During this past holiday season, as we hosted family and friends, and wrote our usual holiday letter, we realized how important connections are to us, and how long-term friendships are sometimes as important as biological or legal relationships. The letters, photos, and telephone calls seemed especially precious. We were saddened to learn of deaths and memory loss, excited to read about new grandchildren or marriages, trips taken, and interests pursued. Some of our friendships have lasted since childhood, while others developed fairly recently. As we age ourselves, and others do also, it seems appropriate to share losses as well as triumphs. Those holiday letters become like precious visits with people we care for and rarely get to see. Staying connected begins to seem like a lifeline.

After several of my aunts and uncles died, and then my parents, I inherited a great deal of “stuff” from all of them, including furniture, keepsakes, photographs, and newspaper clippings, books, jewelry, all sorts of objects. Some are valuable, many are not. After spending several years going through these items, and again after my brother’s death two years ago, I knew it was time to really inventory my household, get rid of some things, or pass them on if possible, so that became my big project for 2017. Room by room, drawer or shelf at a time, some rooms were fairly quickly finished, while others are not yet done. During this process, I have discovered how very important connections are. Finding a photograph of someone I cannot identify, I wish someone were still alive who could tell me, or that I knew who might really appreciate receiving it. I remember my aunt and my father trying to identify the people in photos they could no longer see clearly. Because I know I may lose more eyesight myself, I want to do what I can now. I have sent pictures to people who I thought might want them, and some have written or called to thank me. Some have not. In other instances, I actually had copies made, so that several cousins could have them. It has become a way of maintaining connections and of making new ones.

Finding a picture of a baby, dated 1929 and labeled as to who it was, not my own relative, but a much-loved great niece of my great aunt by marriage, I had to spend some time finding out the actual connection. I may have met this person once as a very young child, but I’m not sure. I just knew my great aunt and uncle had raised her mother. After one call led to another, and that call led to the actual person in the photograph, still alive and healthy, I have found a new friend, an almost-cousin! We have spoken on the telephone and shared memories of this dear aunt and uncle, and the other aunt and uncle, for the two couples lived in the same town and were the closest of friends. Neither set had any biological children, but were very kind to nieces and nephews, and the next three generations.

Although there were no legal adoptions, the relationships were very much like intra-family adoptions, and for those of us who were great nieces and nephews, these aunts and uncles were the grandparents we were missing on that side. Did my Aunt Agnes’s nieces and nephews love her less because she wasn’t a genetic relative? Did She care less for her niece because it was an informal, unofficial, open adoption? Do these artifacts from her, from my biological great aunt’s husband, from others, mean nothing because I’m not their actual direct descendant?

If the woman I’ve recently found had been the daughter of a legal adoption, she’d be my second cousin. Making connections with others makes me more human, more connected with the world. When I talked on the telephone with her, and we shared memories of my dear aunts and uncles, some of which we may be the only ones still alive with those memories, those people came alive again for us, briefly. When she received the pictures I sent, she called and she said it was just the thing she needed to raise her spirits. Our conversation also raised mine.

As I continued with my inventorying project, I found some items I had put in “safe places” and then forgot where I’d put them. Among these were a letter my maternal grandmother had written in 1916, a year before my mother was born; a braid of her hair dating from about 1922; and her wedding ring, already broken in two pieces before she died in 1927. These items are of no monetary value, yet of enormous value in terms of their connection to a grandmother my cousins and I never knew. I am so thankful they had been preserved and identified. Another ring, in the same tiny box, is not identified; I don’t know if it belonged to my great grandmother or to someone else. No one is alive who could tell me, since my mother and aunts are all gone. That connection is broken.

How does all of this relate to adoption? For me, personally, it means I maintain the connections in writing so that all of my sons, including the one I relinquished and reunited with, will have their information, and some objects, to pass on and to enjoy, if they wish to do so. At the current time, my reunited son is not having much connection to me, which saddens me, but the heritage is still there for him.

I only wish he could have had it all his life. That is one of the advantages to what we refer to as open adoption, when it is truly open, not just an occasional photo or communication through an adoption agency. Open adoption does not mean birth parents still get to be full parents or have a say in decisions; it just means connections are not severed.

Adoption is not unnatural. Even animals are known to “adopt” an abandoned or orphaned infant, sometimes even of a different species. It is the secrecy of closed adoptions that is unnatural, not to have the connections, the information shared. It is the pretense that only the adoptive family exists, not the birth family. Open adoption is not a perfect answer, just the best we know how to do.

Many adoptions start out as open, or semi-open, sometimes with agencies still having a great deal of power as messengers or intermediaries, but become de facto closed adoptions, either suddenly or gradually, by adoptive parents. There are a variety of reasons for this, including pride, denial, previously unacknowledged plans to reduce or stop contact, or even relocation to a state where open-adoption agreements cannot be enforced. More often, contact becomes less and less as the child gets older and adoptive parents want to be perceived as the only parents, or as birth parents find it too painful to have only occasional contact, with adoptive parents in control, sometimes referring to the birth parents as “friends” or “Aunt Sue” rather than “Your birth parents” or “Your first mother.” Sometimes they just give up when they see the child becoming more distant. Some, to be sure, decide they can “move on with their lives” more easily if they give up contact, although they nearly always regret that later. Sometimes, in fact, birth parents are not leading lives that are safe for the child to share. However, in other cases, they are simply not living in exactly the way the adoptive parents approve and so they decide to stop, contact “to protect the child.” They may convey to the child, either explicitly or implicitly, that they would be very hurt and insulted if the child, even later as an adult, wants contact with birth family, or even if they want more information. When this happens, the child, or adopted adult, gets four messages: “I come from defective and dangerous people; I must also be defective; I must protect my adoptive parents, who are superior but fragile; I must pretend I don’t care about my original family and heritage in order to comply with my adoptive parents’ wishes, so that I will have their approval, without which I really adoptive parents for that.

We see articles, more like advertisements, in newspapers and online, for children who are “available for adoption,” complete with pictures and descriptions of their assets and liabilities as persons, often describing the children’s wishes for a forever family,” alluding to the belief that their birth family either no longer exists or has been discarded, that birth family was temporary but adoptive family is “forever.” An agency we heard of recently is called “Adoption Dreams Come True.” It seems to us that only would-be adoptive parents dream of adoption. It’s never a “dream come true” for adoptees or for birth parents! Deciding to relinquish a child (or having the state decide to rescind parental rights) is painful, not joyful.

Birth parents may feel joy later, at seeing their child having a good life, at being reunited with their child or having ongoing con tact through an open adoption, but it was never a first choice. Most of the time, a decision to relinquish truly is putting the child’s welfare first, ahead of the birth parent’s(s’) desire to keep the child. This remains difficult for an adopted person, whether child or adult, to comprehend, because they did not make that decision.

Later, when people want to search and be reunited, but are hesitant, not wanting to “interfere” with the adopted person’s life and/or the adoptive family, or, conversely, not wanting to have no family at all.” Someday, these kids, or adults, will realize they’ve been manipulated and they will not thank the “disturb the birth parent” who has moved on, hid the secret forever, or “forgotten” she had this child, or in the case of a birth father, never knew he had sired a child. How many relationships are never pursued because of these hesitations?

How many birth mothers, even at the end of their lives, are still hoping to be found, or wish they could have searched? We know of several instances where the reunion took place, literally, at the birth parent’s deathbed. One woman I know was told by a therapist that not knowing her birth family was a “beautiful mystery” she should accept! She did not accept it; she sued to get her information (this was years ago) and did find her birth siblings. Her mother was already deceased. Mysteries are for books, and they are usually solved by the end! Whether or not making connections results in a wonderful relationship is not the point, either in reunions of birth family, or rekindling old friendships or something else. The connections are the point.

Why are connections important? Why keep letters, photos, documents, keepsakes? Why maintain or re-establish relationships? Why not downsize one’s possessions and also one’s relationships? Life might be “neater,” more manageable that way, one might think. Many adoptive parents, and adult adoptees, have sought reunion with birth parents, thinking it would be a one-time event, a “summing up,” or would “bring closure,” rather than a possible opening and development of relationships. Some have imagined reunion would be a matter of writing, or meeting, finding some information, perhaps exchange pictures, “satisfy their curiosity,” and then be done, not to be “bothered” by developing a real and ongoing relationship that might involve discovering each other’s shortcomings as well as assets.

A full relationship, whether a friendship, a marriage, parent-child, or any other truly meaningful relationship, is messy. It takes effort, time, energy, commitment, vulnerability, and persistence. For some, that is a burden, and therefore frightening. For others, it holds the promise of great joy as well as possible heartbreak. Some will settle for a “virtual” relationship on Facebook or the like. “Virtual” actually means true, or real, but has come to mean unreal, only seeming to be real. It’s hard to be comforted by a laptop or cell phone, hard to hug a tablet.

As we get older, we do lose relationships. People die, some lose their memory, some just lose contact. Making new friends, developing closer relationships with extended family, maintaining relationships as circumstances change, takes work and we may start thinking we don’t want the pain of losing connections, so we just don’t make them or maintain them. In doing so, we give up a great deal of the richness of life. Attending adoption support groups and being involved, keeping up with friends and family, continuing to have hobbies and other interests, is a big part of being human. A dog might not remember who its “birth family” was, but even dogs remember the humans they’ve lived with, and have been known to walk great distances to find them again. Surely we, as humans, can maintain connections with friends and family, whether biologically related or not.