As an adoptive mother to one of my three children, I have spent years thinking about and reading about the issues surrounding adoption.

When my son was an infant I began thinking about all the things I would tell him and when I'd tell him certain things. I thought about how much truth to share, what I should perhaps hold back until later, and how I could present a picture of his beginning that was, in reality, quite negative, in a way that made it look positive. Over the thirty years since my first child was an infant I've come to have the feeling that - whether its how it should be or not - there are times when what people who favor open adoption believe so conflicts with what people who don't believe that it can seem as if the adoptive mother not in favor of open adoption comes from the dark ages or else wants to deny her child something she really doesn't.

I didn't have the option of an open adoption when my son was placed with me permanently, so not having that option made me ask myself whether my son was missing something he should have. He came to me after he was removed from the home of the biological mother and after he had sustained a skull fracture for which he had been hospitalized and which had healed. Once when I asked a social worker a question that led her to realize I was trying to put myself in the biological mother's place she said to me, "You can't do that. She is so different from you there is no way you can put yourself in her place." I later learned that aside from any history of child abuse, the biological mother was said to be "of limited mental capacity". I was told that there was a live-in boyfriend and a question of whether the baby was his. There were apparently a few other young children that were in one place or another. I haven't described the extent of what I had been told, but this is an example of the truth that I needed to find a way to - at one point in his life or another - share with my son.

When he was very little I was very aware of wanting him to feel like "all the other kids". I did, after all, have two biological children and was particularly aware of my desire to make sure he didn't feel different. When he asked about where babies come from I took advantage of the opportunity to tell him that ladies have babies, and, I added, "Usually when a lady has a baby she brings the baby home and is his mother; but sometimes if a lady knows she doesn't know how to be a mother or can't take care of a baby the right way she may ask another lady to be the baby's mother." This was my story, and I stuck to it for a good, long, time. I reasoned that the normal thing for children is to have one mother and one father at one time. I believed, too, that even if there were the chance to have an open arrangement with this biological mother what that would do would be to put a face on someone who was not to him, at that time, more than a story. Later he would, of course, realize that the "story" had a real person attached to it, but when he was little the story was enough to explain where he came from, and that - for some four-year-olds - is often the only thing in which they have interest.

I reasoned, too, that having an open adoption situation where the biological mother visited or called and where pictures were sent on a regular basis would make an adoption feel like unpaid foster care, besides possibly adding a confusing element to a young child's identity and understanding that he, like everyone else, had just one mother at a time. While I did not change his first name (although I added my father's name as a middle name), and while I certainly admired the golden curls he had inherited from one of the biological parents, there was only so much acknowledgement of her contribution AT THAT TIME that I thought was right if I were to raise a secure child who didn't feel different from his siblings or friends. My plan was not to try to deny him the chance to meet this person someday. I just wanted him to have the very normal, mother/father/three kids/one dog/one cat, family in which to grow, hopefully, secure and well adjusted and able to deal with any issues related to having been adopted once he was mature enough.

Also, although this may sound awfully cold-hearted, I've always believed that the very definition of "adoption" involves one set of parents' becoming the very real parents of a child; in order to have that sacred relationship be what all parent/child relationships are. In other words, if adoption gets watered down to resemble unpaid foster care, the nature of adoption does get completely changed. Whether or not an adoptive relationship can be of equal intensity and strength and bonding when there is a part-time, other mother, who shows up at Christmas time, is a question people need to seriously consider. The idea that "there's room for everyone" may not, in reality, hold true when it comes to a child's view of the person who is his mother.

My heart has always broken for all biological mothers who give up their children for adoption, but I've always believed that the cold, hard, and even horrible, reality of adoption is that all ties are cut. That is the very thing that makes placing a child for adoption such an awful and difficult thing for biological mothers, but my belief has always been if a mother wants to keep in touch with her child she should not be placing him for adoption at all. When the argument in favor of open adoption is aimed at any benefits to the child, I'm not sure that there are benefits; and if there are they may not be worth the complications and even compromises of the child's chance to have what all children tend to see as "normal" - one mother and one father.

When my son was a little past twenty-one years old he received a letter from people who arrange reunions between adopted children and their biological mothers. He told me he wasn't going to "bother" because he wasn't "interested", and I asked him if he would at least call the woman who contacted him and tell her to tell the biological mother he is ok. I told him she deserves at least that much. He eventually agreed to meet his biological mother and some biological family members, and it did throw him a little to discover some of the ugly facts surrounding his beginnings. My bond with my son, however, is as strong as they come; and just as I had picked up the pieces after his rough beginnings, I embarked 21 years later on efforts to help pick up the pieces after his reunion. I'm not an adopted child, and there's a whole lot I don't know about my own "roots" beyond my parents. I've lived comfortably without a lot of information, and I can't help but believe that adopted people, too, could live comfortably without some information IF they have been raised in a way that has not caused them to overemphasize the importance of that information.

I am in favor of sharing some information with even the youngest adopted child, and I'm in favor of sharing more information as the child grows. Doing this can help prepare a child for the reunion that probably will, and should, take place. To that extent, I'm not in favor of "deep, dark, secrets" sealed in files somewhere. When, however, it comes to a child's having "Mary, who visits" and "Mommy who I live with", I just think it robs a child of an innocence and normal childhood. If the arrangement will be that the child never knows that "Aunt Mary" is his biological mother, then the only point in having "Mary" come around or call wouldn't be to give the child knowledge of his whole story but, instead, just to let "Aunt Mary" keep in touch with her biological child, and that may be good for "Aunt Mary" but when reunion time comes the child may be more thrown for a loop than the child who meets a stranger who introduces herself as his biological mother.

Finally: I adopted my son because I wanted him and knew I could offer him a good beginning. There has never been one second of the last 30 years when I have allowed myself to think about what I offered him rather thinkining of all the joy and love he brought into my life. Still, with every child we have we devote an incredible amount of love, worry, thought, and nurturing. With an adopted child there can be a little extra thought and planning involved because of the circumstances. I was able to raise my son with his siblings, who happen to be my biological children, as my own because there was no other mother in the picture. I could not have done an equally good job of that if a biological mother were sending me mail and calling and expecting pictures. It may sound unreasonable, but there is something in my maternal instinct that would not be capable of sustaining the quality of the bond I share with all three of my kids had the dynamics been different.

People sometimes seem to forget that the adoptive mother isn't just someone who was blessed with a child, but she is often someone required to figure out how to build that unshakable bond even with some of the "holes" that can threaten the adoptive bond. She can also be someone who is left to pick up the pieces when a child's beginnings affect something like his ability to learn once he gets to school. My belief is that I could not have done as good a job for my son (not me) under an open adoption arrangement; and while my heart goes out to biological mothers who give up their babies, I think adoptive mothers should have the right and responsibility to do the best job possible - and there is at least the possiblity that closed adoption may allow adoptive mothers to do just that.