Anita Tedaldi's failure to adapt

The adoption story of the moment is of Anita Tedaldi giving up her adopted “Baby D.” because she felt the baby was “not attaching” to her.Eighteen months after adopting baby, Tedaldi changed her mind and gave the child back. The baby, Tedaldi wrote, "should have been closer to his sisters and especially to me, his primary caretaker."

In her apologia for running Tedaldi’s essay in the New York Times’s Motherlode column here, editor Lisa Belkin says that “The agency who screened [Tedaldi] should probably have rejected her.” On what grounds? Could it have been obvious for anyone to know that a heterosexual couple with five biological children was “unprepared” for adopting? (Tedaldi is married, albeit with a “deployed” military man.)

When my partner and I sought to adopt a boy from an upstate orphanage in 2007, we were given every conceivable green light by all concerned. We spent a total of ten full days getting to know the 8-year-old boy we fully intended to adopt. The gradual (but not at all sluggish) attaching among the three of us was complex and mysterious. He was a boy with plenty of “issues,” but my partner and I loved him and felt certain we had met the boy we were destined to care for.

Then, after these ten days of increasingly blissful acquaintance, the bureaucrats upstate Googled me and discovered I’d published a memoir about hustling and drug abuse in the late 1990s , and they pulled the plug on the adoption. We drove six hours each way to a meeting where we were asked to wait until the meeting was over, then we were told the adoption “would not proceed.” We fought the decision, wrote to the governor, who appointed a person to oversee the case, and lost. We never saw the little boy again. He must have learned from the experience that nothing whatsoever is real or durable, that no one is honest, and the grit of solitary toil is the only way to get through this miserable life. The incessant sound of children screaming and sobbing in the “time out room” where he lived still haunts my memory. On one of the visits we had with the little boy, we took him camping. One night after dusk, we went hunting for fireflies. He had a net, and he danced in the woods like a boy in a fairy tale. I told him he was a wonderful kid, and he replied that he thought I was a wonderful man. I wonder where he is now. And I wonder if he’s still such a wonderful kid.

I was lucky, and I found the perfect boy to adopt after all. When I met my son for the first time a year after losing the fight for the 8-year-old, I felt there was some justice, since I could not possibly have found a better or move loveable son. He was fourteen when he moved in; he’s sixteen now. Our attachment to one another is complicated by the vicissitudes of his adolescence, his natural inclination to assert himself and pull away in some conflict with his apparent desires to be close to me, to be honest with me, and to love me and be loved by me, to be my son and to accept me as his dad.

When I committed to adopting my son, I was told that our relationship was exactly the same as a biological parent and child, and I took that seriously. I agreed that there was nothing that could possibly cause me to change my mind about adopting him. That commitment is the meaning of being a parent. The Tedaldi story, as told with such revolting sympathy on NBC’s Today Show, is good fodder for the media because it has the ring of mythology and tragedy—of Medea, for example, another dramatic mother hose husband was “deployed” and who didn’t get everything she wanted.

Belkin is correct, thankfully, that Tedaldi’s story “hardly represents most adoptions.” In fact, it represents very few, particularly those adoptions overseen by a competent agency. Family Focus Adoptions in Little Neck, NY, which celebrates its 22^nd anniversary this month, is the agency that has helped me, with consummate professionalism and “anti-bureaucracy,” to adopt my son, and they are superb, perhaps the best in the state. Their website is here.

What perturbs me most about Tedaldi’s story, and its noisy transmission over the mainstream media, is that I hate to think what my son would learn from it were he to hear of it (and he will, if he hasn’t already—he sees everything). The only way I can prove that I’ll never do to him what Tedaldi did to “Baby D.” is a negative capability: it is only by not abandoning him.