In my last blog post, I talked about how we were glad that we used Facebook to get to know our first birth mom, but we decided not to do so with our second adoption so we could talk more freely about what was going on. Here is part 2.
Here’s another big reason we avoided Facebook: Facebook is a breeding ground for drama. We found that out the hard way. The birth father from our first adoption was completely disinterested in the baby during the pregnancy, but about a month after our little boy was born (once his mother found out), all of a sudden he started to cause a lot of drama and problems. We had become Facebook friends with a lot of the contacts from the birth mother’s home town, and we were sharing information with all of them freely until one of those friends started to use the information to cause more problems. I won’t get into what happened, but the troubles that she caused were pretty ugly, and we ultimately deleted all Facebook contacts connected to the adoption except for those that were our birth mom’s immediate family. That solved a lot of the problems.
We also asked all of our friends not to be friends with the birth mother on Facebook. Our birth mom lived on the other side of the country, so we didn’t have mutual friends. Our personal friends who were Facebook friends with the birth mom just wanted to follow our adoption situation, so we told our friends that we would prefer they get their information from us. Our goal was to have all exchanges of information either go through us or our birth mom, and after some time and effort, we seem to have succeeded in that.
We wanted to avoid that whole hornet’s nest with our second adoption, so we just didn’t make Facebook contact with our second child’s birth mom. For us, deciding whether or not to have Facebook contact would all depend on the type of relationship we have with that particular birth mom because, even with the mountain of drama that accompanied our Facebook pages with our first adoption, it has been a good way of building our relationship with her. And with our second adoption, we’re glad we didn’t do it. There’s no right or wrong answer.
