Becky Shares her Open Adoption Story

Meet Becky, an adoptive mom and an adopted person.

When we had our initial match meeting, everything went beautifully. We all cried and met Nina’s birth mom for the first time. She shared her story. She’s parenting four other children and she talked about how much she loves to parent. We talked about how much we’re looking forward to being parents. She talked about how she was really connected to my adoption story on my profile. It was a moment of just a lot of emotions and trying to get to know Nina’s birth mom as much as we could in that moment.

Then that wonderful day came, we drove over to The Cradle and she was there holding Nina, and she handed her over. Obviously there was paperwork that needed to be done, but we also shared a list of promises we had made to Nina’s birth mom, promising to take good care of Nina and to raise her in all the ways that her birth mom wanted us to and to be open about adoption and remind Nina everyday how much her birth mom loves her and made a good decision for her. It was very emotional. I just looked at this woman who had the courage to be there, to be present for that experience. That was huge. I think that to me that’s one of the pieces of openness that you can’t even prepare for, how much courage and bravery it takes to sit down with that adoptive family and say, “Please take my child and do your best to take care of her.”

We talk to her birth mom and she says, “I’m so glad she’s with you.” It’s so glad to hear that, not that we doubt that. We’re glad she’s with us too. But also to know that she’s so happy she made that decision, that’s an experience you can only get through open adoption.

One of the things that we’ve done is we have a lot of books about adoption. We wrote a little book that’s called Nina’s story. We made a book for her that tells her story with The Cradle, and how we met her and her birth mom is in there. We read her that story. We talk openly about her being adopted and we celebrate her adoption day. We do that by going to The Cradle and having a big dinner or brunch or something with the family. We always go up to the nursery and show her where she stayed. She knows that she was in her birth mom’s belly and then came to us. I don’t know if she understands fully what that means, but she can say it. When she seems ready we introduce her to new topics about adoption.