I've been reading this thread and feeling frustrated that I couldn't chime in but Camille helped me set up an account.
I wanted to address some things.
I've been frustrated by people's want to ascribe my experience to being an "insecure" mother or a new mother or to my having been brainwashed by primal wound thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm not an insecure or a new mom -- I've been parenting for nearly a decade and before that worked professionally with kids (including toddlers) in daycare and as a family program coordinator for children living in crisis. I also taught parenting classes. I've not been brainwashed by primal wound theories. I take it all with a grain of salt and the experts who pin everything on adoption -- from asthma to criminal behavior -- don't do much for me. (By those standards my son -- who was a clingy, shy, worried kid -- acted a lot more "adopted" than his confident, outgoing sister!) But I know how bonded I was to my (bio) son and how bonded he was to me the very minute he was born and that experience has convinced me that there is a central loss when a child is placed for adoption.
I think this loss is two-fold: I think it's biological (babies are primed to bond to the mothers who carry them) and cultural (as evidenced by the statements here about treating adopted kids just the same as bio kids; our culture places a heavy emphasis on biological ties so when we say we will treat them "the same as" we are *devaluing* the experience of adoption by expecting it to conform to the experience of parenting by birth or the experience of being raised by birth parents). I think the first loss hits different children differently and I do believe that children are resilient -- after all women used to die in childbirth all the time and so surely for the sake of human survival children would have the ability to re-bond with a new caregiver. But I do believe that had my son lost me at three days, three months or three years that it would have impacted him and so how can I not believe that it didn't impact my daughter? I don't think this loss means Madison is going to suffer the rest of her life nor that this loss can predict this, that, or the other behavior or outcome. But I do believe she has feelings around it and I think it's part of the reason she cried for the first three months of her life. It does not define her but it is part of her experience and dealing with it is part of the work that she will have to do around growing up.
Re., the cultural loss of adoption is about our social ideas about what is a "real" mom and what is a "real" child. Our children will have to contend with the prejudices that other people bring to adoption -- that they are somehow less worthy or somehow less important to us. In reading the adoption research (by non-partisan researchers -- not just the hardcore adoption grief folks) I know that integrating her adoption into her self-image will be an important part of her development and that making sense of our cultural ideas as she does this will be a challenge. I believe we can help her in this by not pretending that she is just the same as our bio son (she is her own unique person with her own unique and valued experiences including her adoption story), by creating opportunities for connection to her birth family (she will decide for herself how to manage this as she gets older but we're all about making sure that the opportunity is there), and by making adoption a commonplace discussion in our house. (We do not segregate it by making it a special-event topic; for example, there are photos of her birth family around just as there are photos of our other extended family members. Noah considers them HIS family, too, because she is his sister and so we have "adopted" her birth family as our extended family.)
Other things: I don't actually write that much about adoption professionally (I've written two essays and am working on an assignment about challenges to open adoption); I've written far more on pregnancy (I used to be on the masthead of a now defunct pregnancy magazine) and parenting. My blog is adoption-centric just because that's where I like to kick around ideas. To read it you would get the idea that adoption is a bigger part of our everyday lives but that would be a mistaken assumption. Madison's life story is much more integrated to our family living than it would appear here. So again, the idea that I'm just so steeped in adoption that it's made my brain work funny is just plain out wrong.
Jessica's visits (Madison's first mom) aren't really special events. She lives here in town and will come by on a moment's notice or we'll swing by her work just to say hi. In other words, the big day Madison had with Jessica wasn't a particularly more special day than any other time we've seen her or at any other time when we've been running around. (We're homeschoolers -- every day is crazy!) What was different about this day is that Madison for the first time "clicked" that she was in Jessica's uterus. (We use the right terms for bodies because if you say "You were in her belly" it sounds like you were eaten like a sandwich!) We'd been talking about babies a bunch anyway because Noah's best friend's mom was pregnant and Madison, like a lot of 2 or 3-year olds, was all about the baby in there.
My original reaction when she cried was what you guys have said: she's over-tired, she's just feeling cranky, etc. But Madison is not one who cries when she's overtired (she gets hyper) and when she does cry, she cries for anger. The tone and intensity of her crying was very very very very different from her typical tantrums and my gut told me this was about waking up and Jessica being gone and it reminding her of being a baby and waking up and Jessica being gone. So that's why I told her the story and that's why I said, "And sometimes you still miss Jessica, sometimes you still wish you were her baby." Then her whole demeanor changed -- her body absolutely relaxed, her crying softened and it was clear I'd nailed it. You don't have to believe me -- what you believe has nothing to do with what happened -- but there it is.
Since then I talked to another mother of a (internationally adopted so essentially closed) child who had the exact same sort of reaction after watching a kid's movie where the mom was lost and the child was adopted. She sent me her journal entry on it and it was eerie how similar it was to Madison's reaction. I have heard from other moms, too, who at different ages have had similar experiences. It's been very eye-opening.
Then for this open adoption article I spoke with Sharon Roszia who is part of the Kinship Center in California. She's a counselor who has been working with adopted families (adoptees, adoptive parents and some with birth parents) for about forty years. I asked her for her take and she was very encouraging about how we handled it. She said that the reason Madison might have done this earlier than a lot of kids is that 1) she's pretty bright (really -- she's been developmentally ahead since she was born) and 2) we are a family who is comfortable talking about adoption. (This was a GOOD thing, she said.) She said this kind of response is more common in a 4 or 5 year old but that it IS typical whether or not the adoption is open or closed.
So if seeing Jessica was this upsetting, why don't we limit visits? Well first off, as Sharon indicated and as my friend's experience (with her internationally adopted daughter) shows, the visit may have been the trigger but it wasn't the *cause.*
Finally, amom4life said she thought Madison might be confused over who her "real" mother is. Ummm, no. (I think she may have said this because I said in my entry that Jessica was her "real mother" and that was to emphasis my strong belief that adoption severs a relationship that is central -- that of an infant from her mother.) Terminology is so limited and that word -- mother -- sometimes doesn't seem big enough. As I've written before (on blog and in my Salon essay) -- I am Madison's verb mother by virtue of mothering her. She knows that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, I will be there. If she is hungry, I will feed her. If she is scared, it's my lap she craves. But Jessica is her noun mother. She is the woman who gave birth to her and she *is* a mother as well but she does not do mothering. I think adults have a much more difficult time of understand this than do either of my kids. Madison has never mistakenly run to Jessica when she wanted me. When I flew with Jessica to meet her extended family we three (Madison, of course, came along, too) spent A LOT of time together but Madison never once reached for her instead of me; she knows who her mommy is but that doesn't erase the pain of *losing* a mother when she was three days old. I disagree with the poster who said, "My children didn't lose; they gained a family!" Your children DID lose a family. That says nothing about what they gained -- they are separate events. I wrote more about that here:
http://www.thiswomanswork.com/2006/07/2 ... verbosity/
(although my site is hosed right now and I'm not sure when the admins will have it back up)
I don't think this is adoptive family vs. birth family. How Madison grows to feel about her adoption and her birth family ultimately has no impact on how she feels about me and her father and her brother. She has room to feel lots of different ways about all of the. She can see Jessica as her "real" mother without seeing me as her fake or imaginary mother. (This is what I mean about rotten terminology.) I'm not hung up on "winning" some competition to prove that I'm more real than Jessica. It doesn't matter to me. I get the great privilege of mothering this fabulous child and the tremendous joy of being witness to her growing up. I am her mother. Nothing erases that. At the same time, I didn't give birth to her, I didn't contribute to her genetically and that's ok. I honor and respect her birth story and I honor and respect her unique genetic heritage. I can acknowledge her loss without putting down her entry into our family just as I can celebrate her arrival without pretending that it erases the things she was forced to leave behind.
As Camille mentioned, I would have changed the name to "adoption grief" instead of primal wound had I to do it over again because people hear that phrase "primal wound" and just shut down as folks are doing here; not because I'm changing my mind about what the experience was illustrating.
Dawn
for all of the people involved...to have to continue to carry it around like that. Unexpressed. That is IMO another kind of loss....a loss because, like in your example Cam, you needed to be able to talk about it....and couldn't. And so, on top of any adoption related issue/loss, you know have the loss of being able to talk about it with your Mom. The issue compounded. 
Hannah 9 
Sophia 5 
Gabrielle 3 
Our house sells in God's perfect timing! 
- I've changed the settings to work around the broken part now so people can join if they wish.)
