oa roundtable - open adoption commitments

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. Click here to link to what other bloggers are writing about this topic.

Call them resolutions, commitments, changes, or choices--how will you be proactive in the area of open adoption in 2010?

I don't like New Year's resolutions. They are typically made to be broken. And something seems so unintentional about making commitments for betterment at only one time of the year. I think making life changes and commitments is more likely a fluid process which happens all throughout the year. But there is something to actually naming commitments, putting them out there for yourself and others to see. So as I look ahead to the next 12 months with regards to our open adoption I desire to:

- continue to pursue a more open relationship with J. For this to really happen we need to...

- determine the involvement our American agency will continue to have in our open adoption. Currently all our pictures and letters are sent through the agency to J. This means that they read our letters to her as a form of censorship (they wouldn't use this language but that's exactly what it is). We actually got a call from the agency in December because we included an email address in our 3rd month letter. They wanted to alert us to this and inform us that we now needed to sign a form that we are okay with J having access to email and they would send J a form to sign that she was okay with it as well. How ridiculous. A number of people at the agency know that we gave J our email address in person after T was born so why has this become an issue now? We all know why, it's about liability and protection for the agency. J knows our last name and the province we live in so all she needs to do is google us and she would find loads of personal information. The world we live in isn't exactly private so how silly that we get into "trouble" for including an email address (that she already has) in a letter. It disturbs me that others are reading the letters we send to J. Our letters and pictures go through the agency for the first 6 months until finalization after which we have the choice to cut them out. Of course we need to sign a whole slew of documents to do this. But to cut them out we need to have access to J's information. So we've now come full circle to my first commitment to pursue a more open relationship with J and the first step in that is working on developing direct lines of communication.

Lastly, I commit to continuing to be an educator about adoption and further work to dispel prevailing myths. This really is my life commitment.