Adoption is a funny thing: You become a parent, but the child's biological, birth parents don't go away. They are still there, maybe in another country, another state, another county, but they exist even if they are not alive. So, if you acknowledge that, what does that mean? Adoption isn't the same as co-parenting, but to deny the existence of birth parents, well, studies show that just isn't healthy for the family and the members of the family. (see books like Adoption Triangle)

Do the birth parents get a say in how you raise the child? the color of her room? whether you homeschool or not? whether you raise the child in your relgion or that of the birth parent?

Dawn talks about power but I see it a little differently. This question of how to handle birth parents often has to do with the adoptive parents sense of entitlement. Their anxiety about birth families and openness can be driven by unacknowledged lack of entitlement -- am I the *real* parent? Is this my *real* child? I know that I needed time to feel entitled as his mother. That I refused to acknowledge that he would be our son until the final signoff was completed, until I got the PGN notice faxed to my office. Despite the very different circumstances that lead most adoptions to conclusion in Guatemala. I carried that lack of entitlement for almost a year.

Here's what Pat Johnston, one adoption expert I respect a lot says in her article Getting Real:

I began to read omnivorously about adoption. One of the most mind-opening things I read was social work professor and adoptive parent Jerome Smith's now somewhat dated (1980) book You're Our Child. It introduced me to the concept that adoptive parents need to build a sense of entitlement to their children--coming to feel that their children are theirs to parent and that they are deserving of the parenting role.

Building a sense of entitlement is related to attachment, but it isn't the same as attachment. One can be firmly attached but not feel entitled. One can feel quite entitled to a child who is not attaching well.

Over the years in the workshops I frequently do for professionals and people touched personally by adoption I've expanded a lot on Jerry Smith's concept. It seemed to me early on, for example, that entitlement was not just a task for the infertile adopters about whom Smith wrote, but that preferential adopters had issues to deal with, too. Though Smith didn't say so, it seemed clear to me that entitlement was a two way street, and that children being raised in adoption needed to build their own senses of entitlement to their parents and families. Still later I saw that, depending on the closeness of the family, it is likely that not just parents and children need to work on this entitlement building stuff, but that grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, too, need to build a sense of entitlement about those joined to them by adoption. The result of a healthy entitlement building process is that the members of a family come to believe that they all belong together and are deserving of one another. When entitlement building is ignored, the fact that "something is missing" is clear from both inside and out.

Smith says (and I include some of my own expansions here, too) that building a sense of entitlement involves three steps. A first step is in being honest with oneself about the motivating factors that brought you to adoption... for adoptive parents that means dealing with infertility or honestly acknowledging the good and the bad about other motivations for adopting; for adoptees this step involves understanding and accepting why a birthparent chose adoption rather than parenting; a grandparent may need to embrace his child's philosophical drive to make the world a better place or to mourn the loss of his genetic connection to this particular grandchild. The second step is coming to understand and deal positively with a concept first discussed by sociologist H. David Kirk: that adoption is different from being related by birth in significant and unavoidable ways. The third step in building a sense of entitlement is to learn to deal straightforwardly with society's widely held and broadly spread conviction that adoption is a second best alternative for everybody involved.

In my husband's and my family, adoption has been central to two generations of family building. My in-laws and their brothers and sisters were not a very fertile bunch. Of five siblings between the two sides of Dave's parents' generation, two gave birth to only children and the other three (including Dave's mother and his father) adopted children. So of Dave's generation of six cousins, only two were born to the family and four were adopted into it. In the next generation, Dave and I are parenting three children thanks to adoption.

I've often shared in speaking and writing some of our multi-generational adoption-expanded family's defining moments in "getting" the concept of entitlement, which we believe is central to successful adoptive family life. I use our personal stories in trying to help families exploring adoption understand the importance of all members of an adoption-expanded family coming to feel a sense of entitlement to one another and to their respective interactive places in the family. I encourage these families to begin before arrival to bring their families on board, and to expect that issues surrounding what brought them all to adoption may resurface later and need to be dealt with on a variety of levels over time. Accepting that this is so, I tell families, will allow them to be less defensive about their own pain, and the result of that lack of defensiveness will be that they will be more open to listening to growing children's processing of adoption's gains and losses in their lives.

Perhaps if I share one particulary poignant anecdote here, you'll understand why we believe that the done or undone tasks of entitlement-building have a powerful impact on all who are touched by adoption...

My husband Dave was adopted at age six months by his parents, Perry and Helen. His parents were particularly "advanced" in their adoption thinking for their time, and Dave does not remember ever not knowing that he and his younger sister had been adopted. His questions were answered openly and honestly. The Johnstons were intensely involved parents--volunteering at school and in scouts, baking cookies and building projects. His parents and extended family embraced Dave and Mary into the family fold without apparent reservation, and the gang of six citified cousins growing up in Chicago and the New Jersey suburbs were a close and rowdy bunch when gathered at the family's homeplace in Central Illinois.

During his growing up years, Dave received a number of family heirloom gifts from his father: the Civil War sword and camp stool carried by a Johnston ancestor who was a Union soldier; the pocket watch with which a Johnston grandfather had clocked a long career with the Chicago and Elgin railroad; a late-1800s-published book, The Johnstons of Salisbury, which traced the family from New England in the 1600s as it branched out and extended through the South and the West (and into the back of which his grandfather and then his father had carefully printed the updated information available for their own generations of cousins and children and grandchildren.) These things came into our marriage and found places of honor--along with the Chinese lacquer box my own great grandmother had brought home from her days as a missionary, the medical texts from my great-great-grandfather's country medical practice and the law books from his son's Illinois State Supreme Court offices, and the beautiful landscape painting by my housepainter great-grandfather--in the home we established as our own for the family which was to come to us through our adoption of three children.

When our son was about nine, our middle daughter three and our youngest girl just a baby, Dave's parents moved from the house they had lived in for nearly 50 years to a retirement community. In the process of weeding out all those years' accumulation, the senior Johnstons asked us during one Sunday afternoon phone call if there were particular things we would like from their home. Mary's list had been long: china, crystal, this chair and those lamps, handmade quilts, etc. But Dave, a less acquisitive person already dealing with a confirmed pack rat wife, had fewer wishes.

Two items from his parents home came to mind that day--items whose stories I already knew. The first was a rickety table from the dining room. I shuddered to think how long it would stand in our house with active youngsters. But the table had come to Central Illinois over 100 years before in a covered wagon driven by his mother's people, who were migrating from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The second item was a string of sleigh bells belonging to that same covered-wagon family. The bells had hung on a leather strap in the front hall of his parents' home for as long as Dave could remember. Dave's interest in those bells had little to do with their heirloom status, but instead involved a custom begun by his own dad-- one that Dave was following (albeit with modern adaptations and a single garage sale purchased bell) with our children.

Every Christmas Eve during the 23 years Dave lived with his parents, Perry Johnston had waited until his children were asleep and then ventured out into a Chicago winter with those sleigh bells in hand. He put a ladder against the side of the house and climbed to the porch roof; from there he made his way in the windy Chicago night onto the usually icy roof to a spot above his children's rooms, where he stomped his feet, rang those bells, and shouted out a hearty "HO, HO, HO!" What a memory!

When Dave expressed interest in those two items, his mother blurted out, "Oh, I'm sorry, Dave, I've already promised those things to my nephew, Bob. He's my only living relative."

We mumbled a few more awkward words, said our goodbyes and hung up. I dashed downstairs from the bedroom extension to where my husband had been using the kitchen phone. He was leaning against the counter, softly crying.

Her only living relative? For over 40 years the son Helen loved with all her heart (we don't doubt it for a minute!) had felt no questions about who he was or where he "belonged." But in that moment, 40 years were nearly shattered. For in that single conversation, Helen Johnston revealed a carefully hidden piece of her own unresolved pain: parenting her cherished children had not been enough to heal the anguish of her infertility and the loss of earlier children to miscarriage and neonatal death. Though her children had felt entitled to her, an important piece of herself had been held in reserve for the genetic children she never had on behalf of her family of origin.

That afternoon Dave and I wandered from room to room in our house, turning over keepsake items and family mementoes and applying pieces of masking tape bearing our children's names to the bottom of them. We were determined to protect our children from ever having to feel pain in adoption. (How naive we were to think we could do that!)

And, yet, that single moment taught us more as adoptive parents than any book we could have read, any class we could have taken, any counseling or preparation we had had. The greatest gift we give our children is our own determination to do the personal work necessary to build our own senses of entitlement as parents in adoption and to bring our family and friends firmly on board with us, so that all of us, together, can help the children believe in and feel entitled to our familiness.

be careful here. some of my thoughts not connected here. but i do believe that people act out of motivations they don't understand or don't want to understand. We all do. Fear of birth parents, of lack of entitlement -- what a big thing to confront and deal with.