Open (Secret)

"I want them to know how much Hava and Melissa really love them," Ann Goldfarb says. She wants her sons to know just how hard it was for their birth mothers to let them go, how it "just took so much strength and love for the child."

It is a brave experiment, but still very much an experiment. When a few open adoptions were initiated about 20 years ago, "there were predictions made that a child would be confused about who was the parent," says Harold Grotevant, a psychologist who studies adoption. While Grotevant's research suggests that these early predictions are not holding true, these remain little-understood relationships, and the well-being of children has yet to be fully measured.

What would become clear during a visit Hava made to the Goldfarbs is that a relationship between two kinds of mothers, birth and adoptive, is a charged and changing thing. It involves anxiety, often, for the adoptive parent, and recurring pain for the birth mother, who, grateful as she may be for the privilege of contact, must watch as her son or daughter gravitates irreversibly toward another woman. "I found it easier to visit in the beginning; it has gotten harder," Hava says.

And once established, the relationship involves a relentless recalibrating of what might be called the adoptive balance of power. At the outset, every mother and birth mother must decide what level of contact they think they can live with. Then they must rethink and revise, weather conflicts anticipated and unexpected. Accomplishing this requires extraordinary grace on the part of a mother such as Ann Goldfarb, who says: "It's your baby, but it's also somebody else's baby. You can't just deny that." And graciousness from a birth mother such as Hava Leichtman, who said, during her visit, to Ann: "It wasn't until I met you that I realized what a good life he could have. I realized that it was in the baby's best interest." But by saying yes in that courtroom, Hava says she felt she was ceding ownership of "the one good thing I feel I did on the face of this Earth."

Perhaps most of all, both women must not only feel, but also control and master, what may be the world's most powerful human emotion: the passion that is maternal love.

EARLIER THAT DAY, Ann Goldfarb took a moment to see whether Jonathan, standing barefoot in a downstairs bathroom, understood what a birth mother is. "Who is Hava?" Ann asked while blow-drying his light-brown hair after a bath. Jonathan looked at her blankly. Presently Daniel, a razor-sharp redhead of 7, appeared and began narrating what he knew of his brother's birth mom. "We got the cat when Hava was here," said Daniel, pointing to Cinnamon, an orange tabby. "Hava has cats," Daniel added. "Nothing but cats. Hundreds of cats. Statues of cats." They had visited Hava in Michigan, and this -- a mythical cat-woman -- was the impression they had formed of the woman who had carried Jonathan.

With that, the family headed out in a late winter snowfall to fetch Hava. "She said she'll be waiting behind door number two," Ann told the boys after they arrived at Dulles and were on their way to passenger pickup.

And there she was, exactly where she said she would be: black-haired, slender, a very different woman from the anguished 20-something of four years earlier. Now graduated from college and studying for her LSATs, Hava was wearing a beige fake-fur parka and leopard-spotted mittens and matching headband, bringing into the car a whiff of perfume and drama. "Hi, you!" she said, climbing into the back beside Jonathan, who was sitting in a booster seat in the middle of the Goldfarbs' Volvo. "Look at you guys; you're getting bigger and bigger!" she said. "Or are you a small boy?" she asked Jonathan.

"Big boy," he said.

"You weren't so sure on your birthday," said Hava, who visits several times a year, the last time for Jonathan's birthday three months earlier.

"Did you guys go to school today?" she asked, and Daniel said no; it was a snow day, and schools were closed. Hava chatted with Ann about the turbulence of the flight; about her boyfriend, Bruce, Jonathan's birth father, with whom she was living, again, and who was trying to enlist her in the renovation of his bathroom. "Bruce thinks all women have the home decorating gene," she said, and she and Ann had a good laugh about that. Then Hava said, "I made $100 at the airport!" describing how a man had approached her as she went through security in Detroit, offering $100 if she would help him win a bet. "He had to find some random attractive girl and get her to talk to him on the phone and talk for 15 minutes, and he could ask her anything," said Hava, who gave him her cell number, figuring she could shock him more than he could shock her, but later would decline to return his messages.

"Weird things happen to me," mused Hava, whose hair is no longer the waist-length cascade of four years ago but shoulder-length and freshly layered. Some months earlier, she had been at a club in Detroit, and Kid Rock had shown up. A group of "Pamela Anderson look-alikes" had swarmed him, and Hava had gotten backed into a corner near a candle, and pretty soon her hair was on fire. "I figure that when you start setting your own hair on fire, it's time to get it cut!" Hava said as the boys listened, rapt.