Open Adoption? Did I Do the Right Thing?

Dear Tara/Jennifer:
After adopting our first child in a semi-open adoption, I attended an adoption workshop put on by Lois Melina who opened my eyes to the importance of being truthful.  Our second adoption was open.
I remember when my oldest son, Zack, the product of the semi-open adoption, was about three years old.  We were at the grocery store and saw a very pregnant woman.  Zack was fascinated and when we got home he wrapped his arms around me and with joy said: "I grew inside your tummy, right!"  I told him no that he had grown in another woman's tummy.  His look of loss was so huge that it broke my heart.  I thought I was doing the right thing (by telling him this truth).
Fast forward 10 years.  Zack was ten when his birth mother called.  She wanted to reconnect.  I agreed but slowly.  (She had been a wild child and I wanted to proceed with caution.)  I agreed to letters and gifts.  She flooded him with letters and gifts from her other children and herself.  Zack was overwhelmed and told me he didn't have time for a birth mother.  My feeling was that she had rejected him once and now he was rejecting her.  I told him he had all the time in the world to get to know her.
Several years later Zack’s birth mother shot and killed herself.  Zack says this event is when his life really went in the wrong direction.  Although we got him counseling, he slipped down an awful rode of violence, gangs, arrests, heroin addiction, and prison.  He always had been a handful, but about this time he began down a dark and dangerous road and no amount of parenting and help stopped him.
Looking back, I know I had the best intentions by being so open, but I wondered if secrecy might have been better?   The truth didn't seem to serve us very well.  When my son told me he thought his birth mother suicide was the start of his downfall, I asked him if it would have been better if I hadn't told him.  He said what would that have helped?  
Anyway I guess I'm just looking for verification that honesty in adoption is the best policy.  Seems like it might have been better to not be so open...~  Susan
Dear Susan: 
Thank you so much for telling me this story and for your question, which is deep and feels as if it comes from a place of personal doubt. 
Your big question is bigger than adoption or even open adoption.  Your big question is:  Did I do the right thing?
One of my teachers once told me that when we are suffering with doubt, fear, worry, pain, anger, heartbreak—whatever—to try to imagine saying, “since I am already suffering so deeply, may I also take on the suffering of all the other people who feel like I do at this moment.” 
It’s like a little prayer.
So, in your own case it could go something like this.  You could think to yourself, “I am feeling deep doubt about the choices I made around my son, Zack.  I worry I did the wrong thing and since I am feeling this way, I agree to feel the doubt of all the adoptive parents in the world.  May I feel doubt for everyone.  May this huge doubt that plagues me not be wasted on just me.”
I know this sounds a little weird.  Why would we invite more sorrow into our lives?  But what actually happens is that—in the invitation—the opposite seems to happen.  You acknowledge that other people suffer in exactly the same way you are suffering and the feeling is like a dam breaking.  You are connected to all people in a truly significant way.  It’s a very powerful way to spread the load from your own worried mind to a wider field.  It’s reassuring somehow.  You’re not alone. 
Now lets look at adoption.  Just adoption.

In my own humble opinion, this is an arena of deep confusion and profound suffering. There are no easy answers for adoptive parents, birth mothers and most of all, for adopted people.  Being adopted, twice, I can only speak to the struggle of the adoptee.  Something has been shattered in me by the fact of my adoption. It’s a shattering at the most fundamental level of my being. It’s a profound and irreparable loss. Not one of us, who has lost a mother at birth, can deny this.
The fact that so few caregivers acknowledged this loss has made me “difficult,” in the same way your Zack has been difficult.  I have lived in a world where no one has said, “my sweet Jennifer, you lost your mother on the day you were born.  I am so, so sorry.  That must feel terrible.”
Basic human empathy.

These words would have been so easy say and yet, so few speak them. 

I have lived an entire life in denial of a basic loss that defined who I am.  I am a motherless daughter.  From the moment I took my first breath, I was forced away from the only home I had ever known and into a brutal world of survival via adaptation.

Too many adoptive parents fail to simply acknowledge the basic biological truth of the first mother and the pain the adoptee holds inside--unknown and unrecognized and unspoken.  What comes instead are the justifications and the judgments, among them:  “She was a bad mother for you, I am a better mother.”
Good mother, bad mother, wild, tame.  These labels do not matter, at the most basic level.  No mother will replace my original mother.  She carried me in her womb, we share DNA, she is my beginning and my blood.  Her bones are my bones.  To not give some serious time to recognize and “be with” the fact of my deep loss is to deny it and that goes for all adoptees.  How many of us have just been “with” the shattering truth of that original loss?  How many of us have been given permission to feel our sorrow? 

Very few.  Very few. 
I want to raise one small point about what you have written here: She wanted to reconnect.  I agreed but slowly.  (She had been a wild child and I wanted to proceed with caution.)  I agreed to letters and gifts.  Right here is where I’d like to pay closer attention to your words, choices and judgments. 
While you may have been working very hard to protect Zack, you may have also been threatened by the potential to lose him.  This is totally human and valid.  When we feel threatened, we are critical of others and have a great deal of influence, especially over a child.  Were you overwhelmed by this birth mother’s attentions and gifts?  Did you share this overwhelm with Zack, who then mirrored you by saying, “I don’t have time for this?”  What ten year old child says, “I don’t have time for this mother?”  That statement is an adult statement or sentiment.  Zack likely picked up that you didn’t have time or interest and out of loyalty to you and out of fear of being displaced by yet another mother, he went along for his very survival. 

I am not saying this to make you feel badly.  You already feel badly.  That is not the point.  I am saying this to have you think more deeply about what went down and what aspects of this story you didn't understand at the time.  Do you think you really understood Zack?  Do you think you understood yourself and your own motivations?  Did you understand the complex currents that run deep in the adoption narrative?

Likely no.  That is okay.  You are learning now--by the fact of your questions. 
Let’s really think deeply about this idea that we can keep our adoptive children away from the birth mothers. 
Systemically, yes, we can do this.  What I mean is that we have a system in place to create barriers between mother and child.  There are adoptive parents who sign legal agreements and court rulings that make the agreements into law.  But what of the biological connection?   Can a mother and child ever be truly separated?  Aren’t their bodies one body?  As Meredith Hall shows us in her important book Without a Map, mothers who gestate children carry the living cells of their babies in their own bodies and babies carry the living cells of their mothers in their bodies.  It’s called Human Chimaeraism.  Mothers and children, due to the link of biology, are living systems of connection.  You may be able to manufacture walls of separation but you can never separate that which is alive in DNA. The energy of connection exists. 
When Zack’s mother killed herself, I imagine he did go through a stunning spiral.  A part of him died when she died.  Her body is in his body.  What she did was kill a part of him due to her own suffering and her own ignorance.  That is a horrible tragedy.  His downfall is aligned with the energetic truth of the biological connection. 
I believe he would have had this downfall having known her or not.  He would have felt it, no matter what. 
So, as for your part in this story, you did your best.  You took the information available to you at the time, you followed the rules of the system put into place and you tried to make the best choices from the heart about open adoption.  In my humble opinion, Susan, your hands are clean.
You can only be responsible for what you can understand.  The rest is learning, making mistakes and asking questions along the way, as you did here to today. 
I hope you can forgive Zack’s mom, forgive Zack and most of all, forgive yourself.  As an adoptive mother willing to consider open adoption, you are way ahead of the curve for most adoptive parents.  Scott Simon, who wrote Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other: In Praise of Adoption, admits he adopted from China in order to never have to encounter the reality of a birth mother.  Scott Simon, one of the most beloved radio personalities of our time, tells the truth that most adoptive parents believe.  Birth mothers—if removed from the scenario—do not exist.  Out of sight, out of mind. It’s simply not true.  Birth mother’s do exist in the cells of the bodies of their children.  A birth mother can be seen in the hands, the eyes, the voices and the bodies of their children.  This is not political.  It is practical.  It is the truth.   
You know this better than anyone now.  So do I.
Take care, Susan.  Be well.