Both Kinds of Love What Life is Like in Open Adoption By Chellee Unruh
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t takes a special kind of love to acknowledge that the best thing for your child is to place him or her in the arms of a family that can give them everything you can’t. It takes a special kind of love to form a deep friendship with a birthmother and give her baby the life she wished she could have provided. This is the beauty of open adoption; it embraces both kinds of love. For this adoptive mother, the desire to adopt was always in her heart. “I worked at a children’s group home right after college and met a lot of kids that I wanted to adopt. That experience opened my heart to wanting to adopt a child someday.” After the birth of her son, they decided to continue expanding their family through adoption. Their parents told them about Beth and John Hughes of Heart 2 Heart Adoptions. “We had a meeting with them and everything sounded exciting and wonderful. We couldn’t wait
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SiouxFallsWoman.net | February/March 2021
to get started!” John and Beth talked with them about having an open adoption. “We had no idea about open adoption, says the adoptive mother.” “We thought everything would be closed after the child was placed with us and that’s it.” John and Beth shared that open adoption had become the norm over the past three decades. They prayed about it and talked with friends and family. The adoptive mother turned to a friend for advice. The friend shared at dinner one night that she was a birthmother who had placed her baby girl for adoption when she was 15 and has a very close relationship with the child and the adoptive family. The family that adopted her child ended up moving back to Sioux Falls and the daughter she placed in adoption ended up babysitting for her other daughters who were her half-siblings. The adoptive mother thought her friend’s story
