Review: "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet"

By David Biddle

The "Do I Love Them Yet?" Syndrome

Once that last child begins to drive, most of us realize our capacity to parent is fading. We get a few years of empty-nest freedom before grandparenting kicks in. But the marathon is over. We finished!

Then there are the Melissa Fay Greenes of the world—and her attorney husband Don Samuel, a man who practices courtroom statements on his kids instead of reading them bedtime stories. Samuel and Greene, a journalist, had four children using their own DNA: Molly, Seth, Lee, and Lily. But then, in their early forties and with encouragement from their biological kids, the Greene-Samuel team adopted five more in less than a decade.

It began in 1999 with Chrissy (whom they renamed Jesse), a four-year-old boy of Romani (“gypsy”) descent from a Bulgarian orphanage. Then they adopted five-year-old Helen from AIDS-ravaged Ethiopia, where, Greene notes, 11 percent of the nation’s children were orphans in 2001. After Helen came nine-year-old Fisseha (renamed Sol), followed by brothers Yosef (8) and Daniel (11)—also all from Ethiopia.

In No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, Greene tells the story of building this mega-family—two loving parents, two quirky dogs, nine amazing children from three different birth cultures—all living under one roof in Atlanta, Georgia.

Cute, huh? Sweet?

Hardly. Greene is not a master parent by any means—in far too many scenes, she just lets chaos reign in her household—and this is not a simple, feel-good treatise on the ultimate blended family. Her memoir is powerful and alluring, almost like a reality TV show where you actually care about the characters.

Greene comments intelligently on adoption, family, intercultural experience, and—above all—real love. This last resonates with me most, because as a mixed-race adoptee, I know that love between parents and children, adoptive or biological, is one of the greatest mysteries I’ve encountered in life....

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Editor's Note: The full text of this review—"Adoption, Light and Dark"—appears in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Talking Writing. This issue features a special "Spotlight" on adoption and parenting in honor of National Adoption Month, including a companion essay about Melissa Fay Greene called "Whoa! I'm a Character in a Friend's Memoir?"

 

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You Do Not Know My Family

By Martha Nichols

The Ethics of Adoption Writing

When my husband and I adopted a baby son in Vietnam in 2002, I never imagined I’d have to explain to our little boy eight years later why another adoptive mother had returned a child. But last April, that’s exactly where I found myself, along with everyone else who watched the sad saga of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev unfold.

In early April 2010, Artyom was put on an airplane alone by his American adoptive grandmother and flown back to Moscow. He was accompanied only by a note written by his adoptive mother Torry Hansen, a single nurse in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

According to the Associated Press, the note said that she’d been lied to in Russia about the boy’s difficulties: “After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”

The why of a news story like this will always hook us. But as an adoptive parent and writer, it’s become a far more intimate ethical struggle for me.

Within days, I had written an Artyom commentary that appeared on the cover of Salon: “Adoption Fearmongers Take Over.” My focus was on the sensationalized news coverage, including a Nightline report about “the inside stories of adoptions that go horribly wrong.” Yet as the week of Artyom stories roared on, other adoptive parents began confessing their difficulties with problem adoptees, often in specific detail and splashed all over NPR, national TV, and the Internet.

It’s an old conundrum of memoir writing: What right does an author have to reveal private details about the lives of other family members—especially their children? My standard for writing autobiographical nonfiction has long been that I must make myself more vulnerable in print than any relative or friend I write about. So far, I believe I’ve hewed to the ethical side of this personal contract.

But it’s also true that a year after Artyom’s flight back to Russia, I’m doing less writing about my son—or, to be scrupulously accurate, the nature of my writing about him has changed. His views of adoption, in particular, do not seem mine to share...

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Editor's Note: The full text of this piece appears in the April 2011 issue of Talking Writing, in which the theme is "Too Much Truth? The Ethics of Memoir Writing."

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Adoption Books: What's the Message?

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

Not Your Average Bedtime Story

 

My fifteen-year-old daughter has banished me from her room. She’s made it clear we are long past reading bedtime stories together. But I still revel in the occasional snuggle with my twelve-year-old son, and I love sinking into a good children’s story—especially if the message is right.

For parents of adopted children, messaging is key when choosing books to read or share, whether a child is a preschooler or near adolescence. The story needs to feel true, the circumstances familiar, and the emotional sensibility realistic.

But somehow these requirements are tough to fill. Few books resonate with my son’s story as a Russian adoptee. How many overly sunny stories about the perfect rainbow family can you read? And he is definitely not a little girl adopted from Asia who took a long plane ride to get here.

On a recent day this fall, I decided to ask a local librarian for advice. At the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, Amanda Gazin, senior children’s librarian, efficiently rattled off almost a dozen titles about adoption. The result was a broad overview of what the genre offers.

Not surprisingly, far more books have been published for preschoolers. After reading many of those on Gazin’s list, however, I’d say the results are mixed...

 

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Editor's Note: Fran's piece appears in the December 2010 issue of Talking Writing, in which the theme is children's books. The issue includes references to more than a hundred children's books, multiple author interviews, and cartoon panels from the graphic novels American Born Chinese and City of Spies.

Fran and I think Adopt-a-tude readers will find this TW issue of particular interest. There are lots of discussions about identity, the development of children's imagination, even one middle-school author calling for "no more orphans!" in young adult books. Happy reading—Martha Nichols

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