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[quote=Anonymous][quote]

Anonymous wrote:
One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open...ds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/

Powerful words.
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This is the perspective of one party in the adoption triad.  I'm sure that the adoptive parents and the child also have sides to the events as portrayed in this writing.  My guess is that if the adoptive parents were unwilling to grant temporary custody to the birthmom when daughter was a rebellious teen, it was probably because they didn't have a lot of faith in birthmom's ability to manage the situation.     The birthmother comes across as a little immature, selfish and overly dramatic---she doesn't seem to respect the fact that someone else did the very hard day-in and day-out of parenting.  She seems to view the adoptive parents as temporary caretakers who weren't doing the job the way she would have done it---and felt entitled to step in once her daughter turned 18 so she could reclaim what she viewed as her rightful place.  The birthmom's pained reflection illustrates though, is that open adoption should not automatically be the recommended form of adoption.   Ultimately, the person who balances all these issues is the adopted child.  As the comments to that 2015 perspective demonstrate---adult adoptees widely differ in choosing whether and how to have relationships with biological relatives.  This birthmother's anguish could very well be temporary---the daughter could very well decide at an older age to have a relationship with her.  But the birthmom doesn't get to demand that her daughter call her "mother"  ---the daughter gets the right as an adult to decide the people to whom she wishes to give those labels.  In the adoption triad, it is the child who has the least amount of say in the process.  It is only fair that they have the greatest rights to self-determination as adults.
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