How to Open an Adoption: A guide for parents and birthparents of minors

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Help in this often delicate situation
Review: As a birthmother and wife of an adoptee, I see the adoption issue from two different standpoints and this book is one of the few that grants all three positions in the adoption triangle equal importance while still maintaing that the adoptees interest must superseed the desires of anyone else.

The different areas of opening a closed adoption, ranging from how to tell the adoptee, to what to say on that first meeting, to, what do we tell other people work not only for an adoptee who is a minor, I think the advice and suggestions, would work equally well for an adult adoptee who is either searching or has been found. I highly recommend this book to anyone involved in the adoption triangle.

Rating:
Summary: A guiding light in a complex situation!
Review: When an adoption that has been closed becomes fully open, or disclosed, most of the participants find themselves in a situation for which they have no precedents in their lives before. This was certainly the case for our adoptive family and our daughters' birthfamilies. So many emotions and so little understanding of what we might expect to feel, the way the relationships would evolve, how all of the children, adopted and birth siblings, would find their way and what each of our responsibilities was in this new extended family. This was family that had always been there of course, but was now coming out from behind a veil that never should have been there in the first place.

So, to come to the point, thank goodness for this book and its author, Patricia Martinez Dorner! This is an invaluable resource for families opening adoptions, for families that have already done so and need counsel and reassurance, and for adoptive families in closed adoptions, whose children are saying they need something more. I return to this book often, primarily because adoption is complex and emotional and the more I understand about what all of us are experiencing, the more grounded I am as an adoptive parent. The writer's wisdom and understanding are reflected on every page.

Buy this book and read it, not once but several times. No matter what your particular adoption situation is, you will learn and grow.