I've been playing around on the Internet, looking for stuff to read and write about for my blogs, and I've come across so many wonderful websites and essays that I think everyone involved in the adoption triad, particularly hopeful adoptive parents, should read.

This article on Salon.com is by Dawn Friedman and is about the open adoption of her daughter and the overwhelming guilt she feels about "taking" her new daughter from her birth mother. She speaks to her daughter's first mom often:

Jessica called about once a week to hear how Madison was doing and to tell me what was going on in her life. I kept my stories sweet and lively. She was working hard to put her life back in order and was forthright with me about her struggles. She missed Madison, she told me. The decision was the right one but oh, she missed her. I welcomed our talks even as I shrank from them. I felt it was my duty to hear her cry. It was the least I could do, I thought, because I had her baby. My guilt was a necessary purgatory, an inadequate payment for my privilege.

Finally, over time, the feeling diminishes:

When I stopped feeling so consumed by what Jessica had lost, I was able to find joy in what I gained, the everyday pleasures of parenting again -- dressing my daughter, giving her a bath. Certainly, with that joy came vulnerability and the insecurity my worried friends predicted. Sometimes I don't want to share Madison. Sometimes I want to feel that I am the only mother she has and will ever need. But even at it's most challenging, I still believe in openness. How much easier it will be for our daughter, I think, to never have to search for her roots. She will never have to wonder why her first mother chose adoption; she can ask her.

Now, in no way can what Friedman experienced be compared to what her daughter's first mother experienced. Obviously not. But I can only imagine how common this type of guilt and regret can be. I certainly feel guilty and regretful about adopting my son from Russia: even though he was removed from his birth family (and who knows what the circumstances there were) and was pretty much doomed to live his life in an institution I still wonder about it. Would he have eventually been reunited with his birth siblings? Could he maybe have been adopted by a Russian family? Did we do the right thing? And even though I know what would have been his probably future I wonder and wonder...I can only imagine how it works with private domestic adoption. In many cases the first mothers may be wonderful, lovely, intelligent people who cannot parent at the time they have their children. Adoptive parents are thrilled when the prospective birth mom chooses them...but then the what ifs creep in...

Life is complicated. Adoption is very complicated. Oh, and if you read the article PLEASE read the comments afterward...they are always worth a look.