Open Adoption Roundtable #30

Do you remember the first time you heard about open adoption?
If you need some further prompting: What were the circumstances? What was your reaction? If you grew up in an open adoption, do you remember the first time you heard the label applied to your relationships?

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don't need to be listed at Open Adoption Bloggers to participate or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you're thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table. The prompts are meant to be starting points--please feel free to adapt or expand on them.

Write a response at your blog--linking back here so your readers can browse other participating blogs--and share your post in the comments here. Using a previously published post is fine; I'd appreciate it if you'd add a link back to the roundtable. If you don't blog, you can always leave your thoughts directly in the comments.

We were so confused about adoption. After our fertility treatments failed in 2006, we looked towards adoption. We knew we wanted to become a family through adoption. But it took us 3 years to decide how to make it happen.  We concentrated on foreign adoption because, quite frankly, that's all we could find information on back then.

We decided to go to an adoption orientation for an agency in Northern Virginia which advertised both foreign and domestic adoptions. They went on and on about the foreign adoptions. Then spent 10 minutes explaining domestic adoption. I swear the social worker rolled her eyes throughout the whole explanation. It was absolutely no help. They made domestic adoption sound impossible and there was no mention of open adoption.

Then, in 2009 when foreign adoption became much more complicated by the Hague Treaty, we decided to look into domestic adoption again. Long story short, we were lead to the Childrens Home Society of Virginia. We attended yet another adoption seminar and it is there that we first encountered the term "Open Adoption" and we truly did not know what to think. Their presentation was all about openess in adoption. Although we were not sure about an open adoption, we loved the staff and decided to take the adoption plunge.

During our home study the question about openess finally came up. They wanted to know if we would be willing to meet with the birth parents plus what kind of contact to have after the placement of the child. All kinds of scenarios were placed before us. Would we want contact with birth siblings, birth grandparents, etc. It made our heads spin. We were very conservative in our answers to the social worker's questions. Because open adoption is the norm for today's domestic adoptions, we later found out our answers to these questions kept us from many placement possibilities for about a year.

During that year I started reading adoption blogs. I can't remember which one was first. But one lead to another and another and another. And eventually I found the Open Adoption Roundtable plus Heart Cries and Amstel Life. Through all of these bloggers I was able to get a big picture of open adoption. We finally asked our agency to amend our home study to include a completely open adoption.

One year later we were matched with our son's birth mother and we couldn't be happier. We are so thankful for the time we got to spend with R and her mother. We initially agreed to send pictures and letters through the agency. And we certainly started out that way. But now we have each other's email addresses and can communicate through Facebook.

I haven't yet digested how this will all turn out. But, I am so thankful to have an open adoption. The possibilities for the future are there and I can't wait to see what happens!