Image via Joanne Bamberger/All rights reserved

Last time I checked I thought that using candidates’ children as targets of attack was pretty much off limits, especially after the 2000 presidential campaign when supporters of George W. Bush engaged in “push polling” to suggesting that John McCain’s daughter, Bridget, who was adopted from Bangladesh, was actually an African-American child he had fathered out of wedlock. The candidates themselves pretty much stick the straight and narrow when it comes to leaving young children out of the ugly world of national campaigns. But some Ron Paul supporters apparently didn’t get that memo.

Jon Huntsman’s two youngest daughters — 12-year-old Gracie who was adopted from China and five-year-old Asha, who was born in India — are the inadvertent stars of a new negative ad produced by some group calling themselves “NHLiberty4Paul,” asking in their “Manchurian Candidate” ad, as if its a bad thing, “China Jon’s Daughters: Even Adopted?”

In the 2000 presidential race, McCain tried to ignore the attacks, hoping they’d go away. Huntsman is taking the opposite approach, saying to reporters that he could only comment on how stupid it is to suggest there was something sinister or Manchurian Candidate-like in his family’s decision to adopt.

As a mom by international adoption myself, I am constantly battling what seems to be a common view in our society — that there’s something wrong with your family if you’ve got a child that you didn’t create the old-fashioned way.  But the larger question for me that’s raised by this negative campaign ad, is this — when will our society stop viewing families formed by adoption as something that’s “other.” News reports dealing with families generally don’t make a point of commenting about whether children are biological members of their families. So why do so many people feel the need to point out if adoption was involved? Are they scared? Nervous? Uncomfortable? I think it’s a combination of all those things, but most of all it’s just wrong.

As adults, we can handle it when an inappropriate remark is made about how our families came to be. But our kids can’t. Huntsman is doing a great job making both the press, and whoever this “NHLiberty4Paul” is, back away. But their actions and insinuations are going to linger with Huntman’s daughters — especially his twelve-year-old — forever.

I know because we’ve been there as a family. Obviously no one has ever suggested my husband and I were Communists for adopting our daughter from China. But every comment our daughter ever reads or hears that is in anyway negative, hurtful or insensitive about the fact that she came to us through adoption is like having a rug pulled out from under her sometimes shaky sense of self and where she belongs in this world.

So Ron Paul fans, you need to step off this one.  Attack Huntsman’s policies all you want.  But leave his children out of it.

1. The Pill. It’s the 50th anniversary of this amazing medical feat and, in many ways, my life as it is today is a direct result of that miracle.  Yes, I think The Pill was a miracle.  For me, it wasn’t about being a wild teen or crazy college co-ed who was sowing wild oats and didn’t want to be bothered with responsibility.  Ask anyone who knew me in my teen years and they would roll on the floor laughing (their A’s off) at the thought that my name would be used in a sentence with either the word “wild” or “crazy.”  Unless I was talking about Steve Martin.  But I digress.

The word “dating” didn’t get a lot of use when it came to describing my life then, either.  But I did start dating in college and, though I don’t know how I’m ever going to explain this to PunditGirl, I got married the first time when I was 19.  Not a good choice for many reasons.  But I am thankful every day that in that short, two-year marriage I did not get pregnant.  If I’d had a baby at that point in my life, I can only imagine how much harder it would have been to get out of a truly bad situation and what that would have meant for my life — and my child’s life going forward.

2. Roe v. Wade.  I came of age in the era just after the Supreme Court ruled that women had a Constitutional right  to have an abortion.  Don’t think that I wasn’t also grateful for that knowledge every day during my first marriage, even when I was on The Pill, that if I had still gotten pregnant (hey, no birth control works 100 percent of the time), that I had the right not to bring a child into the world when I was in the midst of an abusive relationship.  Today, as a woman of a certain age (as I was called recently on Twitter!) looking back, I’m not sure if I ever would have exercised my right to end a pregnancy, but I certainly felt much more in control of my destiny knowing that I had that right.

3. The Women of Newsweek (and so many like them).  When some brave, young women filed a gender discrimination lawsuit  against Newsweek for not allowing women to be reporters, I was an impressionable 12-year-old (not so much older than PunditGirl is now.  YIKES!)  I was reminded about their brave act recently when I was asked to moderate a panel with some current Newsweek journalists who wrote about that lawsuit.  Without those “women’s libbers” forging the way for me while I was still pondering pre-algebra and just how long I was going to have to wear those darn braces (trust me, they weren’t the fashion statement then as they are today), my ability to major in political science and dream of taking over Tom Brokaw’s job one day wouldn’t even have been on the table.  While not directly related to motherhood, their desire for professional lives and their commitment to fight for that was all the proof I needed that it was okay to think about motherhood later.  Which was a very good thing for me.

4.  Women online.  My sisters on Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and group blogs were there for me after I became what CNN  recently called an “older mother.”  Being in the ‘burbs with a baby, I felt pretty alone.  I’d been in the workplace for over 20 years as a reporter then as a lawyer before I became PunditGirl’s mom.  Most of the women I knew were still in the office 60 hours a week.  I found myself without a job shortly after we returned from China with our new daughter and I didn’t know any other moms of young children.  And I was woefully unschooled then in the ways of play groups and Gymboree.  When I started my mom journey, I was unprepared for a lot of things and there were plenty of times when I wished that there was a Xanax in the house, especially when our three-year-old screamed with night terrors and I was afraid someone would hear her and call the police, thinking that only a child who was being beaten could make noises like that.

Thank goodness for the wonderful, amazing women I’ve met online who became my lifeline.  All of a sudden, just by reading their stories, I knew I wasn’t the only one.  And then I met some.  And then I met some more.  And they became my friends and they helped me in many ways.  (I purposely left out site links to my amazing sisters in social media because inevitably I would have forgotten someone and would not want to hurt anyone’s feelings, especially on Mother’s Day).

Aside from being grateful for these things, I will continue to fight to keep access to effective birth control, abortion and equal pay for equal work so that one ten-year-old girl I know won’t have to worry about them quite as much as I did.  I’m hoping she’ll find her own way in the world of women and friendship!

5.  And, of course, last, but not least, I’m grateful for “some people.”

Because without them, well, I can’t even imagine that life.

Photo by PunditMom, all rights reserved

That’s what PunditGirl told her class when we presented a slide show of photos from our recent trip of a lifetime — one that will result in the first memories our daughter has of her birth country.

I included this photo for our presentation to her classmates as an example of one of the many types of street vendors you find all over China.  But she was right — this was also taken in the general area where we were told she was found before being taken to her orphanage when she was just a few days old.

Mr. PunditMom and I were blown away that she chose to share that piece of information with a roomful of her friends.  We were in the midst of photos of The Great Wall of China, the pandas and other photos of daily life in China when this one popped up in the slide show and she made her rather matter-of-fact announcement.

Without drama.  Without tears.  Without making it sound like it was any big thing.

We have other images of that location that show in more detail the area that was her “finding place” …

… so we were a bit taken aback that she recognized that the close-up photo of the fruit vendor was actually shot near the location where she was discovered as a baby ten years ago.  The place where her life changed in monumental ways that most of us will never be able to comprehend.

I’ve often tried to piece together what little information we had about the first days of PunditGirl’s life.  When we traveled to China to bring her home, we were given varying information about where and how she was found.  We weren’t sure of her real story, though we tended to believe that she had been found in the bus station after receiving a copy of the “finding ad” that was required to be placed in the local newspaper at the time she as discovered.

When we were told on this trip that we would be taken to visit  PunditGirl’s finding place — something that many adoption social workers recommend as a way to help adoptees put together some of the missing pieces of their story — we said that we had conflicting information about the location.

A lengthy conversation ensued in Chinese between our agency contact and the local guide/interpreter.  “Oh no,” they replied, “this is what the official account says.”

We still can’t be 100 percent sure.  We were given “official accounts” in the past about other things that may or may not be true.  But it turns out there is a hospital across the street from the bus station — another piece of information we had never been told, but one that could suggest that the bus station story is the true one.

But it had never occurred to us that our daughter had been left on the sidewalk.  In December.  In the cold.

One of the first photos we have of PunditGirl is a 2-inch-by-2-inch portrait-type photo against a ruby red background — a baby just a few months old with the angriest scowl you’d ever want to see.  I still get a glimpse of that look on her ten-year-old face from time to time.  But when we first saw it in the photo, we thought, “What could make a little baby look so angry?”  Before we knew her story, we joked that the bad baby comb-over she’d been given for the photo had to be the cause of such indignation.  Now we know it was a lot more than just having a bad hair day.

At the moment, PunditGirl is taking this part of her story very matter-of-factly.  We’ve tried to plumb her mind a bit to get a sense of what feelings she might really be having about this piece of her life story.  For now it seems that she hasn’t formed any discernible judgment about the fact that she was found lying outside on a sidewalk in the winter (though it is a sub-tropical climate, and from the weather records it apparently wasn’t below freezing on the evening we believe she was found).

We know she’s still processing everything we saw and experienced.  Heck, I’m still trying to get my head around all of it, especially as it was experienced in such a whirlwind kind of way– it was a ‘if this is Wednesday, it must be Chengdu’ sort of trip.  Maybe the fact that we came face to face with more of PunditGirl’s story than we had known before is one of the reasons I’ve been so disturbed by the Russian-adoptee-gets-sent-back-to-his-birth-country story.

No adoption story is ever easy.  No matter how much happiness that comes from celebrating the creation of a new family, adoption, by definition, is also a story of loss — loss of birth family, loss of first identity, and for most children who were in orphanages, loss of the happy baby story that most other kids have.  And that loss can produce significant issues that have to be dealt with and worked through, often over a lifetime.

Even with the countless hours we’ve spent over many years trying to manage PunditGirl’s anxiety and attachment issues (she was never diagnosed with full reactive attachment disorder as some children are and I suspect that Justin Hansen probably was), and even when it felt like I was the worst mother in the world because I couldn’t figure out what to do to help a child who thought she was unlovable, and I prayed I could convince someone to write me a prescription for Prozac or even a little Xanax, I never imagined getting to a place where I could have said, “Hey, China.  Thanks, but no thanks.”

It’s not brave.  It’s not noble.  It’s just me as a mom.  And us as parents.

Photos by PunditMom, copyright 2010

And I’ve ranted before about how the media covers adoption-related stories — that somehow parents who decide to adopt are more suspect in their desires and motivations than those who choose to (or are able to) have children the “old-fashioned” way.

But today this is on my mind — the media this week is obsessed with the potential abandonment aspect of the story of  seven-year-old Russian adoptee Artyom, aka Justin, by his American mother.  Trust me — I will make NO excuses for her or any parent who puts a child on a plane and ships them off somewhere as she apparently did.

But I have to ask — where is the media coverage every other day of the year about all the other children — mostly families’ biological children — who are abandoned, neglected or abused?  I’d like to think that the story of this little boy — who is now an American citizen, by the way — would be getting this much 24/7 coverage if the same actions had taken place but he had been the biological child of this mother, not a child who came to her family by adoption.

I’m pretty sure if I was a betting girl, my money would be safe on that one.

This story is getting attention because it involves adoption.  And the media love to sensationalize stories about adoptive families.  I don’t have the energy to get up on this soapbox for too long again, but it’s just a fact — when children are hurt or neglected or abandoned by biological parents, the stories might get a little play, but not for long.  But make that family an adoptive family, and that changes the whole calculus of its purported newsworthiness because people still like to stare at families like mine, both in real life and on cable news.

You can read more about my take on Artyom’s story at my new column at CafeMom’s The Stir, called Speaker of the House!

Yes, the PunditMom family is back from our amazing tour of China, and I’m trying to decide what I want to share about things other than the tourist stops — our visit to PunditGirl’s orphanage and the events of those few days are still circulating in my mind as I try to find a way to share that she’ll be comfortable with.

Of course, I can share that I’m checking this one off my “bucket list:”

Yes, I was as happy as a little girl!

In the meantime, here are some fabulous Mothers of Intention you need to spend some time with –

Kim Moldofsky from Hormone-Colored Days shares her experience with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and talking about her pre-exisiting condition in connection with the health care debate.  She totally rocked that news conference!

My fellow MOMocrat Julie Pippert discusses the tenuous situation with our country’s textbooks and the undue amount of influence Texas has on that process.

Morra Aarons-Mele at Women and Work blog talks about ther experience at the White House Workplace Flexibility Summit.

And my honorary M.O.I (I hope she doesn’t mind!), E.M. Zanotti at American Princess takes on Michelle Obama about pizza!

Enjoy!

Being here on this trip has been a nice little respite from politics, though you know I’ve been doing a little happy dance about the health care bill!

In the meantime, here are some of the highlights so far:

We survived the sandstorm from the Gobi Desert while we were in Beijing.  We were prepared for just about everything, though I admit I hadn’t anticipated this!  But we managed.

We did have some clear weather in Beijing and were able to hit the must-sees.

Then, it was time to make our way to Xi’an and the Terra Cotta Warriors.  I figure after visiting there and learning about the Chinese emperors, I’ve learned a few things about taking on the political opposition!

Does the smile take away from the fierceness of the armor?

Fortunately, while PunditGirl is recuperating, we have a lovely view from the hotel room.

Maybe tonight we should just order in?

It doesn’t seem so long at first, but it’s a hefty little stroll along Kunming Lake.  The paintings almost bring the ancient royal families to life, but for the throngs of tourists who take the stroll now.

As we’re closing up our suitcases and heading for the airport, my stomach is churning about The Long Plane Ride on for our journey to bring PunditGirl’s birth country to life for her.

I wanted to write some amazingly thoughtful post this morning as I’m going over the packing list, making sure we have all the phone numbers and e-mail addresses we’re going to need, and doing the last-minute house straightening so I don’t have to come home on two weeks to a mess in the kitchen!

But all I can think of at the moment is the 15 + hours it will take to get there, how sleep-deprived and jet-lagged we’ll be, and how PunditGirl’s life is about to change forever in ways that we can’t even fathom yet.

Internet access permitting, I’ll be posting snippets of the trip here whenever possible.  There will be little political wonkiness here for a bit — but there’s plenty of time for that when we get back!

This journey is our first return to China since we brought PunditGirl home and made her part of our family in 2001.  I really can’t believe it’s been that long, yet I also feel like it’s been a lifetime  since we stepped off the plane at National Airport, our lives changed by a baby who spent the first year of her life in an orphanage with about 100 other children and about eight caregivers.  We’ve talked for many years, as our PunditBaby grew into a PunditGirl, about the amazing things we saw and experienced in January of 2001 when we brought our daughter home from Hunan Province.

I keep trying to come up with the usual PunditMom fare to write about in these days before we get on that 15-hour flight, but with the pressure of a book deadline fast approaching, as well as this trip of a lifetime almost upon us, it’s hard to focus on the health care summit, financial regulation or any of that other stuff that usually gets me all riled up!

So I’ve decided not to fight it, and to give in to the need to write about the trip.  PunditGirl can hardly contain herself as we are finishing up our preparations — getting our visas, buying a snazzy new polka-dot suitcase for her, and thinking about how much rice (her favorite food in the whole world) she’ll be able to eat while we’re there.

And I’ve promised myself, I am buying that Mao watch this time!

But there’s much more on everyone’s minds.  PunditGirl has confessed that one reason she’s excited about this trip is the fact that for the first time in her life she will be surrounded by people who look like her.

“Now you and Daddy will be the ones who look different,” she’s repeatedly told us, her chest puffing up with pride at the thought of a whole country full of people who share her skin tone and facial features.  We’ve made many efforts to make sure that her world has Asian friends and families in it, but our neighborhood is not the most diverse in the world, so for better or worse, she sees many more Caucasian people than Asian.

Aside from her apparent joy at being the one who will not look different from everyone else,  there’s also a good dose of anxiety that’s showing itself.

“What if China Mom and China Dad show up and decide they want me back?”  A question full of so many things — the longing for her birth parents to take back a decision they made ten years ago, the need to know that , as her parents, we would never allow anyone to take her from us, and the age-appropriate fantasy about what her life would be like if she had grown up in the country where she was born.

Yes, we’ll be doing the tourist highlights — the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terra Cotta Warriors, and the panda preserve.  But we’ll also be spending a few days in the city where we met her.  We’ll visit the baby home, though it’s not in the same building as the one she lived in.  We’ll see the babies who are there now and waiting for parents, though today, almost a decade after we adopted PunditGirl, more Chinese families are being encouraged to adopt these children rather than Western families.  And, if all goes according to plan, we will be able to visit with the woman who was the head “ayi” (nanny) when she lived there, and who brought PunditGirl (then known by her Chinese name that translates as ‘eternal river’) to us, dressed in worn but clean clothes that we had to return so another child could get some use out of them.

I’m anxious, too.  As an adult, I’m logically able to understand the historical reasons that so many Chinese girls have been available for adoption.  When I look at PunditGirl’s face or watch her wake up in the morning all warm and snuggly from her sleep or watch her race across the soccer field determined not to let the boys outrun her, I can’t imagine being the mother of any other child.  But I know for her, no matter how much she nods and says she understands why China Mom and China Dad couldn’t keep her, I also know that the thought remains in her head, “But maybe they could have if they’d tried a little bit harder.  Maybe they would have kept me if I’d been a better baby.”

I’m bracing myself for the possible emotional fallout of these thoughts colliding with the reality she sees in China.  PunditGirl has struggled with questions about attachment and permanence — I’m not sure if this trip will help heal those issues or exacerbate them.  But in my heart and my gut I think this is the right time to make this first journey to where she was born — to see the baby home and possibly to visit her “finding place” (I think I’m going to need more tissues than I can carry with me for that moment).

Right now, we’re trying to keep it light — talking about whether she can play the games on my iPhone on the plane, wondering how far up the Great Wall we’ll be able to hike, what it’s going to feel like to hold a baby panda (yes, that WILL be our holiday card this year!).

But I feel the low level anxiety starting to creep in for all of us.  I have half of a Xanax left from a procedure I had last year.  That’s definitely going in my carry-on.  After that, I’ll have to find other ways to keep my emotions under control so I can help PunditGirl with hers.

Photos by PunditMom, copyright 2001, 2008, all rights reserved.

Photo of Mao watch courtesy of ChinaSprout.

The government building in Port-au-Prince that housed all the official adoption paperwork crumbled in the earthquake.  Many of those who worked in that building reportedly died.  And there doesn’t seem to be a rush here in the U.S. by the State Department or Homeland Security to ease the paperwork burden to allow these children to enter the country without having crossed all the ‘t’s and dotted all the ‘i’s.  Some in Miami, however, are trying to plan a major rescue effort for these children and the thousands more who have been orphaned as a result of the earthquake.  But shouldn’t the orphans be some of the first to get relief?

As my friend Amie at MammaLoves … put it on Twitter:

Why is it that healthy, white, well-dressed adults were being shuttled out of Haiti and those orphans are still outside in the heat? #BRESMA

Excellent question.  Plenty of are mothers are writing about waiting for their own children or their friends who are waiting and not knowing the fate of the children for whom they were patiently navigating the sometimes inscrutable adoption maze.

Yvonne at L.A. Moms blog wrote about her friend Lorraine’s story in One Mother’s Struggle to Get Adopted Daughter Out of Haiti.

ParentDish blog talks about adoptive families in limbo.

Jessica at Silicon Valley Moms blog wrote, Saving the Bresma Orphans of Haiti.

And MomLogic blog has the post Are My Kids’ Birth Mothers  Dead or Alive?

These are just a few stories.  According to a Washington Post report, before the earthquake there were about 50,000 orphans in Haiti, with only about 800 to 900 of those children part of the official adoption process.  If you are writing about families waiting to bring their children home, leave me a comment here or Tweet about it with the #moms4haiti hashtag.

Maybe in some small way, we can gather these stories and help unite these families as soon as possible.  For a list of organizations that are supporting Haitian orphanages, check this link from Creating a Family.  For a view from the adoption community at large about adoption and Haiti, here’s a post from AdoptionTalk blog.

UPDATE:  On Tuesday, 53 Haitian orphans were airlifted out of Haiti to Pittsburgh even though much of the paperwork was lost in the earthquake. As this story unfolds, it is an amazing one.  Initially the U.S. government was only going to allow 47 of the 53 children to leave Haiti because several had no pending adoptions and the flight they were scheduled to be on had to leave Haiti before everything was ironed out.  According to Ed Rendell speaking on MSNBC, there was an NSC contact that cleared the way so that all the children could leave Haiti and the military supplied a plane to airlift the children out.

There are few things that truly make me lose it, but sensational media coverage of adoption is one of those things.  So bear with me as I explain my visceral reaction to the recent story of Anita Tedaldi, a mother who “gave back” her toddler son after only 18 months following his adoption, and why I was confounded that more people seemed to give her sympathy rather than asking how she could go from someone who openly criticized parents who would do that to being a mother who not only disrupted the adoption of her son, but also sought out the bright light of media attention after having done so.

For me, it’s this simple — there are no “give backs” when it comes to our children, no matter how they came into our families.  My husband and I are lucky to be the parents of the fabulous PunditGirl (nine going on 30!).  We adopted her from China almost nine years ago.

Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you

We thought we were prepared.  We dealt with a fabulous agency who made sure we knew that a good number of children adopted from institutions often have attachment and other emotional issues.  We read.  We listened.  We talked.  Mr. PunditMom already had experience as a dad to two biological daughters.  We thought we were ready.

We so weren’t.

To many people, PunditGirl presented as a very easy, outgoing, confident child (and she still does).  But she has always had serious underlying anxiety and attachment issues, which I’ve written about once in a while.  To say that spending years as a family in attachment therapy was challenging, hard work would be an understatement.  Not to mention the years of night terrors that PunditGirl experienced, my self-diagnosed depression that I was in denial about and all the times I wondered whether there was something I had done (or not done) that had contributed to her mental state, her worries and her fears.

So I understand that there can be difficult issues that arise in adoptions.  But once PunditGirl was our daughter, she was our daughter.  Period. And it was our job as her parents to make sure we did whatever we could humanly do to help her with whatever she needed.

Thankfully, today she is attached to our hips!  As for the anxiety, I think it will always be there and will be something she will have to learn to manage.  She still worries that if we get angry we will leave and in her own fourth-grade way she’s never quite sure if people who say they are her friends really are her friends — she truly believes they might just pick up and leave.

PunditGirl may not have have been “borned from me” as she used to say, but when we signed the papers stating, in English and Chinese, “Said minor child shall be [your] adopted child, with all the rights and privileges as though she had been born to [you] …“ that’s what we meant.  We didn’t mean in case there are no problems.  We didn’t mean we’d keep her until the road got rocky.  We meant we would be there for her and love her forever.

I’m not the only one who’s had a hard time managing their outrage over Tedaldi’s story of terminating the adoption of her son because, as she put it, he wasn’t “bonding” with her family.  The online international adoption community has been quite outspoken.  And in an e-mail, a friend of mine who is also a parent by adoption and biology reflected:

Parenting a child who was adopted  — one who was not a tiny infant at the time of adoption — is not the same as parenting biological children.  It’s requires different strategies and different thinking and great patience.

I understood that I was going to have to change my whole approach the first time I tried to comfort a weeping O. and found that nothing I did could comfort her.  I was used to being the main person to comfort our children, to picking up crying children, patting, stroking and murmuring love words to them and knowing that they would settle in to me and settle down.  But this was not the case with O. — I was the stranger who took her away from someone she loved.

I decided to be with O. “as if” we had a perfect attachment from day one even though that was not the case.  And I also decided that I would wait out the hard times in hopes of good times.

And because of that, one of the best moments in my life was when O. realized I was her mother.  Every time I think of it, it brings tears to my eyes.  But it was entirely different than my experience with my other children — just as wonderful and amazing, but different.

Apparently there was a time when Tedaldi felt the same way I do.  In 2008, Tedaldi wrote a piece entitled, We Can’t Give Back our Children or Husbands, criticizing a Dutch couple who had terminated the adoption of their Korean-born daughter (the site where it was originally posted, Military.com, has taken down that piece, but it’s excerpted here).

No child is perfect. And just because some children come to us through biology rather than adoption doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be seriously hard issues sometimes.  Maybe all the time.  Call me judgmental, but I don’t believe there is any reason to “give back” a child –  for me this is one of the few life issues that isn’t gray, but is black and white.

Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you

You can be sure that if the story that ran in the New York Times and on the Today show had been exactly the same, but Tedaldi’s son had been her biological child, we would still be hearing the negative outcry from parents around the world.  But apparently because Tedaldi’s son was adopted, many have expressed sympathy for her situation, some actually praising her for being brave.

The media often jump at stories that sensationalize families who are something other than a traditional biological family.  But aside from the fascination with stories like Tedaldi’s, I have to wonder why she even chose to go public?  It had to be hard for everyone involved.  Her husband apparently did not want her to reveal their saga and I’m sure her biological children are getting questions from others.  And how must her son’s new family be dealing with what I have to assume was extreme unwanted attention?

Who does this story help other than news outlets who like uber-sensational tales that will boost ratings and readership?  Well, it might help Tedaldi herself — it turns out, she’s writing a parenting book that’s due out this spring.  At least one person has told me I’m the overly-cynical one for even suggesting that Tedaldi’s new book is remotely related to her decision to come out and tell this story.  Maybe I am.  But I’m just saying that for some things, no publicity is bad publicity, and she’s now on the radar of high profile media outlets.  We can each draw our own conclusions as to her motivations.

My family is my family.  It’s not any worse, or any better, than others because our daughter came to us through adoption rather than biology.  I’m not any less of a parent and PunditGirl isn’t any less of a daughter. Since November is Adoption Awareness Month, I’d love to see more coverage of adoption that doesn’t  suggest that there’s something unnatural about it or that it’s not as permanent as biological relationships.  I know things will be better when I see stories where writers stop describing families in terms of their blood relations.  The New York Times and the Today Show can start there anytime.