The adoption agency through which we adopted our son mostly handles semi-open adoptions for domestic adoptions. For a number of reasons, the agency believes that semi-open adoption is the best option for all members of the adoption triad.

As part of a semi-open adoption, the agency encourages the expecting mother to meet the hopeful adoptive parents before the baby is born. If all parties want to see each other again, such as after the baby is born, then the agency will facilitate this. The parties are introduced on a first name basis only.

Here is where my issue came in. "Faith" is my pen name, not my "real" name. My real name is a very unusual name. In fact, it is so unusual that I have only met two other women with the same name in my entire life. When we were going through our adoption home study, I did an Internet search of women with my first name in my state, and I only got 32 hits. Cross-reference them by spouse's name, and I would be very easy to locate.

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While I believed that using an alias was the best decision at the time, I have regrets about it today. If I had met my son's birthmother before telling her the alias, I probably would have opted to go ahead and share my real name. I was so frightened by the theoretical expecting mother, but the reality was much different. I trust my intuition, and my intuition told me that she is a good person who was not going to track me down like a crazed person to take her birthchild back. (I truly had this fear at the time I was going through the home study process.)

Using an alias in a semi-open adoption creates complications, which I will discuss in my next post.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt