When I was born, my Korean parents, immigrants to the United States, relinquished me for adoption. At the age of two and a half months, I was placed with a white family who lived in a small town in Oregon. This was the early 1980s, and mine was a closed adoption, which meant that growing up, I had no contact with my birth parents. I didn’t know their names or their circumstances. I didn’t know why they had chosen not to keep me. I was curious and confused about my history, but my adoptive parents couldn’t fill in the gaps, because they knew so little themselves.

When I was in my 20s, I decided to search for more information about my birth family. This required that I pay hundreds of dollars to an intermediary, who petitioned a Washington State court to unseal my adoption records. She couldn’t share my birth parents’ names or contact information with me until she found them and gained their consent. Throughout the process, which dragged on for months, I thought about how things might have been different had I grown up in an open adoption, one in which I might have known more about my birth family and perhaps retained contact with them. I wouldn’t have had to wait decades, and I wouldn’t have had to shoulder the financial cost of a search, to understand where—and whom—I came from.

Back then, it was easy for me to entertain somewhat idealistic notions about open adoption, what I presumed were its benefits and joys. But the more I have learned and experienced in the years since, the more I have come to question some of those assumptions.

It isn’t difficult to find accounts of adoption told from the perspective of adoptive parents; in recent years, adoptee narratives have also started to receive more widespread attention. But to understand open adoption, you must begin with birth mothers—and research on birth mothers can be extremely hard to come by. Lisa A. Tucker, a professor at Drexel University’s law school, told me that when she speaks with Drexel’s research librarians—looking for recent studies on, say, “birth mothers and their emotions after relinquishment”—the librarians will often come back and tell her, “There’s nothing.”

Two years ago, I began interviewing birth mothers to try to better understand what living with an open adoption can be like: what kind of work and commitment are required to maintain openness and communication over the long term, how these individual birth mothers felt about their arrangements, and what rights or options they might have if challenges were to arise. In reporting this article, I spoke with more than two dozen mothers who’d placed their children in open adoptions, as well as with adoptees, adoptive parents, adoption-agency staff, adoption attorneys, and social workers with professional or personal knowledge of adoption. From those conversations, I learned that what openness means in practice can be incredibly fluid.

The type and frequency of communication can shift. A birth or adoptive parent’s expectations or desires might not align with eventual outcomes. Open adoption does not always ensure that adoptees will be able to maintain a healthy, continuous relationship with their birth family, or that they will grow up with easy access to their personal history—nor do formal or informal openness agreements always guarantee a birth parent’s expressed desire to stay in their child’s life.