I feel back in the mire tonight... There was an African film festival here, and my SO and I went to see a short film about a family from Vermont who adopted a 10-year-old girl from ET. It was really quite heartbreaking. The girl had all kinds of family in ET and it was so sad to see how sad they were to let her go and how sad she was to leave them. (Her mother had placed her in the care center shortly before dying.)The shots of the adoptive parents driving through Addis were hard too--I could identify much more with what others have written here about the discomfort of feeling so unjustly priveleged. I cried through the whole film. We left the theater bewildered and sad and not sure at all anymore that we could go through with this and still feel good about ourselves.
I think we're feeling ignorant--rather shockingly so, at this stage (and considering the amount of reading we've done). I knew that children often had surviving bio family members, but I had no idea that they could be so extensive, and so intact.
And, Carrie, I'm intrigued by your comment about guilt: "where most of my guilt would spring from, thinking about that other parent 1/2 way across the globe who was forced to such a heart-wrenching yet noble decision for her or his child. Yet even that guilt seems perhaps somehow self indulgent of me--for the real decision was from the parent."
