Openness

Getting to know you

Someone once said that "ninety percent of life is showing up." This is particularly true in open adoption – something I learned from my son’s birth dad, William.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Grand’s professional activities and research have been focused on search and reunion, adoptive family identity, provision of adoption services, and openness in legislation and practice. With his book, The Adoption Constellation: New Ways of Thinking About and Practicing Adoption, Grand challenges current and past adoption practices and discusses new and more inclusive ways of thinking about adoption. Grand also addresses the looming identity crisis of donor adoptees and the need for open information for the children of reproductive technologies.

My three-year-old son Callum had his first horseback ride today. He’s always been drawn to horses, and spends a  large amount of his play time trying to “ride” almost anything he can straddle. So we knew he needed to ride a horse. But we were surprised to see the ease with which he rode, holding the horse’s mane in one hand and my hand in the other, as the horse (named Whinny) was led around the pasture by her owner: Callum’s birth mother, Lisa.*

1. Adoption is different in person

Openness in international adoptions is just as critical for emotional and psychological health as it is for domestic adoptions.

What does an international open adoption look like? Certainly openness in adoption is different when an adoptive family is faced with barriers of language, culture and distance. I’ve spoken with adoptive parents who express relief when their international adoption is complete. The assumption is that given the physical and cultural distance that there is no  expectation for openness with birth family or home country.

Explaining adoption through differrent ages and stages requires the right amount of information at the right time.

A number of decades ago (I won’t clarify how many – a lady never tells her age you know), I was adopted. My adoptive parents are amazing. They told me I was “chosen” from the earliest moments. It was part of me and something I was proud of.

A guide that covers the basics of openness and adoption for birth parents.

Birth parents matter

Sometimes you might not feel like it, but you are important to your child. Even if you are not parenting your child, it doesn’t mean you can’t play an important role—you can. Kids usually want to know where they came from and who gave them their special characteristics. Your contact with your child will also let your child know that he or she wasn’t “given away” or “abandoned,” assumptions adopted children often make if they don’t know any better.

We are pleased to share with you some information on adoption. We hope it will help us all to celebrate the adoption in our family and to welcome our new arrival.

As I prepared to adopt, I knew there was a “right” answer when it came to openness. Openness was good, and I needed to come across like I believed it. The truth was, openness scared me silly.

What I really hoped was that any child we adopted would have an unfortunate, yet complete, lack of background information, and that openness was something that I could favour without actually experiencing.

In the 24th of our series, our mom of three kids--Emily, Grant and Lynn--has made her decision not to adopt the unborn child of Emily’s birthmom. Since then things have gone very silent, and she’s wondering what on earth is happening.

It’s been two months since that first phone call from the adoption agency letting us know that Alexa was pregnant and she wanted us to adopt her new baby. We were told her due date was late May or early June and, since she hadn’t had any prenatal care, that was just an estimate.