Our next question comes to us from Elisabeth:
One question I have is what I/we should be doing a new adoptive parents when it comes to encouraging contact with our daughter’s first mom. We’re adopting an eleven month old little girl from Seoul this month (we travel in a few weeks), and it’s very important to us that we do everything we can to encourage the possibility of having a relationship or contact with our daughter’s Korean mom and Korean family. We want to be sensitive to her first mom’s wishes, but we also want her to know that we’re out here and that we’d love to have an open relationship if she’s interested.
We’re writing a letter to personally place in our daughter’s file when we visit the orphanage, but what can we do or say in that letter, and in future letters, that will offer the best chance of contact? What do you wish your adoptive parents might have done, and when? I don’t want to push too far or too hard, but I also don’t want to wait until our daugher is grown and leave the choice of having an open relationship to her–by then the possibility of contact with her Korean mom may not be there. If you wish your parents had made an effort to contact your first family, how far do you think they should have pushed? Would it be too much to write to the maternity/single mothers home where we know she stayed and leave a letter for her there? I’ve known some parents adopting from Eastern Europe who have used private investigators to make contact…I don’t know if that’s an option for us, and I’m not sure if I feel it would be appropriate.
From the adoptee perspective, how would you have wanted your adoptive parents to act/write/pursue when it came to makign contact or encouraging contact with your first family?
