Kids
It's almost unbearable to have JonBenet in the news again, though if that nut in Thailand is guilty then I have a lot of private retracting to do; I just never could make sense of parents who'd doll up their adorable like a sex kitten. Had to be a dysfunction, I thought: had to be a sickness. Then Patsy dies with cancer--ovarian cancer, of all cancers--and it strikes me as a kind of horrible karma: her ovaries, killing her. The kind of thing you don't want to even hear about, just in case the karma leaps over into your own messiness, your own uglies.
Or: Patsy's ovaries send her to heaven so she can hold her daughter in a big blue rocker.
That child haunts me.
***
Friends of ours are homestudy-ready and looking to sign up with an agency to adopt from India. They asked my advice, and it turned out they'd short-listed to the biggest crook in the business--a horrible woman. I grimaced and told them so, carefully, and watched the wife recoil; it takes very little to hurt women who've miscarried five times--women on the dark side of the fertility window who can't imagine a fruitful life without children. They're walking wounds: you can spot them on the street. Sometimes when people ask what you think, they really only want you to be a wind at their backs.
I wished they hadn't asked me; I dread when people ask. But it's one area I can't lie about. Not even for these adorable, wonderful people--these people who are more suited to parenting than I ever could be. I didn't tell them what I really think: that nobody has any business adopting from India now--that a child's identity is not a moveable feast. I didn't tell them that. I just warned them to be careful. I told them to get online and read the local papers.
They've withdrawn from me a bit in the last few days, and I know what it means: their consuming desire for a child overwhelms their more academic desire to avoid the possibility of a dirty adoption. Better-to-act-now-and-say-you're-sorry-later school of thought. I understand it, and whatever they choose, I'll back them. Maybe I should say that to them. How can they be expected to care about whatever complexities they might uncover in five years, if that's the cost of breathing in the love of a child now? Who do I think I am?
This is why it's unfair to put the burden of cleaning up the system on adoptive families. It's so unfair--so utterly unfair.
posted by I n g e r @ Thursday, August 17, 2006
5 Comments:
oh my, i am right there regarding that little girl, who would be 16 now. all of it in the spotlight again just reawakens the ache i feel for all children-in-peril.
ack, to quote you.
then again, i am clueless about the pain adoption brings up. i have old friends that are "walking wounded." one never visits us, because it breaks her heart to be around families/children. ouch.
There are lots of false confessions, but it seems odd they'd arrest this guy in Thailand without some basis.
If neither of them did it, imagine the pain of the poor parents all these years. Unimaginable.
* * * *
What a web of sorrows is involved in international adoptions. And yet . . . there are some very successful ones.
Why don't people adopt an American kid of a different color, or slightly older, as this story suggests? Oh, right, social workers don't like it . . .
Even thinking about this makes me remember how fallen this world is.
It's true--there really are clean relinquishments and happy international placements. Problem is that you can't tell one from the other until it's too late, and you don't have to look too many dirty ones in the face to decide that somebody ought to be slamming that country's doors until they clean up their act. I won't go on; I'm a bore on this issue, I fear.
Domestic foster care adoptions should be the best solution, and the same-race matchers should be shot at dawn.
As for the Rasmey case, it is sad to think she is my nieces age. The girl who recently passed her drivers test and is the proud owner of 1991 Volvo Stationwagon. It is so sad and I really do wonder if he did it.
As far as the adoption thing it is so damn frightening to think at any point, that your child's adoption maybe illegal. At this moment in time, I wouldn't adopt from India. Kiran's k-teacher is the proud aunt of a bi-racial child born in Atlanta and has lived with his A-parents since he was 3 days old. He is cute as a button.
ME
I have the same issues with people here adopting from the agency I used. I have learned, subsequent to my adoption from India, just how unethical the agency HERE is, much less the one in India (which has been closed for several years now). Reading between the lines, I think it is a good possibility that my daughter was one of those children who was manipulated away from her family. My next big dilemna is ... do I ever let her know those suspicions of mine?
I think you were right to clue the woman in, regardless of her reaction.
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