Why would I link to an article about infertility on an adoption blog? Many of us who have, or are planning to, adopt infants came to adoption after struggles with infertility. Some of us stopped before IVF, some of us had more than one unsuccessful cycle of treatments, and some of us had a child through IVF but wanted to complete their family and were unable to do so without more interventions. In fact, the majority of private agencies, including ours, need a doctor’s statement of fertility problems before accepting a family for a domestic infant program. In short, infertility has affected a whole lot of adoptive parents. Not all, certainly not all. But I would say many.

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A lot of comments were riddled with the phrase “just adopt”. “Oh, those selfish people! Why do they spend all that money on fertility treatments! They should just adopt.”

Just adopt. If you have been through the adoption process even once, you know how ridiculous that statement is in reality. From filling out the initial application to completing a home study (and waiting for the home study to be approved) to the actual wait for a baby, there is no “just”. What makes things worse is if the comments come from someone in your extended family or a close friend.

We experienced that early on in our adoption journey. Several family members felt compelled to tell us that we “wasted our time” with infertility treatments; closely followed by the statement “You should just adopt. Plenty of babies out there.” They would never think of adopting, but we should.*

Do I think that adoption is a good thing, even after what I’ve just said? Absolutely. The only thing I’ve regretted in the 9 years we’ve spent dealing with adoption is that we weren’t able to meet more of our daughter’s other family.

*Conversely, we also got to talk to some family members who had adopted children; two as infants and one as a preschooler. I can’t tell you how much we’ve appreciated them and their support.

Videos are generally not that long. Our video was about 10 minutes or so. They can vary in quality from a “home movie” to a professionally shot, scripted production. There are some video companies out there who specialize in potential adoptive parent videos. In fact, we were given names and samples from two companies when we did ours. The only thing all the videos have in common is providing expectant parents with more information to choose a family for their child.

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Whether or not you choose a video company to produce your video for you, a script is a really good idea. It doesn’t have to be much – just a rough idea of the topics you want to cover. We wrote down some things we wanted to talk about for our video, but improvised the actual words. Music is a nice touch at the beginning and end as well.

My husband and I chose to do our video ourselves. We reasoned that it would be a good excuse to buy a camcorder, so that we would have it later on. Our location was up in the mountains, near a heavily wooded lakeside. We had a rough idea of what we wanted to talk about, set things up, and got to work. It took us a couple of hours to shoot, and another hour to edit and dub onto VHS tape (which should tell you how long ago this was!). We brought our dog along for a couple of the shots; our agency recommended to include some footage of all the members of the household, including pets or any other children, but not too much that it detracted from seeing us as a couple.

In the end, it was an interesting experience. We now have a place we go to at least once a year with our daughter, as a part of talking about her story. Our daughter’s birth family mentioned that they really liked the video. M’s mother, C, remarked that we seemed more like “regular people”, and it helped them a bit with their decision. We now have a video camera that we’ve used for lots of other events as well. I hope that the experience of making a video will (or has) worked out as well for you.

This round’s topic was suggested by adoptive parent blogger Rebecca: privacy, blogging and open adoption. Figuring out boundaries is difficult when you write about your personal life. Any on-blog mention of family, friends or co-workers risks invading their privacy. Bloggers who write about or post pictures of their children are accused of exploitation. Where is the line between your own experience and other people’s personal lives? What information is yours to share and what rightfully belongs to someone else?

Add the overlapping relationships of open adoption to the mix and you’ve got yourself a potential ethical and personal mess. And yet it’s impossible to talk about one’s open adoption experience without mentioning the people involved. Where do you draw the lines–on your blog and in your personal life–and why? What, if anything, don’t you tell?

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Every adoption blogger, just like every parent (I’m deliberately not specifying adoptive or birth parents here, although I write from the adoptive parent persepctive) has to work out the privacy vs. complete honesty issue for themselves. I know many well-known bloggers (well, okay, Dawn) who use full identifying information for everybody involved, including her child’s birth family. There’s nothing wrong with that. When I started, I used my daughter’s complete first name and lived to regret it. I began referring to her as Baby Girl not too long after I started blogging. Then Big Girl once she turned 3, and School Girl during her kindergarten year. So School Girl it is. Most of the members of our extended family are referred to by standard names: my Mum and Dad, my Sis, FiL, MiL, K’s stepmother, BiL/wife and nieces/nephew. All members of School Girl’s birth family are referred to by their first initials. I’ve noticed that’s the most common way to refer to family members besides yourself. Another way is to give people nicknames, which works as well.

The other problem is just how much to write about in public. I know for a fact that there are parents of School Girl’s classmates who are well aware of the existence of my other blog. Password-protected posts have worked very well for me; certainly when it comes to writing about visits, difficult conversations we’ve had at home, and more sensitive posts involving loss and grief. If there’s a topic that gives you concern at all, and leaving it unwritten isn’t an option, password-protection works very well indeed. It certainly gives you more control over who reads and who doesn’t. That has prevented much, much ugliness within my husband’s family during holiday visits.

Another thorny issue is putting up your child’s, or family’s, picture on The Internets. Keep in mind that taking a picture off doesn’t mean that nobody will have further access to that photo (Google never forgets), and let your best judgement and common sense be your guide. Having said that, I occasionally post pictures of School Girl online, usually as a model for a completed fiber project. Unless I had M or S’s consent, I would never ever post a picture of them online at all.

Every blogger is different. We operate from different backgrounds, different perspectives and have far different stories. Some of those stories demand more privacy by their very nature. In short, use your own instincts and best judgment determine how much to write about your own open adoption. Even with password protection, you never have absolute control over who reads your posts and sees your pictures. I’ve also found that being pseudonymous can be a very freeing experience; mostly in terms of what topics to pick and how openly you write about them.

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In our case, we’ve dealt with loss in many different ways, all of us. M had, I think, the most difficult time so far dealing with her loss. I mentioned in my previous post that M had dealt with depression for a period of time, when School Girl was 3 or so, and that we weren’t in contact with her for 2 years. According to her social worker, she had a very difficult time deciding to place. In fact, she changed her mind twice before her termination of parental rights (TPR) court date. We knew a little about the hard time she was having, and decided not to have School Girl placed with us until (or if) the court date happened. It partly explains why she deccided not to have more than two visits before School Girl turned 1. I have no idea about S. I do know that he was involved in choosing us as School Girl’s adoptive family. Once we were chosen, he dropped out of the proceedings altogether. He stopped visiting School Girl at the cradle care family. He failed to show up for his counseling sessions. At one point we were concerned that he wouldn’t show up for the TPR hearing. He did, and also was there on School Girl’s placement day. It was the only time we met him, and we have not seen him since. Before one of M’s visits with us, she had tried to talk him into coming along, but he chose not to come at the last minute. Right now it’s not possible for us to visit.

School Girl is quite young still – she won’t be 8 until February – but she works through her losses in her own way. When she was about 5, she decided for some reason that she absolutely, positively, had to see M. We never did find out why. I do remember it was the single biggest, longest, most horrific tantrum she ever had. So far, it’s the worst she’s ever had. It was awful to have to go through, and have no other answer to her screams than “I’m sorry, baby. We don’t know where M is. We don’t know why she hasn’t called us. She’s just not ready for a visit right now. It’s not you, but a visit’s something we can’t do right now.” She talks less about S, although she does know why we can’t be in touch with him.

On the way home from school the other day, she mentioned something that surprised me. “If I was still with M, I would get to show my All About Me poster this week.” Her class has All About Me days for everyone in the class, once a week, with the kids in alphabetical order. I asked her if she was sad because she had to wait.

“No, it’s okay. I talked to S (one of her closer friends), and at least she and I can do our posters almost together.”

Did she ever wish that she was still with M?

“Sometimes I wish I could see her more. But I’m okay with you and Daddy too.” We don’t usually have huge tantrumy moments about anything anymore, and I’m not sure what that means. I’d like to think that she can talk to us about what she’s thinking or feeling, but sometimes that’s hard for a child.

Our adoption hasn’t been that way. What our agency called “open adoption” well…wasn’t. No identifying information was to be shared; and if it was, the agency officially didn’t want to know about it. When visits happened, they were to be in a neutral location with a social worker or other moderator present. We were told that other adoptive families used cell phone numbers for contact, because cell phone numbers aren’t associated with names on Caller IDs. I have since heard this referred to as a “semi-open” adoption.

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Over the years, we haven’t had a lot of contact with M. Our contact has mostly been with her parents; specifically, her mother and me. When we were first placed, our social worker said that M had requested 4 visits during the first year. That was fine. It would not be easy, maybe, but it would be fine with us. I think we might have had 2 visits with M before our daughter’s first birthday, and 5 visits with M’s parents. Then there were the 2 years that we had no contact with M at all. We had no way of contacting her. Her mother said that she didn’t have a phone, that she was going through some serious issues with depression, among other things. Does that still count as having an open adoption?

We have no contact with anyone in our daughter’s first father’s family either. Currently, it is neither safe nor possible for us to have contact with him. Someday, when he is doing better physically and emotionally, we hope that we can be in contact. He knows how to get in touch with us if he ever wishes. But right now, it’s not possible. Does that mean our adoption is open?

I think it is. Our daughter knows that she has a mother, a father and parents – and they aren’t necessarily the same people. She knows that she has two different sets of family, all mixed together. She knows that there are a lot of people that she’s related to, both by blood and love, and they all love her more than life. That, to me, is open adoption. No secrets. Being able to see where you came from and where you are now, and being able to imagine with all those people where you can go in the future.

An autobiography is a little like the profile that is filled out at the agency at the beginning of the home study process. Rather than being answers to a series of questions, it is more like a narrative. It’s the story of your life so far, in as much detail as you feel comfortable sharing. As our social worker told us with the profile, the more you choose to share, the better match you will have. My husband had an easier time writing about himself than I did. Oddly enough, some of the things that he and I left out were things that our daughter’s birth families and ours had in common. We weren’t given a word count limit, but were told the average was roughly 2-3 single sided pages, hand written as in our “Dear Birthparent” letter. Our agency also supplied us with examples of autobiographies from previously waiting families, with their identifying information removed. Some of them felt more complete than others. Some of them read like a resume, at least to my more cynical side.

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My autobiography was roughly 2 1/2 pages long. It touched on some of the highlights of my previous life: early childhood, moving while I was in high school, college, my interest in music and art. I also wrote a little about meeting my husband and our challenges with infertility before making the decision to pursue adoption. My husband’s was a bit different. He grew up in a military family and wanted his own family to have more stability than he experienced growing up, and that was the focus of both his autobiography and his “Dear Birthparent” letter. There was quite a bit that we both left out, mostly because we couldn’t imaging anyone wanted to read about “all that stuff”.

It was strange. The things that we didn’t mention were similar to what we left out of our profile. For example, our growing up as science-fiction geeks, the importance of music in our lives, my husband’s love of writing. All of those and more were things we wound up having in common with our daughter’s birth family. I have no idea what that means, but the fact that we left those things out – and that they found us anyway – means something. I don’t know what just yet.

What did people forget to tell you about adoption? What did they omit or conveniently not tell you before you adopted or relinquished your child?

There are so many things, but I’ll try to keep them at 10.

• I wish that someone had told me how frightened I would feel about having a brand new baby at home. Every other mother I knew seemed so at ease and happy. I just figured that I was going to be a terrible mother from the get-go; that all my IF problems and miscarriages meant that I was going to be a horrible mother.
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• I wish someone had warned me about post-adoption depression. I wish they had told me it was real, and a real danger for someone with a family history of depression to begin with.
• I wish I had felt like I could talk honestly with my social worker about my doubts and fears. About my depression, too. I honestly believed that if I did, School Girl would have been taken from us.
• I wish that M could have had a counselor that was more proactive with her problems. I wish someone would have told us that she would only have her counselor “checking in” with her for the first 6 months. Then it was up to her to reach out for help.
• I wish someone would have told me how protective I would feel, both for School Girl and for M.
• I wish I had known just how idiotic people can be about adoption in general, and open adoption in particular. Especially people in our own family.
• I wish I had known about adoptive parent groups in our area before I did. As it happened, I found out about the lone adoptive parent group as they were going through some political battles. The group disbanded roughly 2 weeks after my first visit with them.
• I wish I had known how horrible it would feel when the 4-year-old that you love is screaming for someone else – her mother – and you have no idea how to reach her, or even if she’s still alive.
• I wish I had known how happy and proud I could feel about our baby. Even (especially?) knowing that we had nothing to do with the gifts and talents that she possesses.
• I wish I had known from the start that opening our adoption fully was not something to be afraid of, but something to embrace. I also wish our social worker had been a little more supportive of opening up our adoption.

Are there things you wish you had known about adoption from the beginning?

In our case, we had interviews immediately after we completed our autobiographies. Like the autobiography, you will be encouraged to reveal everything about yourself. Merely from observing several couples in our pre-adoption classes, I would guess that there are few people who actually reveal everything about themselves. You need to decide, barring anything that would come up/had already come up in a criminal investigation, how much you reveal about yourself. There were things that I chose not to reveal during the interview. Little things, I thought. Like my starting smoking when I was 12 and quitting when I graduated from college. The fact that we had a disastrous kinship adoption in my mother’s extended family, which could have affected my mother’s feelings about adoption in general. The fact that my husband and I love science fiction and are considered huge geeks by people who know us. Little things.

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Our social worker did tell us that the more we chose to tell about ourselves, in both the interviews and our autobiographies, the easier it would be to find a match. I have no idea if that is actually true. I do know that it was almost exactly 2 years from the day we submitted our application to the agency to our placement day. If we had been more open, would we have had a shorter wait? I don’t know. I do know that when we were matched, we wound up having a great deal in common with our daughter’s birth family.

The things that we have in common are little things, especially with M and her family. Her parents loved the outdoors and traveling. Her father’s parents were amateur geologists and paleontologists, “rockhounds” like my parents. S loves reading science fiction. Both M and S excelled in math and science in school, like my husband. Even though they both described themselves as being outgoing, they are both quite shy around strangers. Much like my husband and me.

The point to all this? Don’t sweat the interviews. As you did with your autobiographies, you decide how much to reveal about yourselves. Good luck!

It was our social worker with bad news.  Lil’ D’s family had decided to postpone the placement “for now”.  They wanted the long weekend to bring him home and say goodbye.  The agency would be in touch on Tuesday.

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That seemed reasonable.  We were disappointed, but it seemed like that would be what we would want under similar circumstances.

What happened next is still not clear.  We were told by our agency that Lil’ D’s birth parents would not be parenting him.  We were also told that, as this search for a match had dragged on, one of his grandparents decided that she wanted to parent him herself.  We were told that it had nothing to do with us.  I have no idea what, if anything, was actually true.  All I can go on is what we were told.

We were devastated.  But we went on.

In the next 3-4 weeks, our social worker checked up on us to see how we were doing.  I hope that when we were actually placed with the child we are currently parenting, her birth parents’ social worker did the same for them.  Our social worker did ask us if we wanted to take some time off from the waiting parent list.  My husband and I said no at the time, but we also discussed the possibility of placing a time limit.  If we got no calls in the next 6 months, we would be finished.

Would I have felt differently if Lil’ D’s parents had decided to parent him?  I would like to think so.  Honestly, I cannot say, as that wasn’t what we were told had happened.  I would like to think I would have been more understanding if I knew he was being raised by his mother and father.

(In fact, that was what happened with one potential placement afterwards.  It was an infant girl who was very ill (she needed a gastric tube for nutrition, among other things), and her father was suing for custody in family court.  We declined that particular placement.

Is there any advice I can give?  The only thing I learned is this:

Never assume that a child is yours to parent until after their adoption has been finalized.  It sounds harsh, but there it is.  In the state where we live, a parent is free to change their mind at any point up until the termination of their parental rights in court.  That’s at least 10 days from a child’s birth, but it could be as long as 3 months, depending in part on the schedule of a particular family court.  So, until your social worker says so, a child has only one set of parents.  Meaning if you are potential adoptive parents, with a child placed before a TPR hearing, not you.

Always try to keep in mind that whatever works out is in the best interests of a child.  It may not seem that way to you at the moment that you’re grieving the loss of “your child”, but that’s what is supposed to happen.

Also keep in mind that, when you finally are placed with a beloved child to parent, that somebody else will be grieving the same way you did.

Finally, there comes the day when the potential adoptive family gets The Call.  Then they meet the baby (and usually, at least in our state, the baby’s original family).  Then they’re placed, then there’s the finalization, and they all live Happily Ever After.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

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I don’t personally know of too many adoptive parents who haven’t had at least one instance of a failed placement.  For the purposes of this discussion, I will be calling it a disruption.  Some people refer to it as a “failed adoption”, but that would imply that the finalization had already taken place.  Despite what you might have heard in every tabloid and every sensational news story surrounding adoption, a failed adoption is rare.  According to the study cited <a href=”http://statistics.adoption.com/information/statistics-disruption-dissolution.html”>here</a>, from 1988, less than 1% of all infant adoptions are disrupted.  Certainly sad for everybody concerned, but rare.

The most common reason for a disruption is that the birthparent has decided to parent the child, either alone or as a couple.   If a family has been affected by a disruption, their story will always be unique.  I’m certain that a disruption affects the birthfamily too; but as I have no personal knowledge of that, I cannot speak for that myself.  The one thing I can do is to tell our family’s story of our disruption.

About 8 years ago this August, we got a call from our social worker about a little boy, Lil’ D.  He had been in the ICU for the first 2 months of his life, and was roughly the size of a baby half his age.  At birth, he had tested negative for drugs and alcohol, and so far had not shown any signs of a thyroid disorder.  In fact, he was scheduled for genetic testing right around the time that he was supposed to be placed.  His grandparents insisted that any potential parents meet with them at placement.  We had wanted to at least meet with most of his family anyway, so we agreed.  His birthfamily also wanted us to meet him before deciding whether to accept the placement.  It seemed reasonable, so we agreed to that as well.

We were also told by our social worker that Lil’ D’s birthfamily were extremely upset that the placement was taking so long (at the time, they had been waiting for 2 months to come up with a suitable family for Lil’ D) and were planning on suing the agency for “misrepresentation”.   That alone should have set the warning bells blasting away in my head.  at the same time, I wasn’t…excited, or happy, or feeling very much of anything.  That also should have set off warning bells, but it didn’t.

The next day, we met Lil’ D at his cradle parents’ home.  He was a beautiful little boy.  <em>Very</em> small for a 2 month old, true, but beautiful.  He also had the wide, slightly bug-eyed look of someone with hyperthyroidism.  At the hospital, he had tested negative, but was being taken to the Big Specialty Hospital in town to undergo more extensive genetic testing.  We played with him.  I got to feed him, change his diaper.  We both fell in love.Nothing could have prepared us for what happened next.