There are more adoptive parents reading these postings than I realized. After I wrote about our adoption experiences, I heard from some.

At least one of these correspondents did a so-called “open” adoption. When Carol and I adopted our son Sam in 1984, there barely was such a thing. The prevailing ethic was that the birth mother should give up the baby and get on with her life. Us adoption agencies will take over now, dearie. You just run along and forget you ever had this child.

Most people today will find this attitude ludicrous, but back then it was accepted — at least overtly — by all, including birth mothers. We now know the pain these mothers suffer at giving up their own offspring, with little hope they’ll ever see the child again. We know the pain adoptees feel at not being able to pry their biological information out of obdurate public agencies, and the obsessive birth-parent searches this pain may engender. But we didn’t then.

Frankly, Carol and I were feeling a little pain of our own at the time.

We’d tarried long while the old Bio Clock ticked away. When we finally got serious, we lost a baby to a tubal pregnancy. There followed months — years — of invasive, costly, humiliating fertility fun, none of which got us pregnant again.

Finally one day I had a flash. I said to Carol: We are not going to have a baby the natural way. Let’s adopt. OK, she said. You do it.

In the year it took to adopt Sam, the pain we experienced was of a different sort but real just the same. When an agency offers you a baby, you wouldn’t think anything could go wrong; but I am here to tell you it can, and did. Agency people change their minds. Mothers change their minds. We changed our minds. Long and short, a process that was supposed to take mere months took about a year, and Sam was the third or fourth baby offered us. When we finally got this treasured child, we were feeling pretty beat up.

Then I start reading stories about open adoptions. The stories were, as I remember, pretty gaga. I thought: No way, baby. Ain’t room in this household for but one set of parents. And that’s us.

But our situation with our daughter Shawn was, in a sense, an open adoption. We became her principal-caregivers-without-portfolio while her dad remained her dad. This situation went on from her teens into her 20s, when he died. (Then we adopted her. Talk about locking the barn after the horse is stolen.)

Now Shawn is the mother of her own adopted son, in an agency adoption that was, legally, quasi-open. Shawn has never met his biological parents but communicates with them by mail via the agency.

I still prefer closed to open. When Shawn’s dad was alive, Carol and I walked on eggs. If we’d felt more confident of our authority, I think we’d have been better parents to her. And Shawn’s dad was our friend — not likely the case in an open agency adoption. The idea of a birth mother taking active part in the rearing of my child gives me the willies. It’s hard enough staying on the same page with your spouse without some stranger sitting in the peanut gallery giving you the razzberry.

(For people of my turn of mind, international adoptions are great. There’s a snowball’s chance in hell that you or your kid will ever encouter the birth parents or they you.)

But the world turns. Some open adoptions clearly work. Some adoptive and birth parents work out the lines of authority that seem so daunting to me. I don’t know whether this is good or bad on balance for the kids, and I wish I did. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: Growing up with a biological parent in the picture would dispel that hollow craving that plagues some kids, not knowing who gave them birth.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Acupuncture works! Tell ya about it next time.