Open adoption

You're not honoring one truth or denying one truth by honoring or denying the other.

A successful open adoption can be warm and close.

It can be fulfilling, but it can also be limited, structured, or mostly indirect.

What makes it successful is that it protects the child, respects the child's whole story, and leaves room for the child's curiosity and change and growth.

And-

And we did a lot of talking with her about, like... 'Cause she wanted an open adoption.

Mm-hmm.

And so we did a lot of talking with her about what that looked like and what she wanted the relationship with us to look like and what she wanted the relationship with the kid to look like.

... is open.

It's, it's a really interesting question because if I were to ask 100 women do they want an open adoption, maybe three of them would say no.

Maybe three.

The vast majority of people want an open adoption, but they don't really want-

Right

...

He says, "Adoption is what happens when governments choose not to take care of their people.

Open adoption is a marketing tactic, and I'm here to talk about it," is what he says.

So he means that, y'all.

Connor Howe was born and adopted in San Diego in the mid-1990s.

He was one of the very first kids to grow up in what we call an open adoption.

For him, open, and I'm air quoting that, meant seeing his mom once every year or two.

His father lived in Ireland, and for most of Connor's life, the only thing he knew about him was his first name.

Open adoption was supposed to fix everything.

Like, wow, interesting.

And I think it's interesting how, you know, when you, I mean, obviously we're far past our relinquishment on what happened, but when you learn about the history of open adoption and what that actually means and why that even exists, it's because the industry was falling apart.

They knew that women were not relinquishing anymore.

They knew that adoption was becoming obsolete almost.

I knew that, I guess there was assumptions made, right? Because this is, this is me going into this, not really knowing anything.

And all I'm thinking about is how am I going to get through this? Right.

And how, how do I, how do I do this? And we we talked about openness and we talked about an open adoption, didn't really define it, didn't have anything written on paper because in Florida, anyway, no, no, I do have one one piece of paper that that said that they agreed to.

updates for the first five years right and and you know i don't know what that means i don't know what this is gonna look like i don't know how this is gonna feel like you know how those updates went every time the text message goes off or any time that you know whatever the visit it's it's so triggering it's it's like it's just re-traumatizing right it's it's that rush of adrenaline the the the increased heart rate like the anxiety the whole day right like i i i had a separate ringtone set up for when the text i had to change it i had to make it with all my other ringtones because it would set me off