Continued from here ...

It is, very thankfully, beyond the scope of my rather prodigious imagination to anywhere near fully grasp the suffering that must go with the first flow of HIV-contaminated mother's milk. What can presenting that nipple feel like to a mother who understands exactly what it is she is offering? Where does the concept of the lesser of two evils right itself enough for anyone to find peace enough for milk to drop and the wherewithal to continue to bring that baby to the breast time after time after time?

To shuffle, still bleeding and sore, from giving birth to walking away from a brand new baby, with nothing but a hope that someone will find the child and care for it: can anyone ever appreciate what that has to feel like?

Internationally adoptive mothers spend a lot of time contemplating that horror, and often find ourselves shouting to the heavens, "What kind of world do we live in?"

These children of ours are too precious to imagine in the confines of the likely consequences of other potential eventualities their birth mothers faced without any idea that parents like you and me even existed. The other children, the ones we don't bring home with us, tug at us and provide templates for could-have-beens. There can be no ignoring of facts as we have them or speculation that only make sense; it has to be accepted that many of our children were created under conditions that no decent human being would wish upon their worst enemy.

Those could-have-beens and their families, most continuing forever to live in those same dire circumstances, are a permanent bridge to the culture it becomes our job to impart to our kids. Representing what is great and grand in their heritage is forever tied to the facts of their birth parents' reality, so adoptive parents have no choice, if they're going to do this right, but to internalize as much of the pain of that reality as possible so as to make it fit within the history and the broader scope of what it means to be Khmer or Chinese or Ethiopian.

Occasionally, someone will suggest that there's something easy about adopting a child, and even from under that umbrella statements are often made as fact that families adopt internationally because it saves them some of the efforts seen as needed to be born in domestic adoptions.

I'd like to offer the thought that there is more to internationally adoptive parents that may meet the eye. A good portion of the weight of the world is delivered by referral photo.