Melissa Faye Greene was so repulsed by her newly adopted son
that she desperately, if only theoretically, considered fleeing
her family. Sheila Stainback spent the first year of life with
Charles wondering why her sisters weren't embracing him as readily
as she embraced their kids. And Jacquelyn Mitchard just wishes
everyone would quit asking her which of her large brood are
"hers."
These authors and 17 others share gripping, rarely told tales of life as adoptive parents in a new anthology called A Love Like No Other. It's a book that co-editors Jill Smolowe and Pam Kruger say is designed to throw off the shroud of secrecy that envelopes many such parents and their challenges.
"We wanted to open up a discussion among adoptive parents where people will feel more comfortable to deal with issues like divorce, race and mental illness," says Smolowe, a People magazine associate editor who writes in the book about her Chinese-born daughter's ethnic confusion. "How many parents are willing to say, 'I didn't bond with my kid the second I held him?' But that happens."
The duo set out in 2003 to find an array of writers, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and an Emmy award, who are also adoptive parents with intriguing personal tales.
They settled on a diverse group that include international, interracial and intra-familial adopters.
With about 1.6 million adopted children living in the USA and about 125,000 children adopted each year, Kruger and Smolowe believed such a book would resonate.
"It seemed like the moment was right for this because adoption is so much more accepted and visible now," says Kruger, a contributing editor at Child magazine whose essay in the book tells of her decision to hire an investigator to find her Kazakh daughter's birth family. "It's like, 'OK, we can now talk honestly and openly about what the challenges are. We don't necessarily have to blend in and say we're just like everybody else.' "
Among the stories:
* Chicago Tribune writer Bonnie Miller Rubin, a Pulitzer winner,
describes the ordeal of raising a mentally ill daughter from
Chile who is now institutionalized.
* New York Times real estate columnist Antoinette Martin chronicles
how her divorce and her ex-husband's dating life affected their
two adopted children.
* Novelist Jennifer Levin explains why her own outcast status
as a lesbian enabled her to identify with Cambodian-born sons
with special physical needs.
* Discover magazine editor at large Joe Treen wisecracks about
his being dragged into adoption and parenthood by Smolowe, his
wife.
To be sure, some of this is challenging material.
Greene's essay on her early loathing of her son - there were behavior problems, but mostly she just felt she had made a terrible mistake - ends happily with her succumbing to her boy's charm and adoration of her. But, Greene says, she hoped it also shed light on post-adoption panic, a little-discussed trauma experienced in shame by many.
"There's so much fluffy, heartwarming stuff out there about adoption, especially when you're first considering it," says Greene, a two-time National Book Award finalist from Atlanta. "For a lot of thoughtful people, that flowery stuff is more off-putting than alluring."
Though both editors called Greene brave for writing her piece, the author says her main concern is how her son will view the essay when he's old enough to read it. And, in fact, this sort of deeply personal writing did have other authors worried about family reactions, which is why Stainback, a former TV anchor in New York and Emmy winner, changed the names of some of her sisters when the book was in galleys.
"I didn't want them to be embarrassed by their evolution," Stainback says. "I didn't want their friends to view this as 'Oh, they're so cold and unloving.' The sister who was most outwardly questioning of my decision to adopt now has a picture of Charles in the most prominent place in her house."
The co-editors say they've braced for a backlash from the book because some in the adoption community oppose airing of what could be seen as dirty laundry.
Reviewers have widely praised the book, but one, Marybeth Lambe of Adoptive Families magazine, says she empathizes with some adoptive parents who might shudder at the essays that cast light on difficult issues.
"I can understand those who feel that the public is already skewed against adoption by so much of what they read in the media, and now they're going to be skewed again into not considering adoption," says Lambe, a family-practice physician in Issaquah, Wash., who has four adopted children of her own. "But I think the book is really important in the sense that these are not sugarcoated tales and the emotions are real. The people who wrote were completely honest about the joy and the heartache. "
"Inevitably, anything you write that's not sunshine and roses will upset some people's sensitivities," says Adam Pertman, one of the book's essayists as well as executive director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, a Boston-based think tank. "However, if adoption is finally to get on a level playing field as a normal, natural way of forming a family, we have to look at it in all its dimensions and revel in the great stuff and talk about the not-so-great stuff. That gets a national conversation going."
