Open Adoption Roundtable #16

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don't need to be part of the Open Adoption Bloggers list to participate, or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you're thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table. The prompts are meant to be starting points--feel free to adapt or expand on them.

Publish your response during the next two weeks--linking  back here so your readers can browse other participating blogs--and leave a link to your post in the comments. 

Imagine your child as an adult describing their open adoption experience. What do you hope they will be able to say about you? How did you view their other parents? In what ways did you support their relationship with them?

One note from Heather: "I deliberately avoided asking you to imagine how your grown child feels about their open adoption experience. Adoptees of all ages regularly report having more than enough people (i.e. any) telling them how they should feel about adoption. This is an exercise in thinking about our actions and choices from another's perspective."

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I hope that Liam will recognize that we tried.  That we had his interests at heart and that we wanted to do what we could  for him. That even though we couldn't force his mom to have an open adoption with him that we kept the door open for her.

I hope that he can look back and say that he could come to us whenever he wanted to and talk to us about adoption.  That is was never a topic that he felt he had to tiptoe around.  

I hope that he knows that we were always honest with him and told him everything we could and that we kept everything that might one day be important to him or help him find/reunite with his mom.

I hope that he knows that he is loved.  By us, by "K", by everyone that falls into our definition of family.