open adoption roundtable #33 • on the unfinished state of my education
The Open Adoption Roundtable, a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption sponsored by Heather of Production, Not Reproduction, is designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. Bloggers from all sides of the triad regularly participate, offering incredible insight into the myriad complex issues surrounding this new territory of open adoption.
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This installment’s prompt is a straightforward one:
What did you learn about open adoption in 2011?
This would be a much shorter piece if the question were what didn’t I learn about open adoption in 2012.
It’s funny—before adopting, if you’re dealing with a halfway decent agency, you get an education about adoption, but it isn’t until after you’ve adopted that you really learn anything at all.
In 2011 I learned that open adoption relationships are just other relationships. Sure, it feels different—how could it not, when you become so closely enmeshed so quickly with someone you barely know at all—but just like any other relationship it is fluid, it waxes and wanes, it isn’t ever just any one thing. It is simplistic to say: I have a wonderful relationship with my child’s first mother, full stop; wiser and more accurate to say: I have a wonderful and ever-evolving relationship with my child’s first mother, knowing that wonderful will not look the same from day to day.
{If I were a betting woman, I’d put money on my learning this again, in one way or another, in 2012. I do seem to re-learn it every year…}
In 2011 I learned that it is increasingly difficult to write about open adoption from inside one. Part of it is out of desire to be respectful of everyone’s privacy, and difficulty discussing specific situations without risking overstepping; part of it is simply that it’s easier—for me, anyway—to write about things in a more theoretical sense than it is to write about them in a personal sense. Writing about open adoption from the inside requires opening up to whomever might happen upon this space in a way I’m not entirely comfortable with yet.
In 2011 I learned that our everyday life has very little to do with open adoption and is, at the same time, imbued with it. The things we do—going to the library, feeding the ducks at the park, grocery shopping, playing, cooking, reading together, eating, bathing, breathing, sleeping…—none of these has the least to do with adoption. But if it weren’t for adoption, we wouldn’t have anyone to do them with. That realization is constant, even though I am not constantly—consciously—thinking about adoption. When Julia makes a particular gesture or expression and I can’t get over how much she looks like her mother, or when Asher puts my glasses on his face and is transformed into a younger version of his oldest brother—these ordinary moments might be a part of any family’s day, but in our family they are possible only because of open adoption.
In 2011 I learned that what I know about open adoption is minuscule compared to what I have yet to learn, and I’m looking forward to continuing my education…
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Other responses to this installment of the Open Adoption Roundtable can be found here.
