A Match Meeting

I’m Emily Maxwell. I’m the match specialist here at the Cradle, and I work with adoptive parents and birth parents when they meet each other for the first time in a match meeting—just kind of like a facilitated blind date. Birth parents review profiles of adoptive parents, and they decide which family that they’d like to meet in a match meeting. Families put together their profiles together in their own way to really reflect their own personality, who they are, what they like to do and give birth parents an idea of what an open adoption would be like with this particular family. The profile is kind of the interview, and then the match meeting is really launching the relationship.

We try doing two match meetings prior to the birth of the baby. So that first meeting, blind date, get to know you conversation. The second meeting is the more logistical details of the plan. So we talk about hospital time, we talk about openness and what their plan is for the relationship. We talk about names for the baby, we talk about fears and concerns people have, and really hopes and dreams for this relationship and for this baby. I think everyone coming together and making a commitment to the baby is the most important thing that can happen in a match meeting. Everyone says we are going to focus this relationship on this child, and make decisions that are in this child’s best interests, and everyone making that commitment.

So I would say 99 percent of the matches, everyone is who they expected and they’re a success. I try to explain to people before a match meeting that there is magic that happens in a match meeting. That people find these commonalities that they would’ve never known just from reading a profile so birth dates are similar or a wedding anniversary is the same date a baby is born or a due date. That they find these magical connections. They travel to the same place. They do the same kind of tradition on holidays. You can’t understand it until you’re sitting in there, this connection that people find with one another and it happens in almost all of the matches that we do that people really find this connection.