The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole was written by two women in one open adoption relationship. This book helps others who embark on the open adoption journey, to serve as a GPS system. It has markers, guidance and signposts to help you get where you’re going, provided by those who have traveled the road before you.
Part One is about the Why. “From fear to family” addresses the fundamentals of open adoption. Part One answers:
- What IS open adoption?
- How do we define a “successful” open adoption? What are the secrets to success?
- What are the emotional costs and benefits of open adoption for parents and for children?
- How can you clear your heart of the grief of infertility in preparation for a child who deserves to be your best choice, if not your first?
- What are the pitfalls that can occur in open adoption?
The second part, “Orienting on the child, open adoption’s true north,” covers the Hows, like how to balance the sometimes competing needs within the triad. Through case studies, this section addresses questions that come with the advancing abilities of the child to question and understand his/her adoptedness:
- The concept of “real” parents
- Search and reunion with a missing birth parent
- Extended birth families
- Dealing with the alternate reality, the road not taken, the fantasy life not lived
- The Primal Wound: the fine line between denying and dwelling on your child’s adoption
- The role and responsibilities of birth parents
The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, by Lori Holden and Crystal Hass, is available from Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in hard cover, paperback and e-book formats — and an audio version is coming mid-2016.
Please direct speaking and workshop leading inquiries to Lori Holden.