A reader e-mailed me and asked if I would share more about my personal story with our home study. I am working through a series about each of the interviews we had as part of the home study process.

In my last post, Home Study: Interview About Expecting Mothers Birthmothers, I talked about the home study interview in which our social worker, C, tried to explain the expecting mother's side of adoption to us. I was not in a place where I could really hear her, but she did make a valiant effort.

In this same interview, C talked about post-placement contact. I was absolutely floored and appalled by this suggestion. The only type of adoption I had ever heard of was a fully closed one. My expectation was that the expecting mother would give birth, place her baby with us, and move on with her life.

Our agency strongly encouraged semi-open adoptions in which we were expected to send pictures of the child and letters every other month for the first year and then twice a year after that. I wanted no part of this type of arrangement. I was scared to death that the birthmother would use the pictures to track us down and show up at the most inopportune time to "take back" her child. Hub was more concerned about how painful it must be for the birthmother to see pictures of a family that did not include her.

C made a valiant effort to explain the benefits of a semi-open adoption to all members of the adoption triad. She got through to hub, who said he could see how pictures and letters could offer the birthmother comfort in knowing that the baby was okay. I, however, was completely unwilling to budge. C dropped the topic for the time being but gave me "homework" in reading books about semi-open adoption.

C came back to this topic again in a later interview and, because I was not budging on my position, asked me to talk with three adoptive parents in semi-open adoptions who had adopted through the agency. That is what got me to start opening my mind. One adoptive mother used to feel the same way that I did. She assured me that I would feel much differently after I met the expecting mother. Instead of feeling threatened, I would feel deep gratitude because this was the woman enabling me to be a mother.

This adoptive mother was right. It was meeting my son's birthmother that changed my position. I now believe that some level of openness is best for all involved in newborn adoptions where babies are placed for adoption by loving birhtmothers.

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Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt