Learn and Share

My friend Cynthia is helping organize an open adoption symposium called Opening Adoption: Realities, Possibilities & Challenges this coming September in at the University of Richmond in Virginia.  A whole conference devoted to the philosophy and practice of openness--be still my heart!

They've just issued the official call for proposals, so if you've ever considered pulling together a panel or workshop, now's your chance. Here are some of their suggested topics:

• Opening of conversation about adoption in the community and the family
• Legislative advocacy – how to, what are obstacles, what does current practice do to inform legislative change related to past adoptions
• Best practices in adoption policies, laws and processes;
• The impact of openness or a lack of openness has had on individuals and families
• Preparing for openness (for families hoping to adopt or for women/men planning a placement)
• Negotiating boundaries in search/reunion, open adoption, closed adoption, etc…
• How to offer more/better post adoption services related to openness
• Siblings and open adoption
• Managing openness in families with children by birth and children by adoption
• How does the current thinking around openness change things for those in closed adoptions
• Opening adoptions later on in life
• The internet and openness in adoption
• Openness as it relates to sperm/egg donors
• Openness in adoption as it relates to the developmental stages of a child
• International adoption and openness
• Managing obstacles to openness (personal/emotional, familial, cultural, legal, safety, etc.)
• What sets up open adoptions for success? What doesn’t?
• How can placing parents and families hoping to adopt best prepare for openness?
• Negotiating boundaries in search/reunion, open adoption, closed adoption, etc…
• What kinds of post adoption services best prepare families for success?
• Moving from a closed system/adoption to an open system/adoption
• Post adoption contact agreements – pros/cons; what works and what doesn’t work
• Gender and openness – what if any differences are there for men and women – talking about adoption, managing relationships, etc…

I'm hoping to be there, thanks to the magic of frequent flier miles (if I can get past my revulsion at what might now face me at TSA security checkpoint--ugh). We should make sure to do an Open Adoption Bloggers lunch table or something, don't you think?

Let's Give Adoption Mosaic a Virtual Hug

The online magazine SixSeeds interviewed me as part of their National Adoption Awareness Month project!  They're generously donating $2 for every comment at my interview post to the adoption-related charity of my choice.  I picked the fabulous Adoption Mosaic.

Adoption Mosaic is doing the work that is so needed and so historically overlooked in the adoption community: helping create healthy lifelong adoption experiences through education, support services and dialogue. It's a great resource. The lack of training and post-adoption support services (for everyone in the adoption constellation) that many of us bemoan? Adoption Mosaic is out there doing something about it. Folks not lucky enough to live close enough to attend their events can still join in through their just-launched quarterly magazine The Adoption Constellation, online resource library, or blog. They even recently took one of their workshops on the road to the East Cost. It's a much-needed place where the voices of adoptive parents are included but don't dominate.

Let's raise a ton of money for Adoption Mosaic and show them how much we value the work they do! A few details: SixSeeds requires an email address to comment. If you've already commented on one of the other SixSeeds adoption interviews, you'll need to use a different email address this time in order for Adoption Mosaic to get the $2 donation. Time to pull out that address you save for entering giveaways and getting online coupons (doesn't everyone have one of those?)

Please please please go comment and help me raise some money for Adoption Mosaic!

(Lunasea, Dawn, Soper and Lori were also interviewed and picked some fabulous charities, so check out their posts, too!)

MY INTERVIEW POST

"I’ve been waiting for you for your whole life"

We did the whole baby sign language thing with both kids, which meant we watched a lot of Signing Time.  They were still airing on PBS when Eddie was tiny and it was the only thing we let him watch. (Yes, we were those first-time parents. Mari missed out on the pure Signing Time experience, seeing as how she had an older brother obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. Somehow she still survived with her intellect intact.)

This made the Signing Time co-creator and star, Rachel Coleman, our family's first kiddie celebrity.

This was the first song baby Mari ever tried to sing.

I've followed some of her life with her two daughters on her (really well-written) blog. Only it turns out she's the mother of three daughters.  She wrote for the first time today about her recent reunion with the now-eighteen-year old daughter she placed for adoption when she (Rachel) a teenager and what it was like to wait through those years hoping she would contact her.

I’ve celebrated her birthday every year.

“Mommy,” four-year-old Leah signed to me enthusiastically, “I’m your first baby. Lucy is your second baby. I’m the oldest!” “Nope. Remember?” I pointed to the smiling baby pictured in the gold, sun-shaped frame on the mantel. “She’s my first baby. You are my second baby and Lucy is my third baby.”

“Oh! I forgot!” Which sounded like “Oh I-per-dot.”

Leah and Lucy grew up seeing the baby on the mantel smiling down on them.

“Mom, I hate this!” Twelve-year-old Leah threw herself down on my bed in tears. “I hate that I have a big sister, but I don’t have a big sister! I really need one right now! I don’t understand how you were ‘too young’ to keep her, but only four years later you were suddenly old enough to have and keep me!”

When I was seventeen I really did believe that nobody would know or really understand how much I hurt and how much I suffered. I guess I was too young to imagine that my future children would inherit the pain and that they would share my loss.

-From "They Are Gonna Love You"

The entire piece is worth a read--that bit above is just the smallest slice of the emotion packed into it. Her whole family's joy at this reunion is so apparent; it burbles throughout the post. I admit to tearing up a bit, as I often do when reading people's reunion stories: happy along with them that they are finally together again and sad that they ever spent all those years apart.

Disclosure: The "Signing Time" link in the first paragraph is an affiliate link.