504: 22 Years of Lessons Learned from Two Moms in One Open Adoption

The moment you become a parent, time seems to stop and you can’t see beyond the sweet baby or toddler you have before you, looking up at you with those big eyes that say you are everything. Those days of full dependence on you feel like they may go on forever – in all the ways that bring feelings of both tenderness and exhaustion.

But this podcast is called The Long View. We know that those days give way to the next days, and the next and the next. Days become months and months become years. And before you know it, you’ve got a young adult looking you eye-to-eye as they step out into the world.

What might this look like in a long-enduring open adoption? How do birth parents and adoptive parents stay steadfast for the adoptee they both love, through thick and thin, across decades? The adoptee is going through their obvious developmental stages that take them from fully dependent to independent. And at the same time, the parents are advancing through their lives, through less distinctly obvious adult stages, navigating the challenges of adulthood and parenthood, continuing to grow and gain abilities, clarity, and wisdom about boundaries between themselves and others.

Here with us this month are two women who entered into what became a long-enduring open adoption nearly 22 years ago when Katie placed her daughter into the arms of Amber. Neither of them knew all that was to come. Neither had completely worked out how to navigate their own big emotions, let alone each others’ and eventually those of the daughter they both loved and claimed. But step by step, day by day, they worked at it. They loved tenaciously. They endured hard things, never quitting on themselves, each other, or their daughter.

Katie Cowles and Amber Wooten are here with us to reflect on all that!

Show Notes

• Instagram: Katie Bakes RVA
• Open Adoption 101 Series
  • What is Open Adoption?
  • 2 Keys for Healthy Boundaries in an Open Adoption
  • The BothAnd of Adoption in 50 words
  • What Open Adoption Isn’t
• Instagram: Katie Bakes RVA
• Ep 101 Adoptive mom Leah Campbell on sharing power as the power holders in adoption.
• Ep 502 Adoptees Lauren Fishbein and Glenna Boggson making space for adoptees to feel their emotions

Transcript

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About this Podcast

Lori Holden (The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole) brings to you an array of articulate and thought-provoking guests with lived experience in adoption, each with valuable insights to share about the all-encompassing journey of parenting an adopted person from babyhood to toddlerhood to school age to teenage -- and ultimately to adulthood. Join us as we explore Adoption: The Long View.

Named a Top 25 Adoption Podcast