all down, can I? That would betray everyone, including myself.
— Molly
Wide A$s Open!
Hi, Molly. I honor your commitment to maintaining contact with birth parents, as well as the struggle with that commitment. Your situation is reminiscent of my own experience parenting at the pre-teen stage, when adoptees begin to exercise their increasing autonomy. Let me start with a story.
My friend Smitty tells about playing football in his college days. A defensive back at a small university in the south, Smitty once missed a tackle which led to a touchdown for the other team. During the Monday playback of the film, Coach chewed him out in front of the whole team. “Dammit, Smitty. That guy was wide a$s open! WIDE! A$S! OPEN!”
We laugh to this day about Coach’s tirade, delivered in a south’un drawl.
That story captures how it felt when my children began expressing their own preferences around the contact I’d been unilaterally deciding on for a decade. It took me about the same number of years it took you, Molly, to figure out that there can be such a thing as too wide a$s open. My eye was on maintaining contact for the sake of contact, rather than on continually discerning for adoptee-centered openness.
For a long time, I thought that to achieve the goals I’d set for myself, I needed to maintain contact with first parents, no matter what. And then, as with you, reality hit. I couldn’t see my way out of the dichotomy of keeping the door open or closing it.
A Better Metaphor than a Door
I needed a more nuanced way out of the dilemma between tending to my child’s current needs or keeping the commitment I’d made to birth parents. As I sat with it, I realized there IS a better tool to find my way through.
A screen takes the Either/Or quality of a door into offers instead a BothAnd. It allows us to let in what serves our child while filtering out what may overwhelm them. Setting that filter—or mesh—means reading the needs of our child, their first parents, and ourselves with both discernment (head) and compassion (heart).
Think of it this way: a screen door lets in a breeze but keeps out mosquitoes. Not that people are pests—but that some interactions, like Chloe’s discomfort with physical touch or being called my lost angel, may need to be filtered out for her well-being.
This approach gives us a way to regulate what comes in and what stays at bay—something a door cannot do.
Setting Your Mesh
Contact orients on first parents, but openness orients on adoptees. Openness is always accessible, even when things don’t go as we hoped, even during times when there is low contact. It takes intention and commitment to continually cultivate openness.
Deciding on contact is just one aspect of maintaining healthy relational dynamics. Contrary to popular belief, good boundaries aren’t walls—they’re bridges that allow closeness without overwhelm. Learning to define and communicate our limits is an ongoing journey, in adoption and beyond.
Strategies
- Get help with your own boundaries so you are able to define them for yourself and others. My favorite resource on this is the Finding You podcast by Dr Brad Reedy. He talks primarily about boundaries between parent and child, but the information is equally useful in managing boundaries with first parents—or anyone else, for that matter. The key seems to be to do your own work, parents!
- Be supported by someone adept and experienced in offering wise counsel, such as adoptees Angela Tucker, Chaitra Wirta-Leiker, Dr Joyce Maguire Pavao, Lesli Johnson, or Lauren Fishbein. I coach around adoption relationships, as well, but while I am raising adoptees, I am not an adoptee.
- See if birth parents are open to conversations with you about the effect of certain behaviors on Chloe. Invite them collaborate in figuring out what you all can do to make things better. For example, Chloe’s discomfort within her personal space and about being a “lost angel” would be two things you might bring up. Could they begin to see the effect their actions have on her and perhaps agree to stop doing those things?
- Chloe’s birth parents, if open to the idea, might benefit from working through their own grief. Support groups like On Your Feet Foundation or Knee to Knee could be helpful for them personally as well as in the ways they show up for Chloe.
Caveats about Pausing Contact
Should your wise and compassionate read of the situation lead you to consider pausing contact, here are a few caveats.
- Ceasing contact is not a permanent decision. When conditions change, as they surely will over the course of an adoptee’s childhood, your mesh will need to change accordingly. Parents get only 18 years or so to model for adoptees how to set the mesh before they will be doing it on their own.
- Ideally, decisions to take a break should be accompanied by clear and empathetic communication with those affected. Transparency can help maintain connection, even when that connection is dormant. Keeping others in the dark does not preserve trust during a pause.
- Parents need to check our own energy. Can we communicate our decision in a compassionate, reasoned way, or does it come across as punitive or angry? If the latter, we may need to do more internal processing before we have these important conversations with others.
- Speaking of internal processing, it’s helpful to have a practice of self-reflection in order to know what parts of you are informing your decision. It’s OK for your feelings about contact to be factored in, but an awareness of just how is helpful in monitoring an overall orientation on your adoptee.
- Your power as the gatekeeper comes with great responsibility. Always, we must honor this truth and make contact decisions from our best self. Knowing and accepting oneself is at the heart of connecting with others.
Side Notes
I’d like to briefly touch on parts of your letter outside of your main point of whether to keep the door open or closed.
- Your therapist was unable to support you in the complexity adoption brings. Adoption-competence is key, and not all therapists are familiar and fluent in adoption’s complexities. Find one who specializes in adoption issues, maybe even an adoptee.
- Chloe is coming into her own agency, and that shifts your role. At the beginning of the parenting journey, we are in the lead. Once our adoptee attains adulthood, we usually take on a more supportive/advisory role. Along the way, we do a dance of leading and following, figuring out in any moment when to do which.
- First parents not showing up for visits. A coach can help you come up with ways to mitigate the damage from no-shows, such as not telling an adoptee about a visit until/unless it is imminent. As for why first parents no-show, see Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard’s Part 2 of Adoption Unfiltered™ for context about seemingly mystifying behaviors.
- Invading personal space and saying my lost angel. Besides crossing boundaries, I wonder if these behaviors indicate that Chloe’s birth parents have not yet been able to deal with their grief. As mentioned before, see if they are open to a support group or working with an adoption-competent therapist.
A coach can help you find ways to bring boundary-crossing behaviors to the attention of birth parents, tend to Chloe’s comfort, and aim to preserve relationships. Remember: one of the ways Chloe will learn to set boundaries for herself is to watch you do it.
Aim for OpenNESS in Your Adoption
In my years of parenting and managing birth parent relationships, I have come to understand that contact is not the same as openness. You can still have an open adoption, Molly, even in times when you determine that contact with a first parent is not currently in your adoptee’s best interest.
Thank you for your enduring dedication to the well-being of Chloe and her first parents. It’s not always easy to set boundaries on behalf of our adoptee and to make decisions about contact with their first parents. As with all parenting, the more solid we can be within ourselves, the clearer our way to those answers.
Your Turn
Adoptees, first parents, and seasoned adoptive parents and others: what advice or insight do you have for Molly regarding contact, openness, and boundaries?
4 Responses
Lori. This is an amazing and thoughtful post. Thank you ! I keep learning from you 💕
Thank you, Linda 💚.
Lori, what a great metaphor…and screen door instead of a solid one. Thank you
Thank you, Dottie 💜.