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I have been uncharacteristically quiet about the Anita Tedaldi's story. Josh sent me the article a few days ago and I got almost to the bottom before closing it and saying, "I can't touch this one." Which wasn't the case with the Savages' wrong embryo transfer or the Alex Kuczynski surrogacy article. And perhaps it is because I simply don't know how to talk about it despite my own background and experience with adoption. Her situation is so far outside my reality and seemingly in such a grey area.
There are those who don't believe that it falls inside grey lines, and if we boil it down to its most basic facts, it doesn't. A mother asks for her child to receive a different placement or as MSNBC so sensitively and delicately puts it, "she gave up her adopted son." The term "gave up"--quitting--has such negative connotations, that yes, based on those words alone, you could enter a black-and-white space of understanding, where good parents remain committed to their children and bad parents quit and all is then right in our world because we know which side of the line we fall.
But if you look at the entire situation, it becomes greyer and greyer. We have a woman who states that she always knew she wanted to adopt, though doesn't actually say why. Why adoption? She states in the piece that she "wanted to adopt for a long time, even before I met my husband or had my five biological daughters. I’ve always wanted a large family, like the one I grew up with in Italy, and I love the chaos and liveliness of many kids." But since we can only react to what is written and not what is known only in the author's mind, I don't get a sense of what about adoption appealed to her. Prior to adopting her son, she already had the large family with five daughters. And she seemed to be able to create the family she wanted without utilizing adoption, so first and foremost, I would need to know more about what brought Tedaldi towards adoption before I can begin to understand what brought Tedaldi away from adoption.
She states that she did research, and like any parent knows, there is only so much preparation you can do before you are thrown into the experience. It is like learning how to swim on dry land. You may feel confident that you know the strokes, know how to stay afloat, but it is a completely different experience once you are in the water. Therefore, the argument that she had a rose-tinted view of adoption doesn't hold, another step taking us away from black-and-white indignation and into a softer, greyer understanding that despite how much we might prepare ourselves for something, we still may find ourselves drowning once we place our ideas into action. She states she did research, worked with social workers and a therapist, all sound and thoughtful steps.
We enter an even greyer area when we consider those professionals who were involved in the placement. Tedaldi states that her husband was deployed for most of the early months of the placement and that she already had five children. Some might question whether social workers were doing diligence and placing the child in a family equipped to help a special needs toddler. Whether she was given the education and support necessary to make the placement a success.
And greyer still, Tedaldi admits that the tipping point was her own attachment issues. Would we judge her as harshly if she removed herself from the family situation rather than removing the child? It is still the same effect--a child without his/her parent--but seen through a different lens. She admits that while the child had problems that were difficult to grapple with, in the end, it was her own foibles that brought her to terminate the adoption.
Laina wrote about the situation from the adoptee's perspective; specifically an adoptee who was transracially adopted. O Solo Mama wrote about it from the idea of the public confessional, stating, "Lots of people are now claiming she did the best she could. But hold on: do such stories really illuminate the darker side of adoption, as NYT editor Lisa Belkin claims they do, or do they just draw attention to Tedaldi?"
