How has international adoption changed your biological children?

Lily, who was seven when we brought home four-year-old Jesse from Bulgaria in 1999, was really thrown by the adoption.  She did NOT, after all, it turned out, want to be displaced as the youngest child. She’d gone to Bulgaria with us to get him; but, soon after returning home, she announced that she was finished with him and I believe she may even have suggested one morning that we put him in the garbage can.

I was thrown by the adoption, too, to the extent that I fell into what (I later learned) is called "post-adoption depression."  (You can read my article entitled "Post-Adoption Panic."  The adoption of an older post-institutionalized child so little resembled, to me, the joyous days of bringing home our first four children from the hospital, that I found myself on utterly strange terrain.  I couldn’t begin to imagine what I was going to do with the child for the next 18 or 20 years.

I panicked because I’d thought that adopting the little fellow would prolong the joy of family life;  yet, in the first weeks home, Jesse was so demanding, so frightened and clingy and difficult, that I concluded that, rather than expand the fun of rearing my children, I’d actually never get to spend a minute alone with any of my children again.

I sometimes recognize – in new adoptive mothers’ voices – the wavering sound of  utter terror and regret.  Whenever possible, I reach out to moms who find themselves in this precarious and desperate place (a place that sometimes moves families to disrupt an adoption);  typically, if the match is basically a sound one, the parents can move past this agony towards family happiness.

Which is where we are now.

Lily, once she recovered, was stronger.  She’d been "de-throned," for sure, but better to be de-throned at seven than at twenty-seven.  She was the driving force behind our next adoption, of five-year-old Helen from Ethiopia, and she fell in love with Helen the first day;  the two girls are as close as sisters could possibly be.  Several nights a week, they close Lily’s door, turn on music, dance, do each other’s hair, and paint their nails.  Fourth-grade Helen picks out ninth-grade Lily’s clothes for the next day, by trying them on and modeling them herself, while putting dibs on the clothes she hopes to inherit eventually.

Our older three children – Molly, Seth, Lee -- all have spent time in Ethiopia, volunteering at the orphanages.  Lee spent four months in Addis Ababa last year, learned to speak Amharic, and organized an orphanage soccer league with uniforms, fields, coaches, and a schedule.  It was a marvelous thing for the children.  A team of orphaned HIV-positive girls was undefeated for a time, leading to wild celebrations and much banging on drums and tables upon every return to the orphanage.  Lee began calling home last spring to beg us to adopt brothers Daniel and Yosef;  "they’re such great kids," he’d say;  "they’d be perfect for our family."  So my husband and I said yes.

Then the younger kids started saying, "Wait a minute, wait a minute.  We've been asking you for YEARS if we could have a ferret for a pet, and you always say, 'No!  it's too much responsibility!'  Now LEE calls from ETHIOPIA and asks if we can have two middle-school-age brothers and you say YES??"

"You're right," I said.  "That's ridiculous."

"So," demanded the younger children.  "MAY we have a ferret??"

"No," I said.  "It's too much responsibility."

How do you think being a mother/parent affects your writing – in any way – whether style, form, topic, etc.?

MFG: I’ve always said that motherhood definitely keeps things in perspective. On the day my first book, Praying for Sheetrock, was named to the list of the 100 greatest works of English language journalism, including print, photography, television and radio broadcast, I still faced a pile of laundry in the basement.  When I had to solicit blurbs for Sheetrock—the somewhat humiliating experience of asking established writers to pen a few lines of glorious praise on behalf of your book—it was an up-and-down experience of frequent refusals.  One day in Atlanta, I was driving nine-year-old Molly and her Brownie troop home from a meeting;  we got stuck in a huge traffic jam;  in the distance we saw a man working his way down the row of stopped cars, offering church brochures while soliciting contributions in a plastic bucket.  "What’s that man doing?" asked one of the Brownies;  and, before I could explain, I heard my daughter Molly knowingly say, "Oh!  He must be soliciting blurbs for his book."

With 9 children, do you still have any time to read? If so, do you mind sharing with us what you’re reading now?

MFG: Of course!  Reading is life!  There’s a book in my purse, a book in my car, and a mountain of books tumbling off my night-table.  I read dark, I read light.  I just finished Hubris:  The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, an enlightening and devastating read; and I’m in a sort of class with friends reading modern Hebrew literature, taught by Emory University professor Shalom Goldman; we’re reading the devastating critiques of the West Bank settlements written by Israeli novelist David Grossman.

I also will read any adoption memoir ever written—I’m somehow endlessly curious about how families are built.  In this mood, I read Peggy Orenstein’s new NON-adoption memoir—really the opposite of an adoption memoir—called Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become A Mother.  She’s winningly self-lacerating and funny, observant and humane.  She would have made such a great adoptive mother!

Your earlier books were about events in the past – the Atlanta Temple bombing, racism and civil rights in rural Georgia, the 1958 Springhill mining disaster in Nova Scotia. Are there threads that run through these and your current book There is No Me Without You for you? If so, what are they?

MFG: I was an eyewitness to events described in Praying for Sheetrock and There Is No Me Without You.  In neither case did the intent to write a book lure me to those worlds. I was already there.

The Temple Bombing (1996), describes the Southern Jewish milieu into which I was born and the historic criminal case to which I had a connection. (My husband Don Samuel is a criminal defense attorney; his law partner, Edward T. M. Garland, is the son of the late great flamboyant Southern defense attorney Reuben Garland, who defended the white supremacist on trial for the 1958 bombing.)

Last Man Out (2003) is about a Nova Scotia coal mine disaster and incredible rescue, and the later humiliation of the hero of the underground (a black man) by the State of Georgia, was a stretch.

But in every case I am drawn to the same story: the intuitive search for justice by human beings at the margins. The new book, There is No Me Without You, is a snapshot of a world in which corporate patent rights and profit-making are elevated above human rights to health and to life.

Yet here again, as in McIntosh County in the 1970s, Atlanta in the 1950s, and a Nova Scotia underground in the 1950s, there are people acting against the force of law and social custom and saying, in effect, "We, too, deserve to live."

There is No Me Without You reads like a novel. You draw the reader in from the beginning curious to find out how you came to sit in a living room in Addis Ababa. You take pretty dry subjects, even scary subjects, like big pharmaceutical companies, global politics, history of disease, and fill them with emotion. What do you think is important to making these subjects real and alive?

MFG: I hope that my readers will be struck with the feeling, "Oh my God, these parents love their children every bit as much as I love mine;  these children are heartbroken at being orphaned, just as my precious children would be."  The publication of mind-boggling statistics about the African AIDS crisis has a distancing effect on the public;  we can’t grasp those numbers, so we can’t really grasp the hope and grief inherent in each numeral on a chart.

And I want my readers to feel up to the challenge of grasping the big picture, too.  Believe me, I’m no epidemiologist, and far from an economist or development expert.  If I can master these fields to some extent, you can, too; so I want to take you with me, because the injustice and hurt hides in the details.