A confident parent, with a healthy sense of entitlement will be able to frame her young child’s birthfamily interactions positively and in style that best suits her child’s comfort level/needs. Can we emphathize with a young child who is understandably fearful of an overbearing garrish great aunt, who demands kisses and suffocates with hugs? Yes, of course. At the same time, we maintain that the child be polite and we help them engage while protecting boundaries. We don’t accomodate their preference for avoidance outright. That same Aunt may very well become a kindred spirit over a shared love of cooking or fashion or travel as the child grows up. As the adult in the parent/child relationship, we’re in the position to insist that healthy foods are eaten, relationsihps are nutured, family is valued… not because it suits us, but because we can separate the present discomfort from the long term benefit/value.

Perhaps the author was overindulged as a child and thus continues to hide behind her fears?

A fully open adoption requires courage.

An adoptive mother doesn’t embrace a child’s birthfamily because she is “pressured by the agency” or because she is ill informed or even because she is fearless. She acts in spite of her fears, because she believes it is in the best interest of her child. Because she knows what its like to lose, a part of yourself, a part of your identity, a presumed right as a woman and she’ll do her best in this life, to protect her new child from unnecessary loss.

A birthmother doesn’t pursue openness, thinking it will somehow be less painful or without emotional risk. She has her own fears about how it will feel to hear her child say, “mama” for the first time and be calling for someone else. She wonders how hard it will be to move forward, with the ever present reminder of a little girl who grows to look more and more like her each day. But she loves this child beyond measure and will swallow her fears to maintain a healthy presence and meaningful interaction, so this child will never have to ask, “Didn’t you love me?”

Absent agreement with the author’s requirement for quantitative evidence, anecdotal evidence will suffice. And absent any faith in that, well you just have to stop hiding behind your fears… because with the greatest risk, comes the sweetest reward. Two sets of parents, at a crux of heightened emotions, and seemingly endless unknowns and unable to guarantees, took a self-less leap of faith…. My daughter. Her daughter. Our daughter. Is the luckiest, happiest most blessed little girl in the world. Often without knowing that she was adopted, people remark that she has this little something extra, a “sparkle”, a “warmth”, a “kindness”, a “confidence”, a “radiant energy”. Its probably just what happens, when one gets to celebrate all the best parts of himself and when he is validated by everyone who is a part of his story. Eight sets of grandparents alone is a lot to fill one up with “happy”. But better to spoil one’s child with grandparents than with wreckless autonomy at too young an age. Courage, sacrifice and effort will pay off tenfold in the end.

Percy H. Johnston: It is the height of absurdity to sow little but weeds in the first half of one’s lifetime and expect to harvest a valuable crop in the second half.