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A first mother on a private adoption discussion recently posed a real-life question. I won’t give specifics as to protect her situation from public opinion. However, in the most vague of terms, the birth mother found out some not-so-great information about her relinquished child’s biological father. She didn’t know what to do with it, whether or not she had a duty to tell the adoptive parents and how, if at all, involved she should become.
My advice? I told her to give the adoptive parents the information and let them do with it as they would as they were the ones parenting the child.
I gave this advice because I see it like this: if someone who wasn’t parenting my children knew something important that could help or harm them, I would want to know. I wouldn’t want said person telling me what to do with the information or trying to force my children to do something. I would want to do what I needed to do with said information. That’s how I treat information that I have about anyone’s children, including my relinquished daughter.
I encourage other birth mothers involved in open adoptions to proceed in a similar manner when faced with these types of situations. I know that it is not easy to offer up the information and then back away when you have a vested interest in the well-being of the child. However, simply supplying the information is doing “your part.” Refusing to or refraining to share the information could actually end up doing more harm than good. It takes awhile to get used to the process of sharing and “stepping back.” Relinquishing “control,” as it were, is a hard thing for many adults to do. I think, at times, it’s especially hard for birth parents as we often felt powerless in our adoption processes. However, if you take just a second to ask yourself how you would feel if someone else made decisions for your child, it’s a bit easier to step back and let the adoptive parents handle the situation as they see best fit.
Of course, giving them that control doesn’t mean that you won’t have mixed feelings or emotional turmoil concerning the situation. I encourage you to reach out to friends, family and other birth parents to deal with situations like these if only to reassure you that you are not alone in your journey. The Birth Parents in Open Adoption forum has a great number of amazing first parents who have been through the gamut of hard-fought relationship and communication battles. Sometimes internet support is the best you can get!
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