Over at the New York Times Motherlode blog, commenters are hotly debating the motives of a Texas woman who plans to adopt a six-year-old Chinese girl with scoliosis. The comments were prompted by the first in a series of guest posts by Jenny Staff Johnson about her adoption journey.
Johnson, who has two sons with her husband Mark, says she always wanted a daughter named Rosemary. She and her husband embarked upon a Chinese adoption, and found the wait was shorter for children who are older or have disabilities. Authorities sent her photos and information about dozens of children. Among them was an unsmiling girl who “appeared to have no physical or developmental problems other than a severe curvature of the spine.” An excerpt
"We could handle this? Couldn’t we? Could we? The stress was far worse on me than on my husband, who is a miracle of certainty in his own decisions. While I thought, read, fretted and cried, he quietly advocated for this to be our little girl. I took a hard look at our lives and wondered whether it might be better[to] minimize risk, to abandon the daughter-dream altogether and throw myself back into work as a writer. I could get a nanny, rent an office, and make a proper go of it as I hadn’t done in almost a decade. This fantasy held sway for about 24 hours, and Rosemary began to recede. But I just couldn’t make the call telling the adoption agency we wanted to return her file. Instead, at the end of the 30-day period and on election day 2008, we made a different call. Bring her home we would.
… Why have we chosen all this? Mostly because we want a little girl in our lives to complement our beautiful, rambunctious boys. And, I now realize, I must have inherited something of an adventure gene from my daughter’s namesake."
Johnson and her family have left for China to bring the girl home, and she will post updates as their journey continues.
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