Besides, it's not fair to the kids to make them someone's humanitarian project. Your humanitarian urge will last until about the third tantrum. Melissa Fay Greene: First of all, it's really dangerous to adopt children out of a feeling of altruism. Can you speak to why you made the decisions to adopt Jesse, Helen, Sol, Yosef, and Daniel? O: Some people are skeptical about families with so many kids-think OctoMom, Jon and Kate Gosselin-and some surely believe that by adopting so many, you're the most altruistic of people. We talked to Greene about her parenting (and survival) skills. Why they did it-and how they do it-is the subject of Greene's moving, enlightening, and surprisingly funny new memoir, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (Sarah Crichton/FSG), which folds an adoption primer into a meditation on family. At last count, she and her husband, Don Samuel, a defense attorney, have added five kids to their "bio" group of four: one from a Bulgarian orphanage and four from Ethiopia. To her neighbors in midtown Atlanta, she's also known as the lady who, in 1999, the year before her oldest child left for college, decided to adopt more kids, at least partially to ward off empty-nest syndrome. To most readers, Melissa Fay Greene is the prizewinning author of such journalistic gems as The Temple Bombing and Praying for Sheetrock. How a working mother of four adopted five foreign-born children and lived to write about it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |