Roundtable #48: Why Has or Hasn’t Openness Worked for You?

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don’t need to be listed at Open Adoption Bloggers to participate or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you’re thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table. The prompts are meant to be starting points–please feel free to adapt or expand on them.

In her OAB blog post this week, Kat Cooley wondered if there is some way to predict whether (adoptive and first) parents entering into open adoptions truly understand the importance of openness and are really committed to doing what they can to make it work. She asked readers to comment on what drives them to maintain their open adoption relationships. It sparked some great–still ongoing–conversation in the comments section. I encourage you to read the post and comments for yourself.

Reader Racilous suggested that we continue the conversation in a roundtable, which I thought was a great idea. (And for those of you who left comments on Kat’s column, you already have your roundtable post started!). In Racilous’ words:

Why has or hasn’t openness worked for you?

If you are in a healthy functional open adoption, why do you think it’s working? If it doesn’t work, why do you think it stopped working? Do you think the success or failure was about education and expectations going in? Do you think it was that your personalities matched or clashed? Do you think there is something you do or did during the relationship that kept it going or was there a certain point that it changed the relationship from bad to good? Was it a mixture of all of these things?

What a strange and appropriate time for me to get this prompt; Mr. Book and I are in the middle of a long conversation about whether to tell Ruth and Nora that we may need to officially switch to a semi-open adoption (I say officially because Mr. Book contends that we are already in a semi-open adoption). I’ve also been working on a message to them about this, which is a much-gussied-up version of: You break promises to us over and over again. That sucks, but we can deal with it. But once Kit is old enough to notice (being as Joey doesn’t care at all), if you’re still not doing what you say you will, we’re done. Send us pictures if you feel like following through on that part of the agreement at some point, and we’d appreciate an email once or twice a year about how Cricket’s doing; we will send him birthday and Christmas gifts, and will make sure that you have our contact information. But that’s it. I will stop writing to him, we will stop badgering you to Skype, don’t visit us, don’t contact our children, and don’t help Cricket contact us.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever send that message. If I did, we would still talk to Joey and Kit about Cricket—we’d say that his parents aren’t able to make a relationship work right now, but that we can try to get to know him when he’s grown up. Or something like that. Even if we do decide to pull back, there’s probably no need for an announcement: If I stop nagging, I am confident that contact will dry up entirely. The other night, I got a text message from Ruth containing a question from Cricket, and I was just angry—contact only happens when it is useful and convenient for them. Please, interject yourself into my evening and then vanish again for months. No, really, feel free. (I answered the question and was friendly.) I could run down a list of broken promises from them, but really, what is the point? They cover all the bases, from visits to contact to photos to Skype.

The most likely outcome, I think, is that I will send a message that—if there is an assertiveness scale from 1–10, and if the last message was a 2—is more like a 4 or 5. Here are things you have promised to do and failed to do, here are my concerns, I can imagine that in a year or two we may end up mostly cutting contact with you because of this and because of Kit and Joey.

How did we get to this point? Well, I don’t think Ruth and Nora think that we have a failing open adoption, so this is just to note that they would give a hugely different answer from mine and ours. But I would say that when we all agreed that we wanted to be like family, it would have helped to know that Ruth has cut off most of her family; since the adoption happened, she has also ended her marriage, and her best friend has ended the friendship. She doesn’t seem able to sustain relationships, and ours has lasted this long only because we want so desperately to have a connection to her son—but as that feels less and less likely, we too are thinking about walking away. I still believe that Nora never wanted an open adoption, and sometimes wonder whether she ever wanted to be a parent.

Day 2

Joey has started occupational and behavioral therapies (speech therapy starts later this week). Occupational therapy was great; the woman providing the therapy is one of the people who assessed him, and she’s still wonderful. Most of the things she wanted him to do were things he enjoyed, although he was grouchy about being asked to do things—but he clearly enjoyed himself, and he wept a bit when she left. ABA was a different story. Although no intensive behavioral therapy has started (the therapists are trying to get a sense of what he’s like at where he’s at, first), they tried a couple of small things with him that he HATED. They brought two small containers of bubbles with them, and Joey wanted to carry them around wherever he went. Every so often, the ABA supervisor would say to him “In three seconds, it’s teacher’s turn for bubbles! Three—two—one—” and then she would take the bubbles from him. He would grab for them, and she’d say “In three seconds, it’s Joey’s turn for bubbles!” And so on. She also pushed him to ask for more bubbles to be blown instead of just flapping his hand at the container and whining. This unbelievably cruel treatment (if you ask Joey!) had him hiding from them, trying to get me to pick him up and carry him away, and, by the end, tantruming and weeping.  My understanding is that kids do mostly hate ABA—if they didn’t, they wouldn’t need it. But by the time they left, he was exhausted and glad to see the back of them. I don’t think he’ll be pleased to discover that they’re coming back this morning. . . .

My Kitten

I want to tell you about Kit. He’s not having any crises or anything, so he’s been less in the news, but he’s super great, and you should hear how he’s growing. He started walking at nine months, and now, at eleven months, is practically running; he’s at that stage where he thinks that naughtiness is hilarious. And you know, when he grabs my cell phone and starts his waddling run away, giggling hysterically, I pretty much agree with him. He’s a gigantic, outgoing, cheerful kid—he will saunter up to Joey, grab the front of his shirt, and start trying to snatch the cookie out of Joey’s hand. He is so physically confident (and Joey so frequently passive) that he’s able to manhandle his older brother pretty well. I intervene a lot, and both boys get lots of talk about and demonstrations of gentleness. But Kit never seems to mean any harm; he’s enthusiastic, and he doesn’t know his own strength.

 

I’ve started planning Kit’s birthday party (June 9!) and am hopefully that we might actually have some little kids attending, now that I’m slightly more active in the moms’ group. I even have a dopey pointed birthday hat for him to wear. Mr. Book will be here, and I can’t wait.

 

Kit loves to play hide and seek; it started as peek-a-boo, but now he wants to crawl away and hide behind something (because it’s funnier if he crawls, I guess) and then pop out at you—or, in the latest version, go into another room and have the two of you take turns going in to surprise the other one. It’s more fun than it probably sounds. He is desperate to eat chalk, and he loves baths and showers so much that he will stand outside the stall and yell at you should you try to shower without him.

lisaanne119 comments

“I rarely comment, but wanted to tell you how intrigued by the twist in your story that this blog is now following.”

Early this year, I had been wondering whether EfaN was morphing into a straight-up mommy blog—and thinking about what I wanted it to be. After all, adoption contact has been less than a full blog’s worth, you know? As you can imagine, the dramatic irony here is just killing me. Don’t worry, Susie: your blog, it turns out, was just being set up for new and exciting changes. Oh, and your life. And your kids’ lives.

During that Skype call, Cricket reached out to Joey several times, talking to him and trying to get his attention—and Joey completely ignored him. And that’s everybody’s experience with Joey, but it still made me anxious and self-conscious—but Cricket didn’t seem too bothered. I am, however, starting to adjust to Joey’s new label; I no longer want to avoid telling people, for example. Our next-door neighbor is a pediatric speech therapist, and my mother had asked her long ago about Joey’s speech—I thanked her, belatedly, for some handouts she gave me, and she offered to give Joey an informal assessment if I want. I told her that he’s actually had a formal assessment now, and the results, and her reply was a much sweeter “Yeah, I kind of thought so.” Every little revelation that Joey has been telegraphing this for ages in a language I didn’t understand feels like a sucker punch. Pushing him around on a scooter board the other day and then encouraging him to try on his own—and seeing him instead flip it over and sit spinning the wheels—I understand that differently now, and it’s bittersweet. I’m glad that I know what’s going on.

“This Is Ocean”

Skype was great! I was nervous going in—I hadn’t seen Cricket move or speak in a year—and he looks so exactly like a four-year-old version of my husband with my mouth. (I like my lips, and am pleased to have passed them along.) He talked about scuba diving, and showed us both the signs that he’d learned in preschool (like <I’m running out of air> and <I’m going up!>) and some that he had made up—like <octopus>, which looked a lot like the ASL for <butterfly.> And <ocean>, which Nora thought that he had made up, but which actually looks like ASL. He’s a sweet, chatty kid, and he showed me his LEGO with a great deal of enthusiasm. Kit played peekaboo with Cricket and Nora—he likes to hide and pop out while you say things like “Where’s Kit? . . . There he is!!” So they covered their asked, wondered aloud where he had gone, and then uncovered their eyes and said “Peekaboo!” and after a couple rounds of that, Kit started hiding when they covered their eyes and popping out when they said peekaboo. It was adorable. Joey was interested until he saw that his Daddy wasn’t on the monitor—after that, I kept him around with yogurt drops.

At the end, Nora said “Let’s decide to do this for sure once a month—and try to do it every couple of weeks.” So much more than I expected; I’m delighted.

Mariposa

Yesterday I finally met with Joey’s case manager Mariposa. She said that she’s going to schedule his psychological evaluation as soon as possible—which is what I was asking for, so left me surprised. She was nothing but friendly and helpful, and is also setting up in-home services for Joey; I hope things move quickly, now. Since he’s already twenty-nine months old, Mariposa is also going to set up a meeting with the school system so that Joey can be evaluated by them—if he is diagnosed autistic by a psychologist, he won’t end up need the school system yet, but if he isn’t, at three he will start receiving services through them.

 

Easier Not To

I have a long post in my Drafts folder talking about how much I don’t ever want to tell Ruth and Nora about Joey’s diagnosis. I started it more than a month ago and keep going back to add to it, because I so, so much do not ever want to tell them. I am not interested in hearing what they have to say, and I don’t want them to treat my sweet kid differently. I’ve also felt angry at them, and that makes me not want to open up to them. But Mr. Book has thought all along that we should tell him, and I mostly know that he’s right but keep saying that I don’t care. He has given me veto power, so I’ve just been hanging out with my vague plan to not tell.

But then Ruth asked me, after two and a half hours of Facebook chat, a few questions that led me to a crossroads: Do I evade, lie, or disclose? I was angry that I had to tell her, but felt that I had to—evading would have gotten extremely weird very quickly, and I don’t want to lie. So I told her. She just asked a few questions—she wanted to know how badly off he is, but was trying to ask politely. She wanted to know his prognosis, and no one does. After we were done talking, I sent a message to Nora to let her know, pretty bluntly: but I don’t know what the flow of information between them is like, and I don’t want to have told one of them and not the other.

Ruth did tell me that Cricket has a cousin with disabilities, and that he already has some language around the idea that some people’s minds work differently, and some people’s bodies work differently.