Clarissa's Blog

I started listening to Joyce Maynard’s most recent memoir The Best of Us in a lighthearted mood. She’s one of the most clueless people ever to hold a pen but she describes her exercises in superficiality in a sincere and charming manner. It’s all good fun, I thought.

By chapter 7, however, the book took a very dark turn. Maynard’s ex-husband remarried and had another child. She wanted to have a baby, too, to equal the score but she was past the child-bearing age. To address this problem, Maynard traveled to Ethiopia and purchased two girls who were supposed to help her pretend that she was “a 35-year-old single mother” instead of a very spoilt and careless woman in her late fifties.

But wait, it gets worse.

Within a few months, Maynard tired of the children and rehomed them with people she had casually met a single time in the past. One wouldn’t gift a pet cat to a complete stranger because the cat proved to be unsatisfactory.

International adoptions are a terrible thing. Rich, clueless people purchase children as accessories, separate them from their families, and often even rename them like they are not even human. Then, once they get bored, they can just palm the kids off on somebody else. It’s very similar to how you sell a used coffee-maker on Facebook Marketplace.

There’s no likelihood that children subjected to all this will integrate well and make a positive contribution to society. Maynard herself says it was deeply irresponsible to allow a 58-year-old single woman with an uncertain income to adopt two kids. She never knew and obviously didn’t try to learn their language. She had a very vague idea of what their actual age was. And the next family to which she outsourced these girls knew as little about them. This is breeding ground for all sorts of abuse and unsavory situations.

There are many abandoned children in the US. There’s no reason not to foster an American child and instead trudge to another continent and purchase a kid whom you don’t understand linguistically or culturally.