My Child's Birth Parent Contacted My Child - Weekend Wisdom

Question: My adoptive child was contacted by the birth mother, never contacted us, it has caused chaos in our family. The parents that adopt kids are never considered after raising a child for over 20 years to give them back. 

Resources:

• Adoptive Mom Feels Left Out at Son’s Reunion with Birth Mother
• What You Need to Know about Open Adoption
• 5 Tips for Navigating Sticky Situations with Birth Parents
• Advice to My Pre-Adoptive Parent Self

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Hello, and welcome to Creatingafamily .org's Weekend Wisdom Podcast. I'm Tracy Whitney,
your host and the content director for Creating a Family. We bring you weekend
wisdom each week to offer you an opportunity to tell us what you want to know and
answer your questions. So if you have a question about adoption, foster care, or
relative caregiving, please send it to info at creatingafamily .org. We'll work out an
answer based on our archived content, our expert, inner
The question is, my adoptive child, an adult now, was contacted by their birth
parents who never contacted us. This has caused chaos in our family. It feels like
we parents who adopt kids are never considered after raising this child for over 20
years. It almost feels like we're supposed to give them back. How do I handle this?
First, listener, I want to acknowledge how painful this must feel to you. You've
raised this child for over 20 years. You walked through all the seasons of
childhood, puberty, adolescence, potty training, all the things with them.
You've been there for their late night fevers and their school projects and all the
big decisions they've made to get to this point where they're in their 20s now. And
those countless everyday moments of parenting feel like they're in jeopardy now, and
I want to acknowledge how painful that must feel to you. And now, as an adult,
they've been contacted by a birth parent. You're feeling bypassed and unacknowledged.
And of course, that probably feels like a punch to the gut. It might even feel
like a loss or a betrayal, and it's important to name those things and acknowledge
that those feelings are real and valid. and I want you to give yourself permission
to honor the feelings rather than push them away. It's a tender and complicated
place to be, but I want to give you some hope that you don't have to stay there
in that tender and complicated place. I wonder, before we kind of even get into
some tips, if you've considered working with a therapist at all or a support group
to process all of these emotions. You deserve a safe space to tell your story, to
cope with the feelings that this all brings up, and to process it in healthy,
productive ways that will help you move forward. What's coming up for you isn't just
about the contact itself, because it seems to me that the story you've told yourself
over the years is that you are your child's parent. You are their safe place and
you are their family. And now this new event happened and it feels like some of
that might have put your story in jeopardy or that maybe someone has rewritten that
story without you or at least this chapter of that story. And that's huge.
I want you to acknowledge that that is huge. If you can find yourself some
professional space to work through that resentment, the fear, or even the grief that
this is bringing up for you, it will help kind of take off the weight of the
chaos that you feel and then you won't be unloading it onto your adult child in
ways that could damage the connection between you. And that's kind of where we're
going to be going with this conversation. The hard truth is that once our kids are
adults, we no longer get to make choices for them. We don't get to control who
they are or who they're in contact with or how they build relationships with those
people. But the thing is, and this is key, we do get to choose how we show up
for them in their lives. And that's where your power in this situation will lie.
That's where you get to me.
don't matter. What they are doing or likely doing is exploring and integrating
another piece of who they are into who they want to be and where they want to go
from here. So even if they're doing it awkwardly or messy, it's just part of their
story and it's part of them learning how to cope with and unfold their story as
they grow and develop. their birth family is part of that story.
And it's a part of their identity. So sometimes as adoptive parents, it's kind of
hard for us to acknowledge that that is still part of them and we want to try and
protect them from that. But our role isn't to protect them from their story.
It's to walk with them as they learn how to make sense of that story. One of the
things that I love about the creating a family resources and the online Facebook
community is how often we participants get reminded that our children's birth parents
are not a threat to our role as their parents. Your child's heart has room for
more than one connection. And if you could think of it this way, when a child
comes into a family by birth and then a second child comes into the family by
birth, the parent's love isn't divided in half, it's multiplied. And the same can be
true here in this situation if you can reframe and process it this way.
Your child's relationship with you and your child's relationship with their birth
parents doesn't have to be a zero -sum game. Love isn't a zero -sum game.
Your child can love you deeply and want to build an adult relationship with you,
and they can still want to have an adult relationship with their birth family. This
contact doesn't have to mean that your role has been diminished in their life.
their curiosity about relationship or contact with their birth parents doesn't have to
mean that your role is diminished in their life. And I want to acknowledge that
underneath all of that, you might still have some fears. You might fear what if
they prefer their birth family over me or their adoptive family. What if they reject
me in favor of this new relationship? And the fear that you're possibly feeling
underneath your question could very well be a real valid fear. But it's important to
remember that the antidote or the answer to fear is not control or more control or
manipulation of control deciding how much control to have. The antidote to fear is
connection And the best way to maintain your bond and build on your already existing
connection is to position yourself in their life as the safe, steady place that your
adult child can return to again and again and again. You want to craft a space
between you that they want to come back to, that they feel drawn to when they need
that safe space. So how do you do that? Well, that's kind of the age old called,
and you can do some backtracking with them because you've experienced the contact
already or they've experienced the contact already and you've already indicated that
there's some chaos that has come up from that contact. So you can go back and kind
of repair that by saying, hey, you know, we didn't handle contact at first very
well. And I'm really sorry about that. Can we kind of go back a little bit and
talk about what it felt like for you, you know, was it scary to you? Was it
startling to you? If you can show curiosity and interest without being defensive and
be open to what they're learning about their birth family or what they're
experiencing in this contact with their birth family, even when it's uncomfortable to
you, you can build trust again between you. You can repair that broken connection.
with this birth parent and they're going to proceed with or without you,
you get to choose if they will feel safe enough to process it with you.
You could create an environment that doesn't make them feel safe enough to process
these questions with you that they may have. You don't want that. You want to build
connection. You want to build relationship and continue to be their primary caregiver,
so to speak. So if you can summon openness and compassion and willingness to be
that soft landing place for this hard, complicated issue, that will make all the
difference in your relationship. It will allow you both to move forward with that
repair, but then also with hope for deepening and furthering your connection between
the two of you. If you instead choose to shut down or criticize or block their
contact or their questions or how they're processing it within themselves, you're
going to shut down opportunities for connection and demonstrate to them that you're
maybe not as safe as they had thought you were. However, you can lean in with
love, you can lean in with curiosity, you can and read.
whatever you know about how you connected with this child before this contact,
kind of pull that back in and do the things that you know and have been able to
do in the past to build and deepen the connection between you. Handling this
uninvited and unexpected contact from your child's birth parent may be a perfect
opportunity for you to shift your perspective. If you can,
consider how to move from I'm afraid I'm losing my child to I'm hoping to share my
child's adult life. And sharing doesn't mean being replaced.
It means your family's expanding. It means that you are still the anchor.
You're still participating with them in their life. It's just going to look
different.
disconnected, but they are still there, and it's just up to you to kind of summon
them up again and rebuild them and reinforce them in healthy ways for you and for
your adult child. If you can choose to welcome this new chapter of your adult
child's life with an open heart, you can actually secure your role in their life
rather than continue to weaken it. So to wrap it all up, here's a few practical
tips that I think can act as a summary to help you move forward. The first is to
name your feelings, but don't do it all with your child. Write them down,
share them with a therapist, or confide in a trusted friend. Don't put the burden
of your feelings, positive or negative, all on your child. Don't make them carry
your heavy feelings in this situation. Number two, when you do talk with your child,
try to lead with curiosity. You could say something like, I would love to hear how
this has been for you or something like how do you feel about reconnecting with
your birth parent and just leave it there. Don't try and answer it for them. Don't
try and force them to answer you the way you want to hear or what you want to
hear. Number three, reaffirm.
which your child can launch in healthy ways.
And number four, try to think long term. This reunion is just one chapter in you
and your child's life. Your relationship with your adult child will continue to
unfold over the years and hopefully decades. Parenting is a long game.
And just because they are in their 20s doesn't mean we're not parenting anymore. It
just is a different kind of parenting. So as often as you possibly can,
choose connection over control, choose safe landing space over criticism,
and choose that connection over and over and demonstrate it physically,
emotionally, verbally, however you can. At the end of the day, the goal isn't to
stop your child from knowing their birth family. The goal should be to remain a
steady, trusted parent that they can come back to, that they can depend upon. It
doesn't happen by clinging to them tighter. It happens by opening your heart and
opening your mind wider, wider heart, wider perspective, wider family circle.
After all, you've been their anchor for more than 20 years, and that role does not
vanish by showing up with love, humility, openness, curiosity,
you can ensure that this relationship remains central to them and their life and to
your connection, even if their world is expanding. And ultimately, that's what you
want. You want their world to expand. You want them to go out and explore what the
world has for them, even if it means connection with a birth parent that feels
fraught for you right now. I hope this helps. I'm sorry that it feels so painful
at first, but I hope that you can, once you've processed the painful feelings of
the chaos, you can kind of take a step back and start repairing and focusing on
connection with you and your adult child. If listeners, you appreciated hearing
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