Will my baby go straight to a new home if I am planning a closed adoption?

Closed adoptions usually work by the poor kid having to grow up knowing no-one and nothing about their own history. They grow up receiving no genetic mirroring in order to learn how the world works, and so regularly and often develop such traumatising traits such as hyper-vigilance – and speaking from personal experience, there is nothing worse in this world than being abandoned by your own mom.

You carried the kid beyond the latest abortion date, so stomach up and raise your own damn kid instead of abandoning it into gawd alone knows what ’cause seriously, once you sign the papers, it doesn’t matter what anyone’s promised you, you have no control over what happens.

I dropped lucky, I was palmed off onto a relatively decent couple who tried their hardest, but I have a mate who was palmed off on to a couple who separated six months after the adoption was finalised, and had to grow up enduring abuse at the hands of her adoptive dad, as well as the long string of ‘lodgers’ he used to invite around to abuse her with.

Also, don’t listen to anyone suggesting that open adoption is the way to go – it is almost never legally enforceable! Many parents have lost access to their children due to “open” adoption promises. Please read http://lifemothers.com/thewall.html and http://www.bringperihome.com/history.html and http://www.exiledmothers.com/adoption_facts/wish.html before listening to the hype.

I was abandoned to adoption at 7mths old. I didn’t have a bad adoption – my afamily are the best I could ever have chosen… but if I’d been able to choose, and I’d known then what I know now, I’d've chosen to be aborted before birth instead, ’cause at least that way the lifetime of agony I’ve gone through would’ve been over in minutes, instead of the decades that I’ve been suffering for now.

I’ve been in reunion with my bfam for a few months now, and even that’s proving to be completely agonising.

Taken from Nancy Verrier’s book, Coming Home to Self: http://www.nancyverrier.com/self_book.php

For the adoptee every day is a challenge of trying to figure out how to be, although he probably doesn’t understand the difficulty this presents for him. It has been true his whole life and, therefore, feels normal. However, it takes a great deal of energy and concentration. And it never feels quite right. He never quite fits. Therefore he feels as if /he/ is never quite right.
(pg 50)

Abandonment and neglect are reported to be the two most devastating experiences that children endure – even more devastating then sexual or physical abuse. That’s why some neglected children do naughty things to get attention. Even though the attention is hurtful – being yelled at, hit, or otherwise harmed – it is better than neglect. /Anything/ is better than abandonment. Abandonment is a child’s greatest fear. For adoptees, it is also reality, embedded in their implicit and unintegrated memory.
(pg 102)

It is sometimes difficult to spot grief in children. After all, it isn’t as if the child sits in a puddle of tears his entire childhood. As one adoptee said, “Of course I played, laughed, sang. Do people think that if you’re not sitting in a corner with your head on your knees, you are not sad? I had happy times, but the sadness was always there, even when I was having fun.”
(pg 117)

So do the best thing ever, and don’t abandon your kid, ’cause seriously, it leaves the kid suicidal in way too many instances.