Anita Tedaldi is a cruel, horrible woman. How can one say this?

Well, let’s just start at the beginning. In January of 2008, she wrote an article for Military.com that has since been removed from their website titled “We Can’t Trade In Our Children or Husbands”. China Adoption Talk got an excerpt, though:

Hard to believe, but a Dutch couple returned their adopted Korean daughter after seven years. [I blogged about this case here]. The parents adopted the little girl from South Korea when she was 4 months old. Reports of how the situation unfolded were contradictory but it appears that the girl was given over to the care of the Social Welfare Department in Hong Kong, where the man is a diplomat, because they could no longer care for her. The couple explained that the girl was emotionally unresponsive and all attempts at therapy failed.

As an adoptive parent, really as just a parent, I can’t justify this couple’s behavior under any circumstance. I don’t think these people are monsters, though the result of their action is monstrous because they chose to follow their selfish and unloving side instead of choosing to tough it out and love their daughter no matter what. Sadly, the impact on this child will be devastating.

Perhaps they had good intentions when they adopted, most likely they did, but something went wrong along the way. These parents were probably unprepared to deal with some difficult aspects of adoption. It’s easy to imagine only the best of a new family member, just as we do with our biological children. No one envisions mediocrity, let alone problems. I have imagined perfect things in the past only to discover the road to family or marital bliss requires lots of hard work and an effort to practice unconditional love.

… From personal experience I can say that adoption can be challenging. But so can a biological child who has issues, or problems in marriage, or work-related difficulties. When our adopted son Matteo started having health issues we had to consult several specialist and it was hard for him to be around his sisters, it became challenging. This doesn’t mean that my husband or I ever had any second thoughts about adopting Matteo, or that we considered him any different than our biological children.

Now, who can guess how Anita Tedaldi’s own adoption turned out? You guessed it: she adopted a baby boy and then, eighteen months later, gave him away.

D. was my adopted son. He’s a little boy from South America who came to our home several months before that frightening night. He arrived through Miami International Airport on a Monday afternoon, and I was so anxious that on my six-hour drive to pick him up, I dug my nails into the steering wheel for the duration of the trip, leaving marks I can still see today. I couldn’t contain my excitement. After waiting many long months, I’d finally hold and kiss my son.

His social worker, his pediatrician and his neurologist all told me that he had come a long way, and that attachment issues were to be expected with adoption. But D.’s attachment problems were only half the story. I also knew that I had issues bonding with him. I was attentive, and I provided D. with a good home, but I wasn’t connecting with him on the visceral level I experienced with my biological daughters. And while it was easy, and reassuring, to talk to all these experts about D.’s issues, it was terrifying to look at my own. I had never once considered the possibility that I’d view an adopted child differently than my biological children. The realization that I didn’t feel for D. the same way I felt for my own flesh and blood shook the foundations of who I thought I was.

I sought help and did some attachment therapy, which consisted of exercises to strengthen our relationship, mostly games because of D.’s age. He fell in my arms many times throughout the day, we sang songs, read books, repeated words while we made eye contact. We built castles and block towers and went to a mommy and me class.

None of that was enough, of course, and Anita decided to simply abandon her son.

As I wrestled with these demons, things remained very tense in my home; whenever my husband was stateside we fought incessantly. I felt I was swimming upstream until one early morning Jennifer called, and told me that she had found a great family for D. They had seen his pictures, learned about his situation, and fallen in love with him. The mom, Samantha, was a psychologist, and the family had adopted another boy with similar issues just a couple of years before.

I spoke to Samantha and her husband a few times on the phone and right off the bat I felt comfortable with them. During one of our conversations we decided that she’d come down to meet D. by herself, to ease the transition.

This meant that the decision was final. D. would be leaving my home.

As she said herself — she followed her selfish and unloving side rather than choosing to tough it out and love her son regardless of the circumstances. Did she honestly have no idea that, hey, maybe the first few years might be tough, especially for a baby who was found abandoned on the side of the road? A child who was neglected is not going to automatically be a bright, happy, bubbly baby who will just attach himself to the first person who calls herself Mommy. And she just went and exacerbated his attachment anxieties by abandoning him, too.

Honestly, she probably should have given him away because frankly, she’s a terrible mother who never deserved him. I’m curious: would she give away one of her biological children just because they weren’t attaching to her in the way that she expected? Children are not robots. They don’t respond how you want them to respond. They don’t come without their share of problems or issues, and I just can’t imagine how a parent could choose to just give up on one of their children, especially when they went through so much effort to get their child. She condemns the other couple for giving up their child, saying it would have a “devastating impact”, but apparently that didn’t matter to her with “D.”.

“D.” deserved a real family, one that wouldn’t view him as disposable and throw him away if things didn’t turn out exactly the way they wanted them too. I hope he’s found it with his new family.