Open (Secret)

It was difficult for the Goldfarbs when Hava stopped communicating as she wrestled with her growing ambivalence. They felt sorry for her -- "You just don't want a child at another's expense," Ann says -- but they also wanted clarity. They didn't want Daniel to think he was going to get a brother if he wasn't, or that his own birth mom might take him away. At a post-delivery counseling session mandated by Virginia law, the counselor told the Goldfarbs, "I don't think she's going to go forward." Hava told the counselor she was angry the Goldfarbs were not keeping the name she gave the baby. Ann and Larry looked at each other as if to say: When did the name become an issue?

"That was the exact look you gave each other!" said Hava, laughing now, over dinner. Explaining her remarks about the name, she said: "I just wanted a reason to be mad at them." The Goldfarbs surprised her by saying they would think about keeping "Jackson." "We considered it," Ann says. "But the thing is, we didn't really like it."

"I didn't like it, either," Hava admits.

But she maintains that taking Jonathan home was the best thing she could have done. "It showed me I couldn't cope. It's not like, you breast-feed the baby, and he falls asleep on your breast. It's like -- you put him on your breast, and he falls asleep, and you put him down, and he wakes up, and by the time he wants to eat, it hurts, and it's 3 a.m. and you're exhausted, and it's freezing, and it's like: Please, somebody, take this baby."

Jonathan wasn't a good sleeper -- then, or for a year. "The only time Jonathan would get to sleep was if Larry picked him up and held him," Ann remembers, describing the immediate bond between Larry and his sons. While Ann and Hava chatted, Larry tilted his head back and began blowing upward, showing the boys how he could keep a Ping-Pong-size basketball aloft with his breath. He then got down on the floor and showed his sons how to spin the ball so that, when they rolled it, it would return to them. Presently they got up and went into the kitchen, where Ann spooned mint chocolate chip ice cream into sippy cups and they stood around eating. Larry's wireless hand-held device rang. "Hello?" he said, to silence. Daniel had crept, unseen, onto the counter, and called from the landline phone on the wall. The boys, who have Larry's sense of humor, laughed and laughed. "That was the one thing I couldn't give him," said Hava, watching. "I could have loved him; I could have bonded with him, but I could not give him a father."

"Now he has a father," she continues, "and I get to see it."

HAVA VISITED JONATHAN just days after Bruce handed him over. On a bookcase near the Goldfarbs' mantel, there is a photo of her that day, sitting in a chair holding her birth son. That's all she did, pretty much: held him. She was, at the time, distraught to the point of breakdown. She had given up her baby, and her boyfriend did not want to live with her, and she had been trying for years to finish a two-year associate's degree. Hava's family made sure she was never alone in the days after relinquishing Jonathan. "I was like: 'Oh, my God. What if she hurt herself and I had something to do with it?'" Ann says now.

During early visits, Ann tried to gauge whether it was safe to leave the boys with Hava. And during one visit they made back to Michigan, Hava offered to take Jonathan to see Bruce, but Ann and Larry wouldn't let her drive him. "I was like, I'm good enough to give birth to him, but not drive him?" Hava remembers. "And then I thought, Wait, I want her to be that careful."

Many people in Hava's family thought that visiting her birth son just days after giving him up was a bad idea, but she feared that if she didn't summon the courage right away, she never would. Some members of Ann's family also thought Hava was behaving too possessively; while Ann felt it was reasonable that Hava still felt attached, others didn't like that Hava spoke of Jonathan as "my son," and a year later, addressed a birthday letter to "our baby." Looking at the letter now -- "I actually underlined 'our'!" -- Hava said she could see how this would be misinterpreted. At the time, to her, it represented real emotional progress. "I had gotten away from saying 'mine, mine, mine.' I meant it in a positive way." In the letter, she told Jonathan, "You will always be my precious little boy."

And she did still think of him as her boy. She continued to lactate for months, and while she didn't breast-feed him, she liked that "here's something that technically I could do that Ann can't." She felt enormous jealousy of Ann and all mothers. She couldn't stand to go to the mall and see women buying baby clothes. With each successive visit, it became clearer that Jonathan was Ann Goldfarb's child. When he was 2, Hava tried to fix him lunch, but she didn't cut the grapefruit the way he liked it. "He had a meltdown; he lost it, he said, 'That's not the way Mommy does it.' I panicked. I knew this is natural, but my reaction was partly angry, like, Stop being a brat; appreciate what I gave you. I felt guilty, like: What's wrong with me? What kind of mother am I that I don't know? Then it's like: Where's Ann? She has to deal with this."

Another time, Hava was spending the night at the Goldfarbs' and woke to hear Jonathan crying out from a nightmare. She brought him something to drink, and "when he opened his eyes and saw me, and not Ann, he threw a fit." The incident upset her so much that she slept a lot for the rest of the visit, avoiding everybody, and talked about it later with a therapist.

Often, when Hava would return home from Virginia, she would spend days in bed unable to function.

On this most recent visit, though, Jonathan warmed up quickly and seemed taken to the point of infatuation with Hava, who is a very fun visitor, full of energy and verve and stories. "Sit here!" he commanded at their first dinner, motioning for Hava to sit in Ann's seat, and instructing Ann to sit on the other side. The next morning he told her, confidentially, "Daniel says he likes Mom best, and I say I like Dad best, but really, my favorite is you because you bring me toys." Later he came to her after falling on the floor during a scuffle with Daniel. "I love how he comes to me," said Hava, to Ann. "Mom has to deal with this on a daily basis. She's probably going to be like, 'You're fine; go play.' I know that if he fell down and were seriously hurt, he would go to her."

Much of the time the two women worked together; the second day, the deal was that if the boys ate a good lunch, they could each have four of the Gummi Bears they had bought for Hava. Daniel picked out four bears, and Jonathan, sitting in Hava's lap, announced that he wanted five.

"You can have four," Ann said.

"I don't like having four; I want five," tried Jonathan winningly.

"You have three," Ann said. "Take one more, and we'll pretend it's five."

"No," Jonathan said.

"How about zero more?" asked Hava, teasing him.

"How about negative one?" Ann asked.

"I want five!" Jonathan persisted. But Hava held fast, and Ann held fast, and under this maternal double-teaming, he grudgingly accepted the limit they had set.

And that -- Hava thinks -- is the great advantage of maintaining contact. Because he knows her, and because she knows Ann and Larry, she believes Jonathan will never be able to play the "I'm adopted" card. He will never be able to fantasize that Hava is some ideal, better mother, or to play one woman against the other. The other advantage is that she gets to see how well he is doing. "I love the way he sings while he plays; that's the sign of a happy child," she said, listening to Jonathan puttering in the hall. The Goldfarbs are easygoing, deeply attentive parents who can be firm when necessary. When they began to feel that television was overstimulating the boys, the TV set became "broken" and stayed that way. "Why don't other parents think of that?" says Hava, who can't recall a parenting decision they've made that she has disagreed with.

DURING HAVA'S VISIT, Bev, who is the mother of Melissa -- that is, Daniel's birth grandmother -- called to chat with Ann. It's almost necessary to get a scorecard to keep track of who is who in the Goldfarb household. Around the house are photos labeled "Hava and G'ma Gail," and "D's birth mom Melissa" and "D's birthdad Brad." There is one, titled "Moms," that shows Ann with Hava and Melissa and Daniel and Jonathan.

It has, however, been easier bringing some people into the fold than others. When the Goldfarbs adopted Daniel, his paternal grandmother, who asked to be identified as Del, was extremely angry at her son Brad for not trying to keep and raise Daniel. (In a separate interview, Brad said that this was difficult for him as well, but that he was very young, still in school and daunted by the idea of a custody battle.) Del told Ann she didn't understand open adoption and wasn't sure how to interact. "I wasn't comfortable talking to them at first," says Del, who took time to come to terms with her loss. Even now, she says, she feels that Daniel is not as close to her as her other grandchildren are. "I want to hug and kiss him, and he's not comfortable with that. I don't think we have enough time to bond with him." She believes she has to be careful not to offend the Goldfarbs: "It's been a tricky situation. I want what's best for my grandson, but it's hard finding the right words to say." Del was disappointed when she invited Daniel to a family event at Disney World, but he wasn't ready to leave home and travel with her. "But it's still better than not having anything," she says.

The biggest stumbling block is Bruce, Jonathan's birth father, who wants nothing to do with open adoption. In this, he is unlike Brad, a free spirit and world traveler who sends cheery e-mails from places like Central America. "I have never been a child person," Bruce said. "They confuse me." To see Jonathan is to be reminded of his own inability to embrace fatherhood, and he regards this as a personal failure. "It's not something I'm proud of, and not something I really like to have to deal with on a daily basis." And though he thinks Ann and Larry are great parents, he also thinks he would be constantly second-guessing them. When he heard they gave Jonathan soy-based formula, he worried that this posed a risk of too much estrogen. "I would be wondering about their decisions; it would just drive me nuts," he says. He does feel pressured to come into the fold and, at Hava's urging, sometimes sends a gift card. He says that if Jonathan wants to meet him at 16, that's okay, but until then, "I don't see that any involvement from me is good." Bruce also wonders if contact is really so good for Hava. "She gets pretty wrecked up every time she comes back."

All of which has raised a new question: Should the Goldfarbs talk about Bruce in front of Jonathan? They like to make sure the boys understand who is who, and at one point during Hava's visit, Ann asked Jonathan if he knew who Bruce is. Jonathan asked, in a whisper, if Bruce is his father, and she said: "Bruce is your birth father, like Brad is Daniel's." Hava sometimes talks about her conflicts with Bruce, but they're thinking this needs to stop.

Meanwhile, Hava and Bruce disagree about what to say when they go out and are asked if they have children. Bruce will say no; Hava will say yes. "He'll look at me and say: 'You have to face the facts. You're not a mother.' I'll be like, 'I may not be a mother, but I do have a child,'" says Hava, who is not sure whether she will have another child someday.

"HOW MANY OF YOU THINK YOU WOULD LIKE AN OPEN ADOPTION?" asks Susan Ogden, a counselor at the D.C. area agency Adoptions Together. Ogden is standing in a Silver Spring conference room, talking to 15 prospective adoptive parents. She told them about her own domestic adoption in which her family sees the birth mother once a year or so. Ogden tells the group that she likes the fact that if her daughter ever asks the "$25,000 question -- Why did my birth mother give me away? -- I'll say, 'Why don't you call her up and ask her?'" So far, her daughter, now in her middle teens, has never asked. Ogden tells the group, "You can see the power of adoption when you have open adoption. You are the parent your child is attached to. You are the person your child turns to."

After she asks the group what they think of maintaining contact with a birth mother, there is silence. "The whole concept seems very recent," says one man, finally. "I think of adoption as closed -- they can't find out who you are. Is this recent?"

It is -- so recent that many adoptions are closed even now. While some parents prefer not having contact with a birth mother, the reverse can also be true. "Things haven't changed as much as you might think; not all birth mothers want to be tethered to these people for life," says D.C. adoption attorney Mark McDermott. And there are no studies proving that one type of adoption is better than another. By and large, all adopted children do well, reminds Harold Grotevant of the University of Minnesota, who with colleagues has conducted the longest-running U.S. study of adopted children, which began in the 1980s. "We did not find that open adoptions are giving a huge advantage in terms of adjustment outcomes," says Grotevant, meaning that most adopted children have a healthy sense of well-being and that one group does not suffer from mental health issues more than the other.

The children in open adoptions, he says, are very clear on who their parents are. They also tend to be more satisfied with the level of contact with their birth mothers than children who have none; no child in his study has ever expressed the desire for less contact. He has also found that parents in open adoptions are less likely to be afraid of the birth mother, and the children less likely to fantasize about her. And notably he has found that -- far from gravitating toward a birth mother in adolescence -- the adoptive child can veer in the other direction. "The piece that was a little surprising," he says, is that many adoptive parents assume a teenager will take on some responsibility for staying in touch with the birth mother, but sometimes he or she doesn't, and contact falters.

And in open adoption, he emphasizes, "what's really happening is that the boundaries of family are expanding, and part of how all this is going to play out for the child depends on how well the adults are able to forge relationships."

Clearly, sorting this out is challenging for many parents. "I wasn't prepared for how attached she was to her child," says one adoptive mother who joined the birth mother in the hospital, and who said, afterward, that she needed six months before another visit.

"Early in our daughter's life, I was sort of worried, not that the birth mother was going to take her back, but feeling like -- Am I this baby's mom? Am I entitled to parent this child?" says another mother, who has settled now into a comfortable twice-a-year visit. "I wanted to see [the birth mother] all the time," says another adoptive mother, but the birth mother did not share this desire.

Some parents, however, promise contact and then renege, and because of this, the Donaldson Institute issued a report saying that birth mothers who voluntarily relinquish infants deserve legally enforceable post-adoption contact agreements. Thirteen states have passed such laws; though most laws allow for some renegotiation as time passes, sanctions for noncompliance range from fines to court-ordered visits. In Maryland, birth parents can seek court-ordered visitation if adoptive parents renege on the agreement (and vice versa; adoptive parents can also compel compliance). Birth parents cannot reclaim the baby.

Grotevant is not convinced that such laws are a good idea: "I get nervous about written contact agreements," he says. "People are developing their relationships, and you don't necessarily know at the beginning where it's going to head . . . There's no guarantee things are going to fall into place."

MELISSA MCCLENDON, DANIEL'S BIRTH MOTHER, is proof of how unpredictable the future can be. Despite her relatively easy beginning with the Goldfarbs, Melissa has found it harder than Hava to maintain contact. After Daniel was born, she was unprepared for how excruciating it was to let him go. "He was so tiny, and he looked just like me. He was so cute. They gave him to me, and we went back to my room, and he was just the most beautiful thing you have ever seen," said Melissa, who is petite, soft-spoken and strong-willed, and who found that the six months after the adoption were a terrible fog of guilt and sadness. She could not bring herself to visit Daniel, though the Goldfarbs called and offered. "I think if I had waited until I was ready, the time would never have come," says Melissa, whose mother, Bev, urged her to do so. She found the visit awkward; her role wasn't clear to her. "Instinctively -- the baby's crying, you want to go over there and see what's going on, but you don't know. Do I pick up the baby; do they pick up the baby? I was very glad to see him, but I was just sweating through the whole thing." Leaving, she said, "was like starting all over again." She visited every couple of months, and each time was like reenacting the relinquishment.

Then the Goldfarbs told her they were moving to the East Coast. Nobody could help it; there were entirely valid reasons. "We felt terrible," Ann says. "We thought Melissa was going to be really angry."

In fact, Melissa was; she just didn't air it. "I was very angry, but of course I didn't say it to them. They moved to better themselves and better provide for the family, and that's not something you can argue with," says Melissa, who continues to experience bouts of anger and "get all irritated" by some of the Goldfarbs' parenting decisions. For example, when Daniel, an August baby, was officially ready to start elementary school, the Goldfarbs decided to delay his entry by a year so he wouldn't be one of the youngest children in his class. Melissa privately held the opposite opinion, and wished, without telling them, that Daniel could go ahead. "I wanted him to go through everything just like a normal person," she says.

While Melissa says that, overall, Ann and Larry are "doing a wonderful job," visits have never gotten easier for her. She has flown to Virginia several times, always bringing someone -- her mother, a friend -- for support. Once, she spent a day with Daniel at the Smithsonian, and on the way home, he called her his girlfriend, and, "I was just like, Darn it; he doesn't even know who I am."

Now, more than a year has passed since Melissa last visited. "This was a hard year for me," said Melissa, who now works for a mortgage brokerage in San Jose. A number of her cousins had babies, and she still sometimes feels regret, as well as "moments of sadness" in which she fears seeing Daniel and leaving him again, but she also tells herself that "it's important to maintain a relationship." She keeps a photo of Daniel on her desk. She thinks she will not have more children, because it would be "a smack in the face to Daniel" to know he was relinquished and another child wasn't.

"I don't have any day when it's easy or I'm completely okay with my decision," Melissa says. On Mother's Day, Ann Goldfarb has the children make something for each of the mothers and grandmothers. Even so, "Mother's Day -- it's horrible," Melissa says. "It's just a very, very horrible day."

"HAVA!"

"Hava!"

"Hava!"

Jonathan, this visit, calls Hava "Hava" and Ann "Mommy." But he wants them both near him. This visit, Hava will enjoy her stay more than ever; she will talk about how, for her, it has been lifesaving to visit her birth son and witness how well he is doing under the care of another woman. If she hadn't been willing to accept the happiness and anguish of every visit, and if the Goldfarbs had not been so supportive, "I would have just self-destructed. I would have just punished myself for the rest of my life. I had my own issues to begin with, and a lot of them were self-destructive behaviors, and I can only imagine that I would have used it as an excuse to do even more." The Goldfarbs agree; everybody is impressed by how Hava has pulled herself together: how with the encouragement of Jonathan's adoptive family, she graduated from college and started thinking about the future.

During this stay, in fact, Hava will speculate on whether it might make sense to move to Washington for law school. Afterward, Ann Goldfarb will consider whether this might be a little much. "I don't want to become her life," Ann says. "I don't want her really dependent on us, because that's not good for anyone. She's made so much progress." She adds, "What I want for her and Melissa is: I want them to be happy."

In which case, there will be other issues to confront and resolve. If Hava and Melissa do have other children, which Ann hopes they will, she wonders if it will be hard to explain to the boys why the women relinquished them but not the later siblings. She wonders if it will become an issue that Jonathan doesn't have a relationship with his birth father, and Daniel does. She worries, sometimes, that birth relatives don't always treat both boys equally. She doesn't worry that they will be dazzled by Hava's misadventures. "If they say, 'Tell me again what you did, Hava,' I'll be like, 'And tell them the moral of the story.'"

For her part, Hava knows Jonathan feels loved by her. At one point, he came to her when he had a stomachache and tried to show her how bad it was by measuring with two fingers. "It's this long," he said.

Hava responded by sympathizing and asking, "Do I love you this much?" She put her hands close together. "Or this much?" she asked, opening them further. "Or this much?" she asked, opening them wide.

"This much," said Jonathan, opening his arms wide, too. He smiled at her, and then gravitated back toward Ann, who was back in the kitchen, cleaning.

And Hava has come to accept that that is where he will always gravitate -- back to Ann, his mother. "It's funny -- a lot of people say to me: You've got your life together now. You're in school now. You can take him back! And I'm like -- no."

For one thing, she can't take him back. Legally, he is not hers to take. For another, Hava says, Jonathan is with his rightful family. And that's how she sees him, now: not as "hers," anymore, but as a member of an indivisible family unit. "I don't think of him," she concludes, "without thinking of them."

Liza Mundy is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at mundyl@washpost.com and will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.