Consequences of Closing an Open Adoption

I gave my son up for adoption and I want him back. His parents don't want him to stay in contact with me. Do I have the right to be in his life when he wants me to? (Question first answered by me on Quora)

When you give up a child for adoption, the adoptive parents become his legal parents forever. They get to choose who he is in contact with, who he phones and writes to, who he lives with, who he visits with, until he’s 18. At that point the child is an adult and can choose for himself who to have in his life.

That being said, it is almost always in the child’s best interest to have their birth family in their lives to some degree. My older child was adopted at birth in an open adoption. We had planned to have his birth family involved in his life regularly for all of his years. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.

His birth mother was struggling with mental health issues and not taking meds. She was making wild accusations against me which was seriously messing with my self-esteem. I was having a hard enough time as it was trying to parent a child who never slept, constantly screamed, and kept getting expelled from preschools.

In my state of chronic sleep deprivation and absolute frustration combined with defensiveness from being constantly attacked, I made a decision that permanently, negatively, effected our lives. I told his birth mother that she had to start going to therapy and get back on her meds before she had contact with our child again.

She reacted by getting even more crazy with her accusations. I can see now how devastating it must have been for her to be told she was too unwell to be allowed contact with the child she’d entrusted to my care. I should have found a better way to handle the situation. I have no clue what it is I should have done, but locking her out of our lives was most definitely the wrong answer. I didn’t see that, though, until he was completely gone from my life.

When he was 15, my son ran away from home, got on a bus and headed out of state to be with her, his birth mom. It did not go well for them. She did not have the skills to handle such a seriously psychiatrically unstable young man. Of course, it must be said, neither did I.

Looking back, I wish I’d been more accepting of his birth mother. Maybe, together, we could have found a way to better parent this very difficult child. I messed up big time in throwing her to the curb, and it’s something I can never take back. I can only hope that someday they can both forgive me for this awful mistake.