Ssssh.

Given the choice, I’d probably pick a rosy story over a true one.  I was entranced last week listening to Scott Simon, the host of Weekend Edition, read an excerpt from his book, Baby We Were Meant for Each Other, a book he’s written about the adoption of his two daughters from China.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129375629. 

It sounded a lot like my beloved daughter’s story of when she first met her own baby girl in a hotel in China.  I knew this story and I loved hearing it again. 

But it kind of pissed me off.  I wanted to send Scott Simon an email to tell him….”Honey, you have no clue.”  All of the cuddly kitten, love at first sight, and this….it took us just three days to bond.  Oy.

So today, while also watching a big storm roll in over Lake Superior, I noodled around the adoption blog world which has basically two hemispheres – the hysterically happy and the massively therapeutically-involved.  Our life with our four kids – three of them adopted from Nicaragua – falls somewhere in the middle.  Long stretches of the mundane interspersed with absolute joy and on your knees weeping.  Is this fun?  Do you want to be an adoptive parent?  I’m smiling.  It’s wonderful.  Really.  Would I kid you?

So the best thing I read today was a very long essay about adoption disruptions.  This is the oh, so hidden, and unspeakable underbelly of the adoption world.  An adoptive parent giving a child back! Oh no.  What evil, uncaring person would do that?  Well, take a look at this essay and you start to get it — how hard it is to raise terribly wounded children.

“The Myth of the Forever Family:  When Adoption Falls Apart,” Dawn Friedman, Brain,Child Magazine.http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/summer2010_friedman.asp

I love Dawn Friedman for writing this. 

Good people trying their hardest can fail.

We shouldn’t judge them.