ATTN Adopted Berries and Adoptive Parents

If you were adopted as an infant or very young child, how did your parents navigate naming you. [name_m]How[/name_m] did you feel about their choices when you were younger and how do you feel about it now?

Did your adoptive parents add a name or two to a name that had already been decided by your birthmother (or birthparents)? Did your adoptive parents take away part of your birth name? Did your parents not have access to your birth certificate to know what your birth parents had named you in full, so they chose one from scratch only to find out later what you had been named before?

If you are a berry who has adopted a child, how did you navigate it? In an open adoption, were you able to collaborate with the birthparents involved before baby was born to come up with a mutually-inclusive name that went on the birth certificate right away and therefore didn’t have to change it? What hurdles and hoops did you encounter? What advice did you take into account, both from professionals and experts involved and well-meaning but perhaps misinformed bystanders?

My husband and I are planning to expand our family through (at least partially-open domestic infant) adoption in the next couple of years. Since we have a bun in the oven now, it’s hard not to think about how siblings will fit in the mix later, but also knowing that we don’t even know the woman out there whose decisions and tastes and heritage and family will matter to us then just as much as our own.

I sent you a PM.