Adoptive Parent's Perspective

My youngest daughter, Bunny, is from Guatemala.  We adopted her when she was 7 ½ months old, and she is now a spry and sprightly six year old.  While we were in the process of adopting Bunny, I was in my final year of law school.  By the third year, my classes were smaller and more intimate, allowing for a certain camaraderie amongst the class knowing we were actually going to graduate. At the time, we were receiving updated documents and pictures of Bunny, and my classmates were very interested in the process.  Partly, they were interested because in my Children and the Law class, I had written a 40-page research paper and had given a presentation on international adoption. In a Guatemalan adoption… [more]

Children are not like produce.  You can’t stand in the grocery store, looking through the bin of bananas, trying to pick the perfect bunch, moving the bananas to the side that are too brown or too green.  With children, you get…what you get. With both my daughters, I never chose the child that would be mine.  Elle’s first picture came in a FedEx package and Bunny’s first picture was delivered by email.  Whether they would be intelligent, challenged, or beautiful didn’t matter because they were my children. Bunny was adopted from Guatemala, and we received our referral when she was 10 days old.  Over the next months, we received a monthly report from our adoption agency, with updated pictures and medical records.  When she… [more]

Mornings in our house are crazy and chaotic, no different than most households with school age children.  I have to drag myself out of bed in the pre-dawn morning, because Elle and Bunny have to be at the end of our lane at 6:50a for the school bus.  Beds need to be made, breakfast eaten, teeth brushed, and school assignments gathered. What proceeds after my feet touch the floor, is torture.  Elle’s alarm clock goes off before I wake up.  Her pre-teen effort to have perfect hair, styled outfits, and a touch of makeup results in an earlier start time.  Elle is like me in her ability to roll out of bed and function in the morning.  She never challenges me much when… [more]

I never really gave a lot of thought to my toys when I was a child, especially my dolls.  I had a Giggles doll.  She had a purple velvet dress, long blonde hair and blue eyes.  Just like me.  The various Barbies I had were also fair skinned, blonde, with blue eyes.  There were a few variations, but for the most part, they were a homogeneous group of Caucasians. When Elle arrived with her blonde hair and brown eyes, I still never gave her dolls much thought.  Actually, Elle didn't really like dolls much.  She was more of a stuffed animal person, and she carried a blanket around for years. But when Bunny arrived from Guatemala, with her dark skin, dark brown hair, and… [more]

At 10:24 AM today--exactly three years ago today, in fact--Beauty made her way into the world and my life was forever changed. I didn't know it then, of course. I actually didn't even find out anything about Beauty until we received our referral eight days later. I was journaling steadily at the time, and I hunted back to see what I had done the very day of March 14, 2007. It was a calm day, a regular day. My husband and I ran errands with Bear (then ten and half months old) in tow. We went out to dinner. We watched a movie. A regular day in March. Who knew that it would wind up becoming one of the most… [more]

It is not the "same difference". Recently, Beauty and I went out to do a bit of grocery/household shopping. We frequently go as a family of four, and this day was no exception. My husband was taking Bear to the restroom, so Beauty and I shopped about. She sat in the cart as she usually does, holding and pilfering through the coupons and my shopping list, chatting up a storm. We paused in an aisle loaded with pajamas (Beauty's weakness--she loves to obtain/receive new pajamas!) and as we were hunting through the racks, a woman stopped beside us to compliment Beauty's, well, beauty. "What big eyes she has! And such long hair with cute hair bows! Is she Mexican?" I thanked her… [more]

Beauty was born in March 2007 and spent less than forty-eight hours with her first mom, M., before entering the care of her foster mother. M. was nineteen when Beauty was born; she worked long days to help support her aging parents. She was illiterate and had just over a year (total) of formal education. Beauty's birth father, F., denied involvement with M. We do not have contact with M. or F. Beauty's foster mother, R., cared for her for the first nine months of her life. (We do have contact with her, however.) Like most international adoptions, ours is a closed adoption with a distance of many miles separating our families. While we most definitely plan to visit Guatemala… [more]

One of my favorite sites regarding Guatemalan adoptions is Guatadopt. Prior to adopting Beauty, this was my go-to site; the CNN of the Guatemala adoptive world. I checked it daily, and while I haven’t continued that trend with the same fervor since Beauty came home, I do check in several times a week. In light of the start of Three Days, Three Daughters: An International Hunger Strike tomorrow, I read this article with great interest. The comments on said article were quite thought-provoking in their own right. In essence, they really got me thinking about the binary opposition of the win/lose concept. In regard to these girls stolen from their mothers and adopted out of the country, is it possible for… [more]

I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday wondering why it was so crowded for a Tuesday evening. Ella was home with her brother, and after I explained her absence to the disappointed cashiers I questioned the chaos in the store. That is when I discovered that Thanksgiving is next week. Next week? Where has time gone this month? It is already the middle of Adoption Awareness Month and I have not succeeded in getting anything written in our local newspaper about adoption. Not one to give up easily, I will send another email off tonight after I finish this blog. My other frustration is that Ella has been home for almost eighteen months and I still haven’t succeeded in forming a local group of… [more]

Dear Elizabeth, I’ve just finished reading and rereading your article,"Did I Steal My Daughter?” I highlighted several of your statements and readied myself to begin a systematic and hopefully forceful rebuttal to your article. But then I think “I got it.” This is not really an article about international adoption or concern about the legitimacy of your daughter’s adoption from Guatemala; this is an article about fear and insecurity - your personal fears and insecurities. Being Jewish, I can’t help but make the analogy between you and self-hating Jews. Self-hating Jews are most often very fearful, insecure people. They fear anti-Semitism and the road blocks and challenges that it brings; they fear being ostracized for being different; they fear supporting the country of Israel because it often means facing criticism and… [more]