Continuing on my posts about our open adoption….


Last night, in our foster parent training class, I mentioned to a brand new to be almost foster parent about our open adoption.

She was horrified. I think her exact words were:

That must be terrible for your daughter.

Hummm.. I said, why do you think that?

And she couldn’t really give me an answer. To be fair, she’s probably never even thought about it before. This is her very first exposure to adoption issues, and the potential of meeting birth parents. Maybe she's never even heard of open adoption - a real possibility.

Last night our agency talked about every foster parent meeting the bio parents in a controlled setting through the agency, and I think it freaked her out a bit.

Most of us have really distorted views of what birth parents, (with children in foster care) look and act like. The stereotypes don’t really fit.

Most of the parents loose their children through really bad choices like drugs – which leads to overwhelming addiction – or stealing – or driving without a license one to many times and they have to do jail time.

Yea of course there are lots of parents who are abusive, but not all of them are. Some have mental illness, or zero life skills they are poor parents making poor choices, but not evil people.

This new foster mom doesn’t get that yet. She hasn’t actually met a bad parent yet and tried to interact with one for the benefit of the foster child.

She will.

I know that I romanticized open adoption before we had one. But for us I still think it is the right choice. I don’t think it is terrible for my daughter at all.

She’ll know her birth mom – and if the situation changes and she doesn’t know her later, I’ll know, and I’ll have photos and history for her.

Will I do it again?

Who knows? I don’t regret it this time though.