If you’re considering adoption for your baby, especially an open one, you’re probably getting tons of free advice on whether this is a good thing or not.

Most people do not understand openness. They seem to have a desire to punish the surrendering mother for her inability to parent, telling her to “move on” and forget her baby. (The standard line is something like, “If you aren’t willing to stay up nights and change diapers, you shouldn’t get to see your child. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”) The implication is that if you can't parent, you no longer have any value to your child.

Yet another typical objection to open adoption, one that you’ll probably hear more than any other, is the notion of how confusing it must be. When people want to express their own discomfort with open adoption, they generally transfer their fears onto the child, saying, “It will confuse the child.”

So, what about it? Is open adoption confusing?

Not for the child. For the adults, it is a little tricky at first, figuring out boundaries and limits. But the children seem to instinctively get it, from the beginning.

For a child, what’s confusing is hearing, “She loved you so much” while wondering why the person who supposedly loved you so much walked out of your life and never looked back. It’s confusing to hear that your birthmother is a good person and at the same time be told that you cannot see her. “If she’s so great, why do they keep her away from me? If she is shameful and hidden, isn’t there a part of me that is shameful, too?”

The truth can be complex, but is always less confusing than half-truths or lies.

Children know this.

I’ll give you an example. I once heard a 17-year-old boy speak at an adoption conference. He sat between his two mothers, birth and adoptive. Since birth he had known and loved them both. An audience member asked him, “But who is your real mother?”

The boy sighed and rolled his eyes—-it was obvious he had been asked this question far too many times, and found it idiotic. He said, in a tone that implied it ought to be obvious to anyone with eyes, “They’re BOTH real.”

Why is this so hard for people to understand? Why do they need to limit a mother to just one? Many of us receive some mothering from all kinds of women in our lives – grandmothers, aunts, stepmoms, foster moms, good friends, mentors. We accept their presence as a good thing—-after all, you can’t have too much love or too many good wishes. But when it comes to the mother role in adoption, society really wants the birthmother to crawl away in shame and never come back.

There is a saying, “If a mother can love more than one child, why can’t a child love more than one mother?” In open adoption, a child loves more than one type of mother.

Birthmothers in open adoption do not do any parenting, but they do provide an extra dose of motherly love and concern. Their presence helps adopted children know where they came from, and reassures them that they were never unwanted. And that should not be confusing.