Open adoption, broken heart

I knew it would be hard for my daughter's birth mother to give her up. I just didn't expect to feel so guilty for taking her.

By Dawn Friedman

Read more: Life

March 8, 2006 | The first time I met my daughter, Madison, she wasn't mine yet and I wasn't sure she would ever be. I stared into her solemn face and looked shyly at her mother, Jessica.

"Can I pick her up?" I asked.

"Of course," she said proudly.

There was nothing about her that was familiar -- not her round face, her tuft of hair, the heft of her body. When I gazed at her, I felt enormous tenderness and the quiet stirring of potential love, but I didn't know her. And I was afraid to look too closely because I knew that, just as I had felt the shift and click of my son's life falling into place after his birth seven years before, so Jessica was coming to know Madison. All those months, she had thought she was carrying just any baby when all along it was Madison. She was saying to her daughter what I had said to my son: "Oh, it was you!"

Adoption social workers say that every woman needs to say hello to her baby before she can know if she can say goodbye. But I wanted to say hello to Madison, too. I wanted to let myself fall in love with her. I wanted to unwrap her and examine each little limb, bury my face in her neck, let my fingers trail across her features. But she wasn't mine. I grieved her even as I knew she wasn't mine to grieve.

Three days after Madison's birth I watched my husband buckle her into the car seat, and then I climbed into the back seat beside her. I thought about Jessica, who we'd left sobbing in the maternity ward. I knew her arms were aching for her daughter, the daughter that was now ours.

"She's beautiful," I said to my husband. He glanced into the rearview mirror. "I know," he said. We sped through the gray morning, heading home.

"I feel like a kidnapper," I told him.

"I know," he said.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

My husband and I came to open adoption filled with hopeful naiveté. We tried for several years (and several miscarriages) to have a second child, but when our infertility doctor said we might need more extensive treatment, we decided to walk away. A few months later, we began to explore adoption. Foster-to-adopt, we decided, would be too emotionally risky for ourselves and, more importantly, for our then 6-year-old son. International adoption was too expensive. But when we found domestic infant adoption through a local nonprofit agency, we realized that we had found our way to be parents again.

We knew that our adoption would be at least semi-open. We would be sharing our vital statistics -- first names, ages, religion, as well as carefully chosen pictures -- with birth mothers, as per the agency's requirements. But we wanted more. We wanted a fully open adoption with an ongoing relationship and continuing contact. We wanted holiday visits, regular phone calls and even -- dare we hope -- contact with the extended birth family. We felt our baby-to-be would benefit from knowing his or her origins; we considered it a birthright. We also strongly believed birth parents were due some kind of relationship with their children and with their children's adoptive parents -- if they wanted one.

We weathered the fear-mongering tales of well-intentioned friends and acquaintances, people who had watched nightly news stories of toddlers snatched by their birth parents from adoptive families who had cared for them since birth. We listened as they wondered aloud what kind of woman would have the strength to walk away from her baby and then come back for occasional visits. "What if she kidnaps the baby?" they'd say. "What if she treats you like babysitters?"

Other adoptive parents we knew chose to go abroad in part because they were alarmed by the trend toward increasing openness in domestic infant adoptions. "Won't you feel jealous?" they'd ask. "Won't it confuse the child? What if your child likes her more than she likes you?"

I dismissed their concerns with all of the blind optimism of someone who had waited through four years of infertility for a baby and now finally thought she might get one. "Don't be surprised if you get placed quickly," our social worker told us. "Most adoptive parents aren't ready to be that open, and it's something a lot of birth mothers look for."

Our agency asked that each hopeful adoptive family put together what they called a profile and other adoption professionals sometimes call a "Dear Birth Mom" letter. (The reason they call it a profile, our agency explained, is that a pregnant woman considering adoption is not a birth mother; she is an expectant mother and should be respected as such.) When a woman came to the agency saying she was considering placing her child for adoption, they gathered at least five profiles to share with her. The profiles were pulled on the basis of any requirements that she might have. If a potential birth mother said she wanted an adoptive family where one parent was a teacher, only the teacher profiles would be pulled. If none of the profiles appealed to the woman, she could ask for more.

The profile contained information about us, about our path to adoption and our intentions as adoptive parents. And the profiles are usually printed out on pretty paper.

"Pretty paper?" I asked Denise, our social worker, when she gave us the instructions.

"It matters," she said. "You'd be surprised."

It was a lot of pressure to take to the stationery store. My son and I spent a long time analyzing our choices. I rejected the pastel baby feet as too pushy, the blue sky and clouds as too ethereal. I finally decided on white with a tasteful abstract green border. We made a dozen copies and dropped them off at the agency.

Next page: I felt it was my duty to listen to Jessica cry. It was the least I could do, I thought, because I had her baby