The myth of the fairy-tale adoption

'I

no longer wish to parent this child."

The words aren't mine. They come from a letter written by 33-year-old Tennessee nurse Torry Hansen, who put the letter on a plane back to Russia with the 7-year-old son she'd adopted in September.

But there were moments last summer, after we brought home our newly adopted 3-year-old from China, when they could have been mine.

They perfectly encapsulate the way I felt for weeks after we returned from our adoption trip (although my version would have included more cursing). I didn't love that child. That child didn't love me (although when she wasn't screaming, she clung to me like the last tree standing in a tornado). I didn't want to parent that child, and didn't think I ever could.

Without taking away anything from what her adopted son was suffering, I understand, deep in my bones, what Hansen must have been going through when she bypassed all other options and put that child on a plane. In the same way women who've experienced postpartum depression understand mothers who kill themselves and their infants, I get it.

Like me, Hansen must have thought she was prepared. She was screened, questioned, evaluated. She sat through the mandatory "education" session on institutionalized children featuring descriptions of sexual and other abuses, violent anger and unpredictable procedural delays. She filled out forms, was evaluated by social workers, and, because of Russia's strict travel requirements, would have traveled there twice - the first to meet the child, and, after a waiting period, to confirm her commitment and legalize their ties.

But prospective adoptive parents are either incorrigible optimists (that was me) or people of deep and abiding faith, and it doesn't really sink in with most that things might end badly - really badly - until it's too late.

Hansen's case surely isn't the first to end this way. She's not even the first to return her child to Russia - a couple from Georgia took a 9- year-old girl back in 2000, saying they couldn't get her the help she needed. Russia is notorious for difficult adoptees - its institutional system is extremely rigid and often offers less opportunity for young children to bond with a caregiver, which is considered key to transferring trust and affection to an adoptive parent. There are tragic adoption stories from every part of the world.

Hansen adopted a 7-year-old boy from a country with a long history of troubled adoptions of institutionalized children. I adopted a 3-year-old raised in the best possible circumstances for an abandoned girl baby in China - a foster home with a loving couple whom she called Mommy and Baba, who'd raised her since she was 2 months old.

With their support, she was transitioned to us with as much loving care as the Chinese government allows. Yet we still struggled. My daughter screamed for hours for mommy, and we both knew I wasn't the one she wanted.

She kicked, shouted and defied me, he slugged her new brothers and sisters when they tried to hug her. She said she didn't like us, begged to go back to Baba Mike. Her bottomless well of need meant I often had to ignore one of my other three children. I was sure I'd ruined all our lives.

The older children waiting for adoption in the U.S. and in other countries are those who've already been abandoned or abused. Prospective parents are warned about all that, but there is also a parallel mythology that's risen up around adoption that sounds like that of giving birth in the days before Anne Lamott and her spiritual heirs burst the bubble.

The stories adoption agencies include in their material, the books, the blogs - even the very signatures of the parents on adoption forums ("mom to DD Mei Mei, joyfully home since 2007") all speak of an experience that's supposed to be wonderful.

Your child is "home," his or her orphaned life is over, your travels are over, and you have been united into one big forever-family. Even the politically correct terminology surrounding adoption insists that once it's legal, it's a done deal - your child "was" adopted (not "is"), and now you are its mother, amen.

WE DON'T want adoption to be a process - we want it to be a destination. And that makes us even angrier when it doesn't work out that way. Torry Hansen betrayed her son, and our belief system.

A perfect world would be one in which every child could be well cared for by the mother he or she was born to. But that's not what we've got. A "successful" adoption story is one in which you can tell yourself that it worked out better than the alternative.

That's got to be enough.

KJ Dell'Antonia writes the EcoLiving column for Kiwi magazine. This first appeared in Slate (www.slate.com).