Negotiating Contact

There is nothing worse than the sinking feeling that perhaps things are not going as well in your open adoption as you would like them to go. That happened to us. We were not hearing from our son’s parents, if we had a visit it was because I arranged it, if we spoke on the phone it was because I called them. There was a several month break in contact and finally I was upset and wondering what we were doing wrong and concerned that perhaps my son’s parents did not want our adoption to be open any longer.

We are lucky in that we placed our Punkin through an agency that stays involved in open adoptions through the first eighteen years of the child’s life. They are committed to helping make open adoptions work through the good and bad times. So my first step was to call my social worker and ask if she knew what was going on with Punkin’s family. She made some phone calls for me and found out that they still wanted an open adoption they had just been busy, and she had asked them to call me.

They eventually called Danny’s phone and left a message, which he failed to pick up, so we emailed them. Three weeks passed before they replied to our email. Eventually they called my phone which actually gets answered and messages get picked up. I returned their call and asked if we could visit. They were open to a visit, as they always are, turns out things had just gotten busy in their lives and we had gotten pushed to the back of their minds.

Well I felt, and my social worker felt, as though we needed a contact agreement, just something so that I knew what kind of contact to expect and they knew what kind of contact was expected of them. We worked out a contact agreement of four visits a year, one right after his birthday and one right before Christmas. The other two visits are to be determined at times that are convenient for both families. We take turns calling each other once a month and we are to receive photos through email once a month.

The way we accomplished this was to go through a simple checklist that included the types of contact expected, honorifics to be used, how Mother’s and Father’s day are to be addressed and a few other things. It helped to have a neutral third party there; it kept things from getting heated. That third party can be anyone that isn’t involved in the adoption. It just helps to have cooler heads around when discussing emotionally loaded topics, such as contact.

Don’t give up hope if contact has waned. Be proactive, find out what is going on and find out what can be done to help make contact simpler for both of you. Negotiate a schedule if you need to, sometimes that little bit of structure is all that is necessary.

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