My Soapbox....

I belong to several yahoo email groups... mainly Russian adoption groups. So I get daily digests of the emails. I just read one such digest, and one of the emails pissed me off. In the email, a woman was writing about her first trip to Russia to meet her referrals (a boy and a girl). She described how she accepted the referral of the little girl and turned down the referral of the boy--because he didn't seem interested in his surroundings and wasn't interactive. She got another referral of a younger boy and accepted that one. I don't know...this got me thinking. Why should we Americans get to go to another country and pick and choose which children that we want to take home. I guess, on one hand, it is better for the child not to get a mother that is not capable of handling any problems that he may have and is not capable of loving him for who he is. But, then again---what if he doesn't really have any problems in the first place... What if he is just incredibly shy or just not open to strangers, what if he just wasn't feeling good during her visit... Maybe he just lost his one chance at having a family, because some foreign woman decided that she didn't like the way he was acting.

I start to think about Little A- she never made meaningful eye contact until she was about one year old--she was not very interested in interacting with other people until she was about a year old, she still acts a bit standoffish at times, and she can be extremely moody. What if she had been an orphan in Russia. What if some American had gone over there and met her--would she have been picked... Not if that American was going over there expecting to find the "perfect" child. Fortunately, she was not an orphan, and fortunately she was born to a Mother who could accept and love her for who she is.... and, by the way, although she is still a bit quirky at times, she is just fine! I just don't think that I agree with the philosophy that we, as adoptive parents, should be allowed to pick and choose the child we adopt because of looks or personality, etc. We don't get to choose the children we give birth to... I think that if a person makes the decision to adopt a child from a country that institutionalizes children, they should be aware that they may have issues ---if they don't think that they can handle a child with issues, then they should not adopt at all.

Anyway, that is my soapbox for today. I hope that that little boy finds a loving home someday. I have seen first hand what happens to the children who don't... and I would not wish that on anyone.