Forever Family

No, this isn’t about a lame Ben Stiller movie.

There is a quandary about adopted children; they typically have 2 sets of parents.  There is a set of birth parents and a set of adoptive parents (or singular parent).

I know…duh, right?

Many adopted children have no memory of their biological parents.  As these children age, some are filled with a need to connect with their bio parents, while others have no desire to contact their birth families.  What motivates people to either seek or not to seek their birth families intrigues me, as someday my son may come to me with questions about his birth family.

I cannot deny that I will be disappointed if he wants to connect with his bio family.  I am working through this issue and trying to at least pretend it won’t bother me, but I’m pretty sure that no matter what, I’ll be a little saddened.  I can understand that he may just want to know more about his heritage, or to even see where he gets his darling blue eyes from.  Out of necessity, he may need to find them, especially if he has an hereditary health issue.  Logically, this all makes sense to me.

But my heart still struggles to reconcile that.  I know I would feel a little bit like a failure if he comes to me one day and tells me he wants to find his birth mom.  Does his desire to seek them out stem from something he lacks in his relationship with us?  Did we do something wrong?  I will likely want to stand up and say “but I’m your mother, what more do need?”

Don’t worry.  I won’t say that, and I’ll support him in whatever he decides to do.  I’ll keep my feelings to myself, because they are selfish feelings and it’s more important to help him on his journey through life.  He has a right to know more about his biological connections if he chooses.

I’ll just lock myself in my bedroom before I cry my eyes out.

Besides, I’ll be able to answer a lot of his questions myself.

Depending on the adoption route you take, the chances of meeting the birth family vary.  With foreign adoptions, chances are pretty slim you’ll meet the birth family.  In a private domestic adoption, you’ll likely have extended contact with the bio parents all the way up to birth, and if you’re doing an open adoption, it will continue in some form indefinitely.  For foster and foster/adopt parents, it’s kinda up in the air.

Most parents we journeyed with as we were getting our license did not have any direct contact with the bio families.  When you consider why kids are in foster care, it becomes pretty obvious why many adoptive parents don’t meet the bio parents.  It boils down to safety.  If the bio parents lost custody because a parent was being physically or sexually abusive, you don’t want to take any chances.  There were plenty of stories floating the DFACS office about foster parents being stalked by bio families.  We had a couple in our support group that was having trouble with the bio grandmother of their kids.  She would park out in front of their house and peek in through the windows.  They ended up having to move.

No doubt you’re wondering how that could happen.  The information about the foster parents is supposed to be protected, and this example is precisely why.  Fear not, in the case of this couple in our group, it was a problem of misplaced sympathy.  It seems the bio grandma was very upset about the children being moved to foster care, but could not take custody of them herself.  The foster mom, thinking she was doing a nice thing for grandma, gave her their phone number.  From there, grandma was able to locate their home.

As we were told repeatedly in training and in support group, just like any other superhero, your identity is your most prized possession.  Protect it!

Having heard these stories, we were somewhat shocked when our social worker asked us if we would be interested in meeting our kiddo’s birth parents.

My first reaction?  HELL NO!

But then I started to think about it.  Kiddo’s birth parents were very young and not major criminals.  They had been in and out of jail because of self destructive behavior, but never from causing harm to someone else.

I backed off my initial hell no reaction a little, and weighed some pros and cons.  We learned that it may help our case along a little; if bio mom liked us and thought Kiddo would have a good life, she would relinquish with no further fight.  That peaked our interest, plus we were also a little curious about them.

So with many reassurances from the social worker that we would only give them our first names, no other info would be shared, and our contact with each other would only be within the DFACS building, we agreed.

Hubby and I went down together, and at the end of one Kiddo’s visitations, we went into the room to meet them.

That was probably one of the strangest 15 minutes of my life.  These kids were so YOUNG and so utterly clueless.  I saw where Kiddo gets his features from.  They asked us some simple questions about what it was like to live in our house and Kiddo’s average day.  Clearly they had some fears about horrid foster parents, but I think we reassured them he was in a loving home.

It seemed fairly harmless.  I now am able to answer some questions Kiddo will no doubt have about what his parents looked like.  For that reason, I’m glad we did it.

However, for Kiddo’s future visits, things were a little more lax about our contact with them.  I started taking Kiddo directly to the waiting room, instead of hiding in the back of the building and waiting for a social worker.  His bio parents would arrive, and we would end up sitting there together waiting for the supervised visit to start.  Bio mom got more comfortable with me, and in some ways I sorta felt like I was mothering her, too.  She was clearly desperate for some sort of maternal contact.

But this became a problem.  They asked me for money.  They told me many terrible stories about being homeless, the last stint in jail, partying with their friends.  Just their interaction with each other made me want to scream.  I didn’t want to let my guard down and have them know any more about us then they already did.  I didn’t want anyone stalking my house (or worse).

I started to get paranoid.  They saw my car, and subsequently, my license plate.  Did they have the smarts to figure out where we live?  I started peaking out my window regularly, and any time a car was parked in front of our house for longer than 10 minutes, I would panic.

I longed to go back to the anonymous hand-offs, but I was also afraid to offend them.  Kiddo’s case was finally moving along, and I didn’t want to do anything that might rock the boat.  I wanted them to be happy with me as a mother, so they would go back to their lives and never look back.

Ultimately, we got through it, but would I do it again?  No.  I would not.  Even with the benefit of being able to answer simple questions about them should Kiddo ever want to know, I don’t think it was worth it.  I may change my mind later on, but it was not worth the constant fear.

Did it really improve our case?  Not really.  We learned after the meeting that if we went down the path of voluntary relinquishment, it would ultimately take longer than the termination track we were on.

Would I make a recommendation to other parents facing the same choice? Well, each case is different.  I can say that if we are ever given the choice again, we will likely choose to remain anonymous.

That, or I’m gonna wear a mask.  It works in the movies, right?