I'm a bmom and this year my son's amom wrote me a letter telling me that she was not yet ready to tell him he was adopted. He is five now...and I was devasted. I'm not devasted by the fact that she basically discounted my act of choosing adoption. Rather, I felt bad for her and her husband and most importantly my son. She believes she is protecting him. She said she didn't feel he was ready to be told and didn't know when she felt the "right" time would be. The right time is from the beginning. I talked with my son's amom before I placed him with them at birth about this subject and she even asked me what I thought. I told her that she would be his parents and she would have to decide when the right time would be. I even suggested talking with a child psychologist. (This was all before I learned that the best time is to start from the beginning. There are age approriate ways to talk about adoption.) I say all this because while my son has everything I couldn't offer him when I made the decision to place him for adoption, he now could lose trust with the most important people in his life when he finds out the truth. The way I look at it is secrets are usually something bad we want to hide from people. Adoption is not a bad thing and I don't believe that my decision was a bad thing, rather a blessing. It's cliche' but honesty is the best policy all around. If you talk about it from the beginning it doesn't become a big deal rather something they've always known.
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