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When Hubby and I embarked on adoption a few years ago, everything we "knew" about adoption was from decades past:
1. You waited on a long list until the agency matched you with a situation. The main criteria for the match was your place in line.
2. You tried to make the building of your family as close to "normal" (read: biological) as possible. You didn't talk much about the adoption (either inside or outside of the family), and you certainly didn't have any contact with birthparents. The goal was to make it seamless, almost as if adoption were never part of the story.
3. You didn't talk much about adoption. It wasn't exactly shame, but there was an air of secrecy for for my friends who had been adopted. When we did speak of adoption, it was in hushed voices. My friends didn't know much about their birthfamilies, their birth story, or their origins. And it would hurt their parents too much to wonder too much. So they tried not to.
Our agency had to teach us about this newfangled thing called Open Adoption. We replaced the above myths with:
New & Improved 1: Adoption wasn't about waiting passively in line -- it's about who we are. Someone would make a conscious decision about us parenting her baby. The criteria were now our values, our bundle of experiences, and our vision for the future -- US!
New & Improved 2: Why try to deny that our family was built by adoption? Why try to hide the fact that our children each have a set of firstparents? Is my ego so fragile that acknowledging the firstmothers of my children takes anything away from me? Loving and respecting our children's firstparents is just another way of loving and respecting our children.
New & Improved 3: It's possible that I am too OUT about our adoptions. I am so happy about the way we became a family that I share a lot, in an effort to combat some of the myths leftover from bygone eras.
Reason 4: My children have access to their medical histories and a clan who looks like them and loves them (but are in no way coparents).
Reason 5: My children will not have to go through the potential minefields of search and reunion just to get answers to their wonderings.
I know openness is not for everyone in every circumstance. But in our situation, open adoption is working well for our children, their birthmothers, and for us.
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