Sustaining and Draining? Adoptive Mothers’ Enactment of Rituals in Open Adoption Relationships

• In Event: HIGH-DENSITY: Communicating in and About Families

Abstract

Adoptive families are dependent upon communication to create, sustain, and manage family relationships and identities. One way that adoptive mothers likely do so is through rituals, or the meaningful, habitualized routines, events, and actions that create meaning and identity within families. Researchers have long noted that mothers tend to initiate, organize, and sustain family rituals. This invisible kinkeeping labor is time- and emotionally-intensive. The proposed chapter examines the rituals mothers enact in open adoption relationships. Data from 129 adoptive mothers reveal the type and frequency of rituals involving birth parents in the open adoption relationships as well as the effect of ritual use on adoptive-birth family relational closeness. Analyses also illuminate the effect of maintaining rituals on the adoptive mother. The sustaining functions of rituals and the emotional labor in creating and sustaining these rituals will be discussed using a critical feminist lens that gives voice to mothers’ invisible labor.

Authors

• Colleen Colaner, U of Missouri

• Haley Kranstuber Horstman, U of Missouri

• Maria Butauski, U of Missouri