Call me an asshole, but I think adopting overseas is overrated. There's plenty of children in your home country that need homes and while it's probably better than poverty in Sierra Leone, the US foster care system isn't exactly paradise. I understand it's for the child, but why do (often shitty) countries favors by taking their problems?
Besides, apparently a lot of orphanages steal children or trick parents into giving up their kids under the guise of it only being temporary. I think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were in lukewarm water because apparently one of their kids came from an operation like that. I wouldn't be surprised if the orphanage Madonna went to just let her take the kids and told the father whatever they could to get him to comply.
I think most parents do love their kid and give them up for the same reason Western parents would: they can't afford or take care of them. That especially makes sense in countries where women have little access to contraception and live in male dominated societies where their reproductive choices are few and far between. Sure, some people want to dump unwanted girls or their 8th child, but I think most drop offs are out of love, or at least a realization "I can't do this and need to care for the other children".
Call me an asshole, but I think adopting overseas is overrated. There's plenty of children in your home country that need homes and while it's probably better than poverty in Sierra Leone,
I think most parents do love their kid and give them up for the same reason Western parents would: they can't afford or take care of them. That especially makes sense in countries where women have little access to contraception and live in male dominated societies where their reproductive choices are few and far between. Sure, some people want to dump unwanted girls or their 8th child, but I think most drop offs are out of love, or at least a realization "I can't do this and need to care for the other children".
Yeah, I shouldn't have said most people, that was wrong and should edit that. It's such a shit sandwich in a lot of countries. With a lot of these cases it's because the mother dies and the father can't raise the kids himself. The families in Africa are pretty tight and stick together through unbelievable odds, but with a mother dead things change radically esp if there's no grandmother around.
The biggest problem is the lack of contraception or not using it and abortion being illegal in many countries. The orphanages are very overburdened for many reasons, but lack of BC is the main culprit.
Still, these bio parents do get lured into going after adoptive parents. It may not be motivated by the parents themselves but local lawyers and other shysters in town driving the bus on these things. Judges and politicians expect bribes to approve any paperwork, even from non-celebrities. I've knew someone (not rich, not famous) who adopted from Uganda years ago, and the corruption involved in a simple adoption was astonishing. What I don't get is why kids with any living parent are offered to prospective adoptive parents when there are TONS of kids in those places who have no known living relatives whatsoever.
It used to be fairly common for poor and working-class parents here in the US to temporarily leave their children at orphanages when they were unable to provide for them, and had no family (or none living close enough) to take them in. And that could happen for a variety of reasons: Dad got hurt on the job or was struck by a catastrophic illness, so there was no money coming in, thus Mom had to work and take care of Dad. Mom and Dad had to travel to get seasonal work, and the kids were too young to go with them. Mom and Dad moved to another town in the hope things would be better, and sent for their kids once they were stable. Or, very often, Mom died, leaving behind several small children, and a Dad who was working 12-hour days and had never learned anything about the "women's work" of housekeeping or childcare.
In the 1920s, my grandmother spent six months in an orphanage because my great-grandmother ended up involuntarily committed to a mental ward (back when PPD, menopause and other hormonal "female troubles" were still being written off as insanity). There were no relatives able to take my grandmother (who was 7 years old at the time), so an orphanage was the clear solution.
When my great-grandmother got out, she found a job and a room, and after a couple of weeks went to pick up my grandmother from the orphanage. And nobody thought that leaving my grandmother in an orphanage for the duration wa a sign of not caring, or not wanting her, or abandonment. It was a given that she'd at least be cared for and educated while there, and perhaps enjoy being around other children.
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During the Great Depression, parents who literally couldn't feed themselves, let alone their kids, resorted to leaving their children at orphanages where they would at least have a bed and food. Most of those parents visited their children when they could, and eventually reclaimed them. They didn't want to leave them, but they were so desperate they felt they had no choice.
There was no foster care--that's a much more recent development here in the US, and serves a much more limited group of at-risk kids than orphanages once did.
So here in the US, the prevailing idea of what an orphanage was is a place where children with no surviving parents--or who were abandoned by their parents--ended up, and were, by default, available for adoption. But that's just not how it was, and in places like Malawi, that's still not how it is. The father of David, the older boy Madonna "adopted," wanted to keep his son--but his wife was dead, and he was unable to care for the boy on his own because infants, toddlers, and small children require a lot of care and attention. Esther and Stella's father is likely in the same bind--he loves and wants to keep his children, but is unable to care for a pair of four-year-olds on his own, while working to keep body and soul together.
And while I've never had kids, I cannot imagine any parent being thrilled to see some rich foreigner come in, under false pretenses, to take their child away forever, leaving the parent utterly powerless to do anything about it. I can't imagine them just writing it off as, "Well, they'll get a better life than they would in this shithole."
And what about the kids? Age four is plenty old enough for Esther and Stella to have bonded with their daddy, and to wonder why they're being taken away by some crazy old white lady to places that are scary and disorienting and when their daddy's going to come for them. And when they find out he's not, and they're supposed to call the crazy old white lady "Mama," and now they're going to live with her forever? Yeah, don't tell me that's so much better than leaving them in Malawi. Really. Just fucking don't.
But this happens all the time in international adoptions, when people with money--and the inability or unwillingness to meet the criteria for domestic adoptions--believe that children in Third-World orphanages are there because their parents don't really want them, and tell themselves all kinds of comforting stories to justify taking children away from everything familiar and loved. There's a damned good reason Madonna chose to take the wanted children of an impoverished, uneducated Malawian man, rather than go through the adoption process here in the US for any of the thousands of disadvantaged kids available and waiting for a family.
She isn't adopting these kids; she's using her wealth and power to get away with stealing them--and as long as poverty, corruption, and bribery are rampant in places like Malawi, people like her will get away with it.
It seems that all the stars of Marilyn's generation did just fade away. A few continued careers-Debbie Reynolds, playing older women, but most just did their thing out of the spotlight. People like Doris Day and Olivia de Haviland are still alive but you never see them. Doris Day works with animals and deHaviland is 100 now. Betty White started her career a long time ago but all we remember her as is playing old women.
Marilyn was smart and talented, as well as greedy for fame. Maybe she'd have been able to get more of the type of roles she wanted as her beauty and youth faded and her acting talent remained. She may have ended up like Meryl Streep-well respected. She was intelligent enough to know that youth is just one phase of life. She was in a tough era for women though.
'I've always felt oppressed. I know a lot of people would go, "Oh, that's ridiculous for you to say that. You're a successful white, wealthy pop star,'" but I've had the s*** kicked out of me for my entire career, and a large part of that is because I'm female and also because I refuse to live a conventional life. I've created a very unconventional family. I have lovers who are three decades younger than me. This makes people very uncomfortable.'
Madonna, oppressed-former-basket case, pays interior designer six figures to hang a bunch of ridiculous floating baskets from her kitchen ceiling in her multi-million dollar Lisbon home.
(For those that don't click the news link quoted, it shows a photo of her high end Lisbon kitchen with 30 odd woven baskets strung from the ceiling in what is either accidental irony and/or Madonna continuing to piss large sums of money away on terrible aesthetic choices.)
When I heard "wicker baskets hanging from the ceiling" I really was thinking of something a little more classy than a Rio de Janerio favela clothesline, but here we are.
That is just so damn ugly. Some stupid interior designer probably told her it was the latest thing in Paris. Celebrities are so dumb. They wastte money on gurus and stylists that are usually nothing more than scam artists trying to sell them overpriced decorations that will just get changed out in a year or two for whatever the next trend is.
Edit: Looked it up.
The names of the books are The English Roses, Mr. Peabodys Apples, Yakov and the Seven Thieves, The Adventures of Abdi, Lotsa de Casha
Shit, you awakened a long-dormant memory where one of them was read to the class in 6th grade (you might be wondering why 6th graders are having a story read to them but I don't really remember the context, nor do I particularly want to). Contrary to what you might expect, it wasn't that bad. The plot still ingrained into my memory has a kid thinking that a neighbor is stealing apples from a farmers market, so he starts telling others that he's a thief, then it turns out the neighbor had already prepaid for them (or something like that), and makes him a cut up a feather pillow and try to recover every feather since rumors are nearly impossible to clean up. Or something like that. But if I can hold on to details from 15 years ago while forgetting the names of most of my teachers and friends there's something very wrong here.
