a different kind of family

Two new discoveries about Julia from this weekend: (1) She loves chicken wings. (2) She likes dancing around to Great Big Sea in person at the marina just as much as she likes dancing around to them on CD in our living room.

I found it an incredibly difficult read. As an adoptive parent, I want to believe these practices are part of the past - left behind in the "bad old days" of the Baby Scoop Era.

I have spoken over the years to a number of mothers who relinquished their babies during those days - many of them who still believe they made the best choice for themselves and their child at the time, and many still who, if they could go back and do it over, would have chosen to parent. But almost without exception they describe the same coercive practices; the only difference between them is not how they were regarded as expectant mothers but instead how they regard their decision with the benefit of hindsight.

I suppose it would be naive to believe that no woman, in this day and age, is subjected to such coercive practices - I think I understood that there remain agencies and social workers who hold expectant mothers considering adoption in such low regard, who see them as having done a "wrong" that they can make "right" by making what they believe to be the "correct" choice - or who, in simpler and somewhat more profane terms, see the children they are carrying in terms of profit and the women themselves merely as vessels that will deliver that profit to the agency. But I think I believed that such attitudes - in our modern, enlightened world - were few and far between, the attitudes of a relatively few "rogue" counselors or agencies rather than a widespread practice.

My own attitudes toward adoption likely informed this belief. I knew early on that adopting would be difficult for me, because it would require me to reconcile the fact that I would be granted my heart's desire - motherhood - only at the price of someone else's greatest pain. So we - George and I - did our homework. We wanted to work with an agency that respected the expectant mothers who sought their counsel. We wanted to work with an agency that counseled women who sought them out on all of their options - who provided information about the resources available to them if they chose to parent - rather than steering them toward deciding to place their babies. We wanted to work with an agency that saw itself as working first for the benefit of the expectant mother and the child, and only secondarily for the benefit of the hopeful adoptive parents. We were fortunate to find such an agency, and we were encouraged when, at the orientation session we attended, we were told that they saw their job as "finding families for babies, not finding babies for families."

So clearly the practices described in this article aren't the only way things are done - they may not even be the norm anymore - and this is good. But the fact that agencies that operate this way continue to exist at all is evidence that much more needs to be done to change the practice of adoption in this country.

Groups exist nationwide whose purpose is to effect change in adoption practice in the United States, but I've found that most of them have no use for people on my side of the triad. To them, I am part of the problem. And I can't say I entirely blame them - the fact is that my part of the triad also includes people willing to overlook the unethical means some agencies use to ensure as many placements as possible, if it means they get a baby. If hopeful adoptive parents refused to work with them, these agencies wouldn't exist. And the attitude that adoption agencies should primarily serve hopeful adoptive parents isn't limited to those who choose to work with less child-centered agencies. I left an online discussion group for clients of the agency we worked with when I grew uncomfortable with similar attitudes: When the agency had few placements for several months in a row, one member said, in effect, that if the agency was "doing its job," it would have more placements - and several other members agreed.

So it seems that even in an "enlightened" age in which open adoption is becoming more common and more attention is paid to the needs of first parents, attitudes common in the Baby Scoop Era often remain deeply entrenched. Which makes me wonder how many women truly freely choose to place - even women who seek the services of agencies that have their best interests at heart.

What I mean by this is complicated, so bear with me while I try to explain. We think we live in a society in which old-fashioned attitudes about family and motherhood are changing - unmarried pregnancy and single parenthood no longer carry the stigma they did many years ago; services are available to assist single parents, young parents, and others who would have, years ago, been coerced or forced into placing their babies, to enable them to parent if they wish. But on the other hand, people still talk about adoption as a "loving choice"; people still talk about adoption as providing a "better" life for a child than the expectant parent can herself provide. The question is: "Better" by whose standards? Certainly, there are people whose circumstances would make it impossible to parent - but it's just as clear, from many discussions I've read, that older ideas about the "ideal" nature of the nuclear family play a role as well. Being young, poor, uneducated, or unmarried doesn't mean a woman is unqualified to be a parent, but I wonder how many women - women who are not coerced, who do freely make an adoption plan - consider those reasons heavily when making their choices. In other words, is our society - with its many conflicting ideas about adoption but an emphasis on one kind of family as its "ideal" - itself coercive to expectant parents, even those who work with agencies that are not themselves coercive?

I don't know what the answer is; I only know that it's important to keep talking. Reform in adoption practice is badly needed in this country - that much is clear. It's wonderful that so many agencies work ethically, considering the needs and desires of the women who seek them out; but at the same time the fact that unethical agencies exist nonetheless taints the entire enterprise. Some practices need to be made outright illegal; others need to be more tightly regulated. Legislation that make laws consistent nationwide - closing loopholes that allow agencies to use the more lax laws of some states to their advantage - would be a welcome improvement. But laws can only do so much - they can move us in the right direction, but at the end of the day attitudes need to change before real progress can be made.

Those reform groups that think I am part of the problem may not be entirely wrong - I am part of a cohort that contributes to the problem - but they're not entirely right, either. I want to be part of the solution. I just don't know where to start.

Of course, our respective beginnings happened far earlier than this, but this is the story of how we all came together, and so this is our beginning. A wish to be parents. An adoption plan.

We did not know that D was making an adoption plan, of course, and she did not know that we were hoping to adopt a baby. Neither of us knew the other existed - living in two different towns, an hour apart - but in the course of just a few days, we would become family.

A social worker from the agency called me on Thursday to ask if we wanted to be considered by an expectant mother who was ready to choose a family for her baby. Later that day, I found a penny on the ground at the gas station. Heads up. I am not superstitious, but I picked it up - it was shiny & new, dated 2008. I took it home and put it on top of the little notebook where I'd written the small bit information I'd received about D - her age, her medical history, a little about her background. The baby was due, SueK had told me, "any day."

I had what you might call a Good Feeling about the situation, but I didn't dare hope. Anything more than the vaguest hope that someday, somehow, we would be parents was, I'd found, a dangerous thing. We'd been called before, but never chosen. Having experienced both, I can say that being considered but not chosen feels quite a lot like having an early miscarriage; the two phone calls from the agency much like the two from the doctor's office, the first when the nurse tells you your blood draw was positive and the second when she says, "I'm so sorry . . . your HCG levels are down . . ." For two days you try not to think too much about it, but whatever you try to do your brain breaks in: This time it might actually happen! So I tried not to think about it, bracing myself for the call that would inevitably come a day or two later: "I'm sorry - you weren't selected."

When SueK called back on Friday, I could tell right away that this phone call was different. Her voice was chipper, without the somber "Hi, how are you?" that always began these calls.

"Someone wants to talk to you," she said.

"Okay..."

"Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"I think so." There was no time for a face-to-face meeting, but D wanted to speak on the phone with the family she chose. SueK had told me this on Thursday. "I just want to hear you say it."

We talked on the phone that night. It was at once the most awkward and most comfortable conversation I've ever had. We talked about our lives and our families. We both admitted to being really nervous about talking, and wishing we'd written down some of the million questions we'd thought to ask each other over the course of the day but were now completely escaping us. We discovered we had a lot in common. She told me her reasons for making an adoption plan; I told her our reasons for adopting. She told me why she chose us - among her reasons were, it turned out, the very things that I'd feared would be the reasons no one would ever choose us. We aren't religious, although we celebrate the holidays of our religious heritage with our families. We aren't wealthy - we have college degrees and white-collar jobs, but we still define ourselves by our working-class roots. We live in a half-fixed-up fixer-upper and drive an old car. But she told me we seemed normal, down-to-earth, and that drew her to us.

We talked about our hopes for adoption. SueK had told me that D was hoping for a "semi-open" adoption - that is, photos and letters, and that she might want to visit with us periodically but she wasn't sure. We were hoping for a fully open adoption, but we believed that sort of relationship had to grow organically, so we were fine with "semi-open" to start, hoping the relationship would develop into something more open. We knew we wanted visits - we wanted our child to have the opportunity to get to know his or her first family, not just see pictures and get the occasional letter - but we'd always said we would leave the degree of openness up to whoever chose us. Still . . . I felt like I wanted to encourage it. So I said: "I know you said you want to have letters and pictures, and that you aren't sure about visits. And I don't want to push you into something you're not comfortable with, but I do want to be sure you know that we would love to have visits with you, so if you do decide that's something you want, it's absolutely something we'd embrace."

We talked about names. George and I had names chosen - a boy name and a girl name - after our grandparents. But we wanted to know if she had thought about names at all, because we wanted to honor her, if we could, by using a name she'd chosen as a middle name. She told me her girl name - she has three sons, but she had a name she'd always wanted to use for a daughter. The first name she'd chosen was actually my "second girl name" - the name I always thought I'd name my second daughter, if I was ever fortunate enough to have two daughters. The middle name was her mother's. She had no boy name, but she told me about a name that is common in her family.

(You might notice my use of "me" and "I" in describing the call. My intention had been to begin the call myself and then put the phone on speaker so George and I could both talk to D, but in my eagerness and anxiety about the call, I completely forgot. This really upset George, and when I realized it, I was of course also quite upset. He said: "Some day our child will ask what it was like the first time we talked with D, and I won't be able to answer because I wasn't a part of the conversation." This still bothers me; it's one of those things that no matter how much you regret it, you can't go back & do over.)

I still cringe when I think about that first phone call. I have a tendency - to say the very least - to talk a lot, often too much. This gets worse when I am nervous, and of course I was very nervous. And I was bent on not monopolizing the conversation, so I wanted to be cognizant of what I was saying, and how much I was saying. I wanted to let her direct the conversation, but at the same time I wanted to be able to smooth over any awkwardness; I wanted her to feel easy and comfortable talking to me. I wanted her to like us. But it's hard to go against the grain, and I felt more awkward than I ever have. I spent the entire time alternately telling myself: Idiot! Say something! She's waiting for you to say something! and Idiot! Stop talking! You're babbling & she probably thinks you're a complete ass!

She would say - for instance - "I have one brother; he's six years younger than me. But we have a huge extended family." (Awkward pause in which is clearly waiting for me to say something about my family, or George's, while I sit there like Cindy Brady on that quiz show, staring like a deer in the headlights while my mind races trying to think of something to say.) "So . . . what are your families like?"

I spent the weekend replaying the conversation in my head - What I should have said. What I shouldn't have said. What I wished I'd said differently. - and by Monday I'd convinced myself that I'd completely blown it. She was going to call her case worker and tell her she'd made a horrible mistake; she couldn't possibly entrust her precious baby to someone as awkward and strange as me, and since I'd neglected to let George say even a single word, there was no hope that even a glimmer of "normal" had gotten through. She hated us, and it was all my fault.

And then, on Monday morning, SueK called.

"She loves you guys."

I recently was involved in a discussion on the first mothers' forum at adoption.com - a community in which I'm sporadically active - and someone there asked me if I'd ever considered writing about my experiences & trying to publish them. And it happened that I'd been thinking of relaunching this blog with a new title and a new purpose, and her suggestion encouraged me to go ahead with it.

So here we are - this is a blog about living in open adoption. This is our life: We are the parents to a beautiful eight-and-a-half-month-old baby girl; we are - all three of us - family to her first mother, but in a way that is still a bit nebulous and undefined, because it is a new relationship to all of us and is, in a larger sense, new territory.

But it's also a blog about living, in open adoption. In many ways our smaller family - George, Julia, and me - is just like anyone else's. This is our life: We go to sleep, we wake up, we eat, we work, we play. We might paint a room or plant a garden, and none of this has to do with open adoption - but at the same time, all of it does.

Open adoption has been around for a long time, yet it is still shrouded in mystery to those who aren't a part of it. There are no guidebooks; we are charting this territory for ourselves. We are - the three of us adults - working together to create a family relationship that will be ours for the rest of our lives, one that will benefit our children and make all of our lives richer in ways we likely can't imagine. This is a family in which titles can be confusing - D and I might both introduce each other as "My daughter's mother," and we would both be correct - and where our understanding of precisely how we fit into each other's lives is a work in progress. But, as D said to me the other day - we're muddling through it, and figuring it out as we go along, and it'll all work itself out.

This is our life.