What if No One's Watching?

It has become acceptable recently, from what I'm reading, to accuse Angelina Jolie of adopting her two kids, Maddox and Zahara, as "accessories." As if becoming the mother of these two kids was a stunt to make her cooler and more multicultural. In the same vein, there are the claims that these children are commodities that she "bought," that maybe they are not orphans but were kidnapped, etc. These claims aren't just leveled at Jolie, of course, but at adoptive parents of international kids all over the U.S.

And it pisses me right off.

I obviously don't know Angelina Jolie personally. However, from what I've seen of the role she has played as a Goodwill Ambassador, and how much of her time and money she has dedicated to international poverty alleviation and healthcare issues, especially those pertaining to children, it seems ridiculous to me to think the worst possible thing about her adoptions without knowing any facts. Why in the world would we choose to assume she adopted these kids for the kids of base and selfish reasons that are being ascribed to her? What evidence is there for that? As far as I can see, the only evidence is that the kids have a different skin color than she does. And that, y'all, is racism.

Though I know Angelina only in my dreams (heh), I do have the great fortune of knowing some other international adoptive families personally (both IRL and online), and knowing them only strengthens my sense of there being a whole host of right reasons to do this, and that those right reasons are probably a whole lot more common than the wrong ones, are attributed to my girl Angie. It's not about accesssorizing, or about being PC, or about buying babies. It's also not about rescuing, or fetishizing, or being taking babies from their native cultures and Americanizing them. It's about creating a family. It's about finding a match between people who want to be parents and a child who needs parents. It's about negotiating the delicate balance between preserving the birth culture of your child and making sure she doesn't feel objectified or out of place in the culture in which she'll be raised. It's about staying up at night worrying about how you will explain to your little girl that even though her birth mother left her, that doesn't mean she wasn't wanted--it just means her birth mother was a woman in a misogynist society who didn't have all of the options she should have. It's about love. The people I know are parents, and their little girl is their child, and calling that something like "fetishizing" or "baby buying" or "commodifying" does a great disservice to their family, especially by those people who think they have open minds about what constitutes a family. So they should shut the fuck up.

That is all.