Raven Hey bud!
I've thought about this thread a lot in the past two days. It's been on my mind because I am seeing something entirely different than everyone else is seeing.
I take your initial question not to mean "are we real" but "do we matter" in the face of OA. I suppose I've read it that way because you and I and others have spoken of this amongst ourselves and that is what I'm seeing here between the lines.
So I've meditated on how to explain the way that I picture it, because I, probably like some others from the Closed Era, have felt "apart" from OA. And that the message is getting lost in the midst of Roe and everything since.
I've thought a lot about how to phrase how I see it and the only thing I can do - and pardon me because this will sound either weirdly dramatic or...I dunno....skewed perhaps....but I think of the two eras of adoption as a sort of San Quentin.
The OA's (birthparents and adoptive parents alike) are doing short time in "A" Block. They are thrust immediately into the politics of the "system"; into the general population where they must quickly learn the rules or die trying. Vague promises are made on both sides regarding each other's security (in terms of their feelings, thier dignity, their rights); those promises overseen by a warden, I.e., an agency or legal entity holding the keys and the power. But because neither side has little by way of education regarding what they will face in "A" Block, they are left to fend for themselves all while trying to keep their morales intact. Five years minimum trying to come to terms with where they stand with themselves and with others; where they begin and someone else ends.
No thanks, Alex Trebec! I'll take dental surgery for $500.00.
Then there are those of us from the Closed Era. The residents of "B Block"; hardtimers doing 30 to life. We were not thrust into the fray. The warden simply locked us in solitary and threw away the key. We were left to rot in the darkness; to suffer in denial of what had gone before and why we were imprisoned in the first place. That is how it has seemed and the reason I personally believe we've made it thus far is not so much that we had the will to survive (after all, some of us didn't) but more because we learned how to avoid the battles raging around us.
Then, one day, some of us received parole. For whatever reason, we discovered that the keys had been in our possession all along. We emerged from our cells into the light but the light had grown almost painfully brilliant. In our long incarceration the world had changed; so had the rules. We found ourselves mingling with the young men and women of OA who'd already done their time on A Block and were now out grappling with their residual battles scars.
In the world of OA, I do not (my opinion) think we have a voice; at least not one that will make a difference to a system that is vastly different than the one we've known.
I also do not believe that a short-timer can understand a life sentence.
This is not to say that the men and women of Open Adoption do not tred a heavy path throughout their lives - far from it - at least I would imagine. But that path is about forward momentum; striding however haltingly into the future.
For you and I and those like us, the path goes in two directions and we must traverse them both. We must travel along the backwaters and alleys of the past in order to pave the unbuilt road of the future. All with the weight of many years in brutal solitary for company.
We do have a voice but it belongs to us. That is what I mean when I say that we do not matter. We do matter but only in so much as what we have experienced can be shared among us and healed.
Open Adoption belongs to the young and it is the young who must change it.
Hope this made sense.
Love ya much!