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I recently binge-watched the show This Is Us. There is a character who was left as an infant at a fire station by a father who was addicted to drugs. The baby was adopted by a family and as an adult finds out his adoptive mom had communication with his birth father over the years, but kept that to herself. From a mom's perspective, I can see that she was trying to protect him from a bad situation. As the years went on the birth father got clean and the mom feared losing the son as the father had never signed away his rights. As an adoptee, I would have wanted to know. Maybe the right answer would have been to tell the boy while he was younger that it wasn't a great situation, but when he was an adult, they would let him have limited access to the man. I'm conflicted. What are your thoughts on this?
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I understand wanting to protect the child from a situation out of their control (the fathers drug addiction) and I don't think that what mom did was wrong. However, the only part of your post I don't agree with is the part where you said that the parents would continue to control the adult adoptees relationship with the father when he was an adult. While adoptive parents have a right to have an opinion on the relationship an adult adoptee cultivates with their birth family members, I don't believe they should have control of it -- and upon adulthood, the parents need to step back and allow the adult adoptee decide what he or she is comfortable with when it comes to birth family relationships. Adoption relationships are hard to navigate and I think that the show, This is Us, did a great job and it was actually the first show I've watched that had an adoption component that didn't trigger me, as an adoptee or a birth parent. :)
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