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| Lorraine |
Joyce Maynard’s writing—and thus
her, because her writing is
her—has always irritated me, perhaps irrationally. She was too famous for celebrating the banal. But when the news that she disrupted her
adoption of two sisters from Ethiopia became
public the other day, my reaction was not
to rub my hands gleefully and think
Aha! The great comeuppance for that
navel gazer! Instead I hoped that her celebrity and this public admission about
a disrupted adoption would help stem what often seems like the wholesale exportation
of children from one part of the world to another by do-gooders of all political and religious stripes simply because
they have more money.
Far too many of
them think that they are doing something noble by taking these poor children
from the over-crowded orphanage where they find them. People in my large social
net have adopted from Guatemala, China, India, Nepal, Romania, and Russia. In
truth, I am not close to many of them. And it is undoubtedly true that in many
cases, they are saving a child from an uncertain and perilous future and giving
them a home in which to flourish.
