Who adopts a rejected kid?

An interesting post from The Daily Beast about difficult adoptions... the parents who have to disrupt the adoption AND the parents who step in to pick up the pieces afterward. We here at the Wood household fill both sets of shoes, interestingly enough...

Rita says that she doesn’t think she could ever put her adoptive son on a plane to another country, but the problems she has had with him make her sympathize with the woman from Tennessee who made headlines by doing just that. “I totally understand her desperation and her frustration,” she says, “because you love these kids, you do everything you can, but you have little to no support for what you're doing.”

As Sterkel points out, the families who make the difficult decision to give up an adopted child do not deserve the stigma that has come in the wake of the recent Russian controversy.

“Parents are made to feel badly and they shouldn't because we all have limits to our capabilities,” she says, “and not every parent can do the same thing. I never want to criticize a parent who has felt the need to disrupt.”

Yep. People need to have options... a way out, if necessary, or a bearable way through at the very least. Most of us can't even pull our retirement dollars to put our kid in residential treatment because we've already pulled our retirement just to pay for the meds and the mortgage. My fondest hope is that the Russian adoption debacle opens up a dialogue so that people can at least know what their options are, and that if there aren't any options, someone will step up to provide some.

And at the very least, some freedom from judgment when our troubled adopted kid ends up homeless, jobless, pregnant for the fifth time, breaking into our relatives' homes to steal money or food... these are the nightmares I live with. I promise, I did the best I could. What she becomes is up to her, and I struggle with fear about this. I don't like to take her to see family and friends because I don't want her to know the way to get there if and when she decides to ditch the meds and becomes a psychotic criminal.

[shrug] I press on. Taking it day by day, sometimes hour by hour, is the best I can muster. It's frankly miraculous that I'm even still here; my personality inclines toward the cut-and-run response, and the notion of just disappearing one day is often quite tempting. I don't, because I have two others who need me to stick around. But it's tempting nonetheless.

Such a post for a Mother's Day! We celebrated the big M-D by going out for lunch on Friday, so I don't feel neglected. I did, however, do dishes on Mother's Day. They needed to be done, and nobody wanted to step up, so I did them, and it will come in handy from time to time when I need to leverage some guilt. heh