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A question was posed on the forums yesterday.
If you weren’t connected by adoption, would you be friends with your child’s other mother?
It was posted in a forum that fosters communication between adoptive and birth parents, hence the use of the word “other” as opposed to a specific triad side. The responses were varied, of course, and posed many great points.
Some said that they thought it would be difficult due to the large age difference. One pair of mothers had a twenty-four year age gap. I’d have trouble understanding someone who was three years younger than me (considering that would make them three). Still others pointed out that they have absolutely nothing in common. Some of those mothers were speaking from the foster care perspective and/or closed adoptions in which the birth mother did not search for and choose a family for her child.
But when I hear about open adoption mothers who don’t share anything in common, my mind sort of boggles. And then my heart breaks for what I know these families are missing out on. I specifically searched for and chose a family that encompassed some of my same ideals, morals and, yes, even likes and dislikes. I do think its chance that my daughter’s Mom and I both enjoy things like video games and nachos, as those weren’t things I asked when we were matching. But otherwise, I just can’t imagine having placed my child with someone who didn’t enjoy certain aspects of life. Furthermore, we’ve taught each other new and different things to like. Would you believe she had never had pierogies before? My Polish heart skipped a beat. Now she loves them.
And, like many of the responses, I don’t know that we would have met otherwise. Some blamed the whole foster adoption issue and thus not being anywhere to meet those “kinds of people.” For us, it was a distance and logistic issue. I’m not sure I ever would have been in her neck of the woods looking for a friend. But, who knows. If we were meant to be friends, perhaps we would have been anyway.
What about you, readers? If you had met your child’s other mother without the connection of adoption, would you have been friends?
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I’m thinking of the lifeguards at the pool where my daughter takes her swimming lessons. One is approximately her birthmother’s age (31), another is my son’s birthmother’s age (21). My girl has taken lessons there and has known them for two years. My son will learn to swim there too, and will hopefully be taught by them. Were it not for that, I probably wouldn’t have met these girls, but I can still have a warm relationship with them based on how they are a part of my daughter’s young life. We’re not “friends” but I do care for them and always ask what they’ve been up to when we meet up each summer. Neither of my kids’ birthfamilies choose to have contact right now, but I’d hope that it’d be very much the same…someone important in their lives that I can have a cordial relationship with based on what/who we have in common.
Emphatic no to that one. I didn’t choose my son’s adoptive parents. My son and I were victims of forced, closed adoption during the Baby Swoop Era. At the time, I was told that the prospective parents had been chosen by the agency based on their promise to raise my son as a Catholic and to teach him to value education. HA. Not only did they raise him in a chaotic, dirty environment, they joined a religious cult when he was seven that does not value education. My son spends most of his days proselytizing. He has no education beyond high school. He is nearly forty and is extremely immature. The adoptive parents are divorced now and the mother often loses touch with reality. She has left the original cult and has flitted from one new one to the other. We have nothing in common but adoption. If I had met her outside of the nightmare of adoption loss, I would not have wanted anything to do with her. The dad is a nice guy but was always too weak to stand up to his wife.
I’ve wondered about this one a lot before myself. I sort of did know Charlie’s Amom before he was born (I would ask her wheelchair related questions!) but Charlie is what brought us closer together and gave us a reason to come together. I do think given the right circumstances we could have been friends without Charlie.
I don’t know if we would have met had we not been connected through adoption–but we so much like Kaiti and her family that we certainly could have been very close as friends if we had met through some other means (although most likely we would have been friends with her parents first–due to the age difference.) Would I want to be friends with them? Definitely yes! Our first meeting lasted 4 hours–we naturally all fit together.