Thursday, August 18, 2011

Come, Let us Puke Together!

FAMILY PRESERVATION ADVOCACY: Come, Let us Puke Together!

Let us bow our heads and puke together.

Interview with Jennifer Grant author of Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter, entitled "Adoption is Not a 'Ministry'' Jennifer challenges interracial adoption, and why it’s more than a “missionary” project....yet she speaks of being "called by God."



The publisher describes the book thusly:
Following the invisible thread of connection between people who are seemingly intended to become family, journalist Jennifer Grant shares the deeply personal, often humorous story of adopting a fifteen-month-old girl from Guatemala when she was already the mother of three very young children.
Her family's journey is captured in stories that will encourage not only adoptive families but those who are curious about adoption or whose lives have been indirectly touched by it. Love You More explores universal themes such as parenthood, marriage, miscarriage, infertility, connection, destiny, true self, failure and stumbling, and redemption.
Note that she believes this child was 'intended' for her! I find that the most arrogant thought anyone could possibly have. You mean to tell me that God intended for a child to be born to parents unable to raise him or her, becoming an orphan, and "languish" in an orphanage fifteen months, just to be there for YOU! Her original parents died or suffer a major loss for YOU!? Are you kidding me?


"Adoption is wonderful for growing a family" she says. And indeed reviewers have said of her book: "Love You More is a wonderful book describing the journey of a family being completed by the adoption of their little girl from Guatemala." But she believes it is not the best way to address global issues of poverty. Yet she did it and now preaches this. HUH?

And, not only did she adopt, because she was 'called by God' to do so, but how odd that God - in His infinite wisdom - would have called this American woman and her husband to ignore the 120, 000+/- children in US foster care who can never be reunited with their original families and who could be adopted, and instead to adopt from Guatemala, a nation plagues with crime and impunity, kidnappings and child trafficking! Odd, eh? Do you think "God" just didn't know, like the agencies that handled these adoptions?

Love you More, the title of her book nauseated me from the moment I heard it. I found it offensive, albeit unintended. Is love or adoption a competition? Does she love her child more than she loves her husband, or are they not just different kinds of love?

As a mother of three, how do her other children feel about that title, I wonder? Did it hit them in the gut as it did me and make me squirm with discomfort? Do they wonder exactly what that title implies and what the whole book says about them and their relationship with their mother? Why is this one child singled out for an entire book?

Is she implying she loves her daughter more than her daughter loves her or that she loves her adopted daughter more than her daughter's other mother does or could have? I don't get measuring love in terms of more or less.

If anyone has read the book and cares to share, please do so. (Though I will NOT allow this blog to become an advertisement for the book, so please save your praise for anywhere other than here.)

Meanwhile, excuse me while I will reach for a barf bucket to rid myself of the bile created by this woman's eagerness to exploit her daughter's image and life in order to pat her self on the back for saying that patting oneself of the back for adopting should NOT be the motivation for adopting.

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