Leslie Gould

Heartbreaking Stories

There are two heartbreaking adoption stories in the news today. Sixteen people in Vietnam are on trial for allegedly selling more than 250 babies for foreign adoption. Read the whole story.

There is still a moratorium on adoption between Vietnam and the U.S. because of this sort of thing. It’s absolutely gutting for the Vietnamese families—and for the American families too. What a horribly heavy burden to wonder if the child you adopted in good faith was stolen.

The other story is out of China where parents are coming forward, telling stories of their babies taken, sometimes by government officials. Often the parents didn’t realize what the officials were doing was illegal and felt they had no choice.

There’s a telling quote included in this article by Ina Hut, who recently resigned from the Netherlands’ largest adoption agency. She says: “In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing, because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market, and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money.”

Greed corrupts--and is especially tragic when children are involved.

How it was handled in the movie

I went and saw "The Time Traveler's Wife" with my oldest daughter on Saturday night. (Hubby and youngest daughter went to the OSU football game along with two of her uncles. Way fun.)

Anyway, I was waiting to see if "fake" and "pretend" would be included in the dialogue when the subject of adoption came up. They weren't. Instead Clare said she didn't want to adopt, she wanted to do something "normal."

"Normal" is a little better than "pretend" and "fake." But does that mean that adoption is abnormal? Hardly. I think "ordinary" would have been a better word--but then birthing a baby, although common, hardly feels "ordinary" when you're doing it.

(And I can also vouch that adopting doesn't feel "fake," "pretend," or "abnormal.")

Did you know that Brad Pitt produced the film? I thought that was interesting, being the "serial adopter" that he is (speaking of terms that I detest!).

Okay, that's probably enough of my negativity toward adoption references. I think I'll stick with the positive comments from now on.

A Cool Adoption Quote

Following is one of my favorite responses concerning adoption. (I'm trying to balance out my collection of negative quotes...)

Here it is:

"As mysterious and magical as it is to have a baby you gave birth to, I have that exact same thing with Daisy," says Ryan. "I feel like we made some agreement, long ago and far away, to meet in the way we did."
Meg Ryan, on adopting her daughter

FAKE? PRETENDING? Say what?

Here's another entry from my collection of "comments about adoption." This one is from The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the novel. The construction is amazing and so is the writing. But there is this little interaction on page 350 that jabbed me--hard. I'm still thinking "Ouch!" Yes, it’s fiction. Yes, it's a character's reaction. Still, it bugs me.

Here it is:

“Let’s adopt.” I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, months. It seems like a brilliant escape route: we will have a baby. It will be healthy. Clare will be healthy. We will be happy. It is the obvious answer.

Clare says, “But that would be fake. It would be pretending.”

(Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife, p. 350)

The primal wound

Sixty-percent of all Americans have a direct relationship with an adopted person (i.e., they are adopted, they gave a child up for adoption, they adopted, or a family member or very close friend was adopted). Adoption is about both gain and loss, something that we as Americans are understanding more and more. It is often called the primal wound and usually an adoptee, on some level, deals with the grief and ambivalence from it throughout his/her life.

Adoption was featured on Talk of the Nation last month. Many of the stories came from Relative Choices, a NY Times blog. A particularly gripping story for me—probably because the adoptee is from Vietnam—is told by Sumeia Williams.

I think about the Vietnamese children adopted in the late 1960s and early 70s quite often. I think about what adoptive parents who have adopted twenty to thirty years later have learned from their experiences. We now have the support from the Vietnamese-American community to do language classes and culture groups and Vietnamese Heritage Camp. We have Vietnamese restaurants to take our children to and Tet celebrations to attend, and we decorate our children’s rooms with hats and fans and ao dais. We know about play therapy and therapy for adolescents. We have books, magazines, and social workers as resources. We have the hope of taking our children to their birth country, to show them the city where they were born, and maybe even visit their birth mothers.

Still, we can’t meet all of our adopted children’s needs. There will always be the primal wound— the loss of a birth family, the loss of a country, the loss of a culture. (And we won’t be able to meet all of their plain-old “growing up” needs either.)

So we listen. And we love. And we're honest with them about not having all the answers.

I can’t pretend to know what that primal wound feels like, but I’ve held it. I’ve rocked it to sleep. I’ve stayed beside it long into the night.

It’s touched me, but it’s not mine. There have been many times in the last seven and a half years that I’ve wished I could take it, that I could carry it, that I could make that wound mine instead of hers. But I can’t. It’s part of her story. I only hope that I will be allowed to walk beside it as I walk beside her through the rest of my life.

Check out Relative Choices. There’s a whole collection of posts on adoption and lots and lots of comments.