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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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.   [b]Ultimately, the person who balances all these issues is the adopted child. [/b] 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.
 [/quote]

This is unrealistic. Did you read that the child was adopted at a few days old? Explain how an infant or a small child is expected to "balance all these issues"?

Further, the perspective you tout shows zero empathy and completely minimizes the life-long pain this woman has endured.  "Pained reflection" and "temporary anguish" and "selfish" and "overly dramatic" because she made/was coerced to make a monumental decision at a most vulnerable point in her life?  Those types of descriptors are pretty inhumane. Especially if one has not personally been in the exact same situation making the same decision.

If someone is an adoption-industry advocate then of course they would view this piece with skepticism since it is contrary to the party line.

Here is another perspective, that of an adoptive mother in an open adoption (from 2019 as if that really makes a difference to the subject matter):

"McGrady became a mother in her 40s, when she adopted a newborn baby girl from a local couple who wanted to pursue music careers instead of becoming parents. She’d always planned on having an open adoption, but never the possibility that she would later take her daughter’s biological parents, whom she identifies only as Bill and Bridgett, into her home for a few months when they found themselves homeless—or that their relationship would sour when she eventually stopped welcoming their last-minute requests to crash with her.

[b]McGrady entered into the open-adoption arrangement without much of a plan for what lay ahead,[/b] and the consequences bear out as McGrady’s relationship with her daughter’s birth parents metamorphoses repeatedly. At first, Bill and Bridgett are like random but tentatively friendly strangers on the opposite side of an important transaction; soon they become something like extended family members, then something like dependents, and ultimately something like bitterly estranged relatives."

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/rock-needs-river-open-adoption/581851/

Bottom line, to get back to OP's original question:  OP, do your research.  Look at all sides of the adoption issues, consider the choices and life-long ramifications, discuss it with those who will be your support group (family, friends) and most importantly, consider the child.  Always consider the child first.  [/quote]

I agree with all of this, and PP said it better than I could. I was accused earlier in this thread of being "anti-adoption" because I said that adoption is inherently traumatic. I'm not anti-adoption exactly (but I am anti- coercion-of-poor-women, and anti-stick-your-head-in-the-sand). I know some great adoptive families. I just want people to go into it knowing all the perspectives and challenges, and to go about it in a way that they are not perpetuating trauma.

[/quote]

What is your real agenda?  Your rants are pointless.  Dont tell OP not to adopt.[/quote]

I'm not telling OP not to adopt. I'm telling OP to look at all sides, to be educated about it, which is what I said. WTAF. What is your agenda? You haven't made any good point, you've just been here throwing out defensive postures. Are you an insecure adoptive parent who can't hear anything negative about it?

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