Here is part 1.
Here is part 2.



I'm writing about the essays in the wonderful anthology of adoption writing, A Love Like No Other. It truly is a book I think that anyone who is hoping to adopt should read. It's not just a book about how wonderful adoption is - there's certainly some of that - but it's also a book about how complicated adoption is. Adoption is complicated because adoption involves people.

“Keeping It All in the Family,” by Bob Shacochis, tells the story of Bob and his wife’s adoption of his wife’s niece when she was 10. The little girl’s mother had just died and they were her chosen guardians. Since Bob and his wife were infertile, the little girl would become the daughter they couldn’t have on their own.

They also inherited Bob’s wife’s sister’s eldest daughter, who’d been adopted at birth by another family. This woman was 28, so didn’t move in with them, but they maintained connection with her after her birthmother died. They became family.

So - what do you think happened? Little girl was sad to lose her mother but soon, with the help of bonding moments and nurture and structure the little girl began to thrive with aunt and uncle?

Noooooo. Not at all. Little girl had been raised in a free-flowing, structureless, too-adult way. Her favorite aunt had now changed into her mother. Little girl is traumatized by living through her mother’s cancer. Her aunt/mother goes from childless (not by choice) to mother to a 10 year old who served as a constant reminder that she couldn’t have any children “of her own.”

Ouch.

At one point, after the girl, Samantha, has had an emotional breakdown, Bob holds her in his arms and this is what happens:

”This isn’t supposed to be my life,” she finally blurted.

No honey, I had to tell her. This is supposed to be your life. And our life, too. But even then I had begun to have my doubts about the healing power of love, a Band-Aid we kept applying to Samantha’s lacerated soul. Sometimes it would stick for weeks, sometimes less than a day. Off it would come, and we’d put it on again. Off, on. Off, on. Off.

People in the adoption community, mostly adoptive parents of non-traumatized, non-problematic (at least for now) children are fond of saying that love can conquer all. “All she needs is love,” they might say. But this essay is proof that it ain’t so. At least not all the time. You have to just do the best that you can, which may or may not be enough.