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.
How do/would you talk with children about siblings in open adoption? How do you approach this as a (first or adoptive) parent, or how was it handled in your family if you grew up with siblings who didn’t live with you? For prospective adoptive parents or first parents without other children, has this been something you’ve thought about how you would approach? (Other responses can be found here.)
I’ve been thinking about this one for awhile.
I’ve been mulling over some of the comments I got, and am reluctantly convinced that I need to remove the language about hearts being broken; I have a weakness for faerie tale prose, and still think to myself sometimes in phrases from those I’ve read, or most especially some from a pink story tape we had when I was a child: “The wicked queen flew into a rage.” Now I’ve got to figure out the best way to talk about regret.
Mia said in comments that
As the adoptive mother, I wouldn’t want visits where my son might be told that it breaks his mother’s heart that he doesn’t live with her. My son can’t fix that situation, and he didn’t cause it, so he shouldn’t have to feel like he’s part of someone’s heartbreak or caught between two sets of parents when there is nothing he can do about it–he’s just a little kid.
It’s a fair point, and certainly I don’t want to burden little Cricket. On the other hand, I think that the absence of any mention of regret creates different problems: Why did we have and raise another child so (relatively) soon after placing Cricket if we didn’t regret the loss of him? And what birth family doesn’t wish that the placed child could have stayed with them, at least some of the time? Who doesn’t wonder what that would have been like?
I talked to a social worker at Catholic Charities who has done a number of adoptions about this, and she gave me permission to include my regret in the story I tell Joey: “It’s part of your story.” My understanding of the best interests of the adopted child (not thought up on my own, but heard from vaguely remembered experts) is that children own all of their stories, and that it is the parents’ obligation to give them all of their information—in age-appropriate ways, of course, and gently—but all of it. I’m not parenting Cricket, and I honestly don’t want to tell him anything. I want to send him to his moms if he has questions, dodging any awkward conversations until he’s taller than I am. But I want and need to tell Joey what happened, and why, and that it won’t happen to him and that I wish it had never happened at all. I am going to tell him all of that—I just want not to hurt anyone. That may be impossible.
I’m still looking for ways to put it, and hoping, cravenly, that Joey doesn’t talk to Cricket about this stuff. Heck, they’re unlikely to have an unsupervised conversation in the next decade. Maybe I can just swoop in with cake and interrupt. Or start a small fire. Or jump off the balcony.
I don’t feel as though Cricket is caught between two sets of parents—we’re clear that he’s with his moms forever, that they are his “real” parents (I use this language in real life), and that they are great moms and his family and and and. I want to find a way to talk to my Joey about this without wounding Cricket, and I know there has to be one, but I haven’t found it yet. And if I tell Joey these things and Ruth and Nora close the adoption because of it? I have no idea.
Endure for a Night 
This is complicated shit and I have nothing useful to tell you, but I had to comment because your posts have been increasingly… worrisome, I suppose, in their cold nature towards Cricket.
I don’t want to go all crazy how-can-you-be-so-involved-with-Joey-and-not-Cricket because trust me, I know that’s a decision you never really got to make. He’s with his “real” family now and you are not raising him so you do not feel like you should be part of “his” story until he already has all the information from his moms.
I don’t know why this bothers me so much. But since you know I am coming from a place of respect and love, I can tell you that the distance between Cricket and you scares me. I worry about him, and you – for the first time, I see the point of the whole “what happens when Cricket sees you with Joey and doesn’t understand why Joey was kept and he was given away” problem, because your boys are so close together in age; I can imagine Cricket being extremely confused and hurt. But it almost seems like you don’t care, and you don’t want to deal with it. That bothers me. You have to deal with it. I have a whole post brewing about the “it’s all about the children” thing and how that’s not exactly fair, but in this case I think you are being a little selfish. Dealing with Ruth and Nora is hard, I know, and it’s clear you don’t think of Cricket as your son anymore. Maybe that will work out for all of you, but I don’t have a good feeling about it. If I were Cricket and I ever read some of the posts you’ve been writing recently (remember, the internet is forever) I would feel TERRIBLE. I know this is not what you mean, but it really comes off as though you love Joey more than Cricket.
Blah, okay. I really don’t want to make you mad or hurt your feelings, but I had to say something. I hope maybe things will get easier, but you and I both know they probably won’t. Obviously, I am thinking about you and wishing you the best.
What to say.
I think a large part of what’s going on is that I’m trying to deal with the adoption from Joey’s end right now, and I cannot figure out a way to think about it helpfully for both boys at the same time—I just don’t know how. So I am shuttling back and forth, and yeah, the pendulum has been on Joey’s side for awhile now. I tend to give myself a pass on this one because Cricket has two smart and adoring moms to answer his every question and Joey has only me. But of course it’s not really fair to only focus on one of them at a time. I just don’t know how else to do this.
My experiences and emotions with and around Cricket have been almost universally crappy, and that’s not his fault at all—and yet I think there’s a link that I’ve let build up in my head, and I think of him and feel lousy every time. I don’t have good experiences with him, which is of course NOT HIS FAULT . . . but it makes it rarer and rarer for me to think of him with anything other than apprehension, guilt, or fear.
Madison and I have been having these discussions because it is likely Pennie will be moving out of state at the end of the summer because she needs the support of her family to parent Roscoe. And Madison is heartbroken.
I understand what lianotjuno is saying and I know it’s coming from a place of love for a boy who is so new and so young but I also understand what you are saying because Pennie needs to prioritize as difficult as that is. Roscoe is her priority because she is parenting him and that is the truth as much as it sucks for Madison. We have talked to Madison about that some not to ease the hurt (because the hurt is big and cannot really be eased right now) but to help her make sense from a practical point of view, which she gets. She has us and Roscoe has Pennie and that is how the parenting thing goes. Therefore, practically it makes sense and now she can sort of see her way out of the pain (the light at the end of the tunnel) even though she’s really IN it right now.
The other thing is that we are programmed to take care of the youngest most diligently. It’s an evolutionary thing where the youngest child in the equation has needs that seem the most urgent because they ARE the most urgent; they’re the most vulnerable. So there’s a lot going on that makes Joey’s needs take precedence over Cricket. But again, it’s not like you (or Pennie) are leaving your eldest out in the woods; they have parents.
I am certainly not in any way trying to diminish the painful experiences of Cricket or Madison, obviously, because we are LIVING it over here (and even if I was blogging I don’t think I’d take on this prompt — it’s running too thick in our lives right now).
Finally the internet is not necessarily forever. I believe WordPress.com is pretty good about erasing the cache although I haven’t checked the wayback machine lately to see. I do think we all need to be more careful than we were in the olden days when the world was less ‘net-savvy but as long as you control the space where you share, you can usually make it disappear. Not so if you’re posting to messageboards or email lists but you’re not so I think it’s ok.
I think it would be good if R&N let you have a voice in shaping the narrative for Cricket relating to his adoption. I support you telling both Cricket and Joey about the way you’ve experienced the loss and regret and how they’ve affected your life (at whatever point in time you deem best). In my opinion, it might also be good for you to tell both boys you think of Cricket daily and that you wish you guys could see Cricket more often.
When it comes to feelings of closeness and perceived coldness, I come back to visits. You did not get to visit Cricket early, and you have not been able to see him often. It’s not surprising the two annual visits would feel crappy and painful. Frequent visits probably would have been painful as well, but you might have felt more connected or like you knew Cricket better. Thinking of you.
I’m also coming to this from a different place, parenting a little girl whose one-year-younger sibling lives with extended family rather than strangers like us. She’s not yet at a place where she asks about that, maybe in part because we haven’t yet had visits, but I think it’s our job as her day-to-day parents to figure out how to explain that to her. There are very good reasons why the sibling left their mother’s care at birth and she didn’t until later just as there are good reasons why the relatives who are raising her siblings couldn’t raise her and I don’t know all those reasons but can guess about them, the same way I can guess about why her mother has these children in the spacing she has even if she’s not raising them. I may not know the answers, but I have to talk about the situations anyway because they exist as a part of our lives.
Was that a long enough preface? I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s possible Cricket is going to be confused or threatened or hurt by Joey’s very existence and there’s nothing anyone can do about the reality of that situation and dynamic. However, Ruth and Nora need to step up and parent him in a way that helps him deal with that, helps him deal with Joey’s story being different in some ways from his. That doesn’t mean that you have no role in helping him figure it out, but there’s a huge part of this that’s going to be up to them.
I don’t know. Now that I’ve started writing this, I know I’m not really adding anything. More later, maybe.
I wonder if what you’re trying to say is that there are often things that will hurt our children (not just adoption related) and as parents, we need to try and help them deal with it in the best way possible. Or maybe that’s just what I was having a sense of reading all this (!). There will always be hurtful things happening to our children in life, although that is hard to think of as a parent. The best gift to our children is not to stop them from ever encountering anything painful (although certainly to always give them information in the most age-appropriate and sensitive way), but to help them make sense of it and cope with it. At least, that’s my theory.
Why is it that Cricket was the one who was placed..but Joey is the one who has to be reassured about it? Kept kids just matter more. That is literally the only explanation I can come up with. But it’s not much of a surprise to me…I’ve seen it happen in my own life.
I think I might have to add myself to the list of many adoptees who just cannot continue to read this blog.
Because Joey is the one I have to explain everything to. Do what you feel you should, of course, but I don’t think it’s about mattering more; I think it’s about being parented by me. Cricket has other people who want to create his explanations and have a better right to do so.
Susie- YOU are the ONLY one who can explain things to Cricket in any sort of meaningful way. His mothers can tell him the story, reassure him of his place in THEIR lives. But they can’t and shouldn’t do your job for you. My parents can give me explanations until the cows come home..and it doesn’t change the fact that the ONLY people who can tell me MY story pre-adoption, the reasons of my placement, and how they love me are my NATURAL parents.
I’ve seen many an adoptee stop reading your blog because it makes us feel so shitty. Doesn’t that tell you something? Could it be that there is a trace of validity in what we are telling you?
Don’t see this is a criticism…it’s not meant to be one. I’m trying to point out how Cricket might feel down the road. And I think you can take some preventative steps that I just don’t see you taking.
But I’m not allowed to. I really believe that if, in the next several years, Cricket asks me for the lowdown and I answer him in anything but the most idiotic and cheerful way, his moms will stop visits. I think you’re absolutely right for when he’s an adult, but right now? I don’t know.
If it makes you feel shitty to read, really, don’t feel any pressure from me. I do listen to what people say in comments or email, even when I don’t agree, and I think especially about the things that are negative (of course)—but at the same time, I feel as though my hands are largely tied. I’m not willing to live eternally and entirely for Cricket, because I think I would kill myself; it’s too hard to mourn forever for a child I can’t see or talk to and who is at least for now doing quite well. I want to do right by him, but that runs up against what is possible, I think.
Bah, I just see disaster written all over this. Cricket deserves from you everything that Joey does. Worry about HE will feel about his placement and relationship with you. Joey is already ahead of the game- he’ll never know what its like to be given to other people to be raised. It will be beyond his comprehension, and that’s a good thing. You give everything of yourself to Joey..why would you not do so with Cricket? The inequality astounds and saddens me. But I presume you’ll say that its normal because Joey is being raised by you but Cricket isn’t. I guess that’s a reality of adoption that no one ever talks about.
At the end, this is really none of my business. You wouldn’t recognize me if I sat next to you on a bus. But as an adoptee who has lived for a long time a situation that is eerily similar to Cricket’s.. I can’t help but feel the need to tell you these things. In the end, its quite plain for everyone to see that your feelings towards Cricket and your feelings towards Joey are astoundingly different. People would like adoptees to think that we are equal to our kept siblings, that we deserve the same sort of compassion and interest. But it simply isn’t true. The fact that you are seemingly more concerned about how Cricket’s placement will affect Joey than how it will affect Cricket himself is evident. Personally, I find it a little backwards. It IS your job to ease any troubles Joey may have with this in the future…. but your attempts to convince him of how special and wanted he was, in direct comparison to Cricket, make me ill. Ill because I recognize it so much, sad because I know you don’t mean any harm, and even sadder because I know there is no way to change how you feel and that this will simply be the way things are.
Of course Joey’s needs and feelings are more important to you. He’s the son you love and feel connected to and are raising on day to day basis. I just find it devastatingly sad for Cricket. I know what its like to feel “less”. The knowledge that it’s not just a feeling that I have, that its actually TRUE that my family cares more about my sister than they do about me..well that’s a hurt I can’t even express.
It’s such a hard balancing act, but I think you are doing a great job!!