Apparently, the current trend in adoption circles is toward open adoption. In an open adoption, the birth parent is allowed to occasionally have contact with the children. Most of the prominent adoption magazines strongly recommend it. It is also the in-vogue direction that social work academics seem to be leaning.
My wife and I were recently driving home from a three day vacation and “just for fun”, Nancy called in to a very popular national radio show hosted by a well-known family issues psychologist. The radio host seemed oblivious to all of our good reasons to avoid our children’s birth mother. She essentially told Nancy that it was extremely important for the boys’ development to maintain contact with her.
I have revisited the issue in my mind because it was recently time to send the birth mother photographs and a written update on how the boys are doing. We agreed to send that information every six months when she agreed to sign relinquishment papers for the youngest child. We are not legally required to do it, but we feel like it is a moral obligation.
I have detailed the problems that the birth mother has in previous blogs. To summarize, she has had very serious substance abuse problems for many years, she never had any of our five children in her direct care, and medical professionals who have examined her have concluded that she can not take care of a child because she can not take care of herself.
Only the oldest child ever even mentions Lola. He knew her in his previous life, but he did not know that she was his mother. To the other boys, she is only the “lady who carried us in her belly”. We recently tried to show the oldest child pictures of Lola and he was clearly not interested.
When we were required to visit her, her presence scared all of them. She looked, acted, and smelled spooky. Any of these words could have been substituted for “spooky”: yucky, weird, creepy, and frightful.
We do have a responsibility to do what is right. In order to make sure that we are doing that, we have asked our adoption worker, our state social worker, the boys’ attorney-ad-litem, the Child Advocates volunteer, the state’s attorney and our psychologist if we should involve Lola at all in the lives of our boys. They all said no and that we should not ever consider it.
In a future blog, I am going to deal with how I have learned to have compassion for Lola, rather than despise her for what she did to the boys.
If you think that we should have more contact with Lola, I would appreciate your input. I would also like to hear the viewpoint of anyone who is the birth parent of a child who was adopted.
Related Blogs:
Adoption Day #2