Madonna gets her way....Baby Mercy is hers.

[whooosh]

Feel so frustrated for all those going through the adoption process who don't have the cash "big guns" she has.

You are incredibly patronizing, Kristina. I am fully aware that life as an "a-parent" is complicated - I live it every day.

What exactly does my "choice of words reveal"?

When I say China gave me my daughter I am referring to the Chinese govt. who facilitated the adoption, the lovely foster family who nutured her for several months and of course her birth parents (yes I do know she was "born to birth parents" . I have enormous empathy for them.

As I have been through the same gruelling homestudy process as you no doubt went through, I am fully aware of the challenges my DD will face one day but just now she is 4 and a half years old and I'm sure she'd agree with me that things are "pretty bloody marvellous".

However, I sense that your adoption experience has not been quite so positive...

perfect - the things that i have said here about adoption and loss are not controversial to most adoptive parenst or adoptees and i am sorry that you have found them so. for me they are not an attack on you and your experince, nor a revelation about my own experince but simply a statement of fact

i can see that you do not agree and that's fine

i wish you and your DD well

It's your opinion, not a statement of fact.

Perfectgangofthree, you are missing the point here. It is TRAGIC

for parents to be unable to care for a child, because of economic, social, political or cultural reasons

for a child to be unwanted, neglected, abused or abandoned

for a society ( like the UK, China or Malawi) to have many children grow up in care because their own families cannot care properly for them

There is hard evidence that many parents and children will suffer grief, loss and trauma because of these things.

I disagree with your opinion that these things either don't exist or are "pretty bloody marvellous"

As your child is only four you CANNOT know the full extent of the loss and trauma she has suffered. That is a FACT. I challenge you to find any expert on attachment, child development or adoption who will say otherwise

I hope for your child's sake that she is one of the 20% of children who emerge unscathed.

If she does have issues of grief and loss, I hope that you will be able to step off your high horse and be there for her. In my opinion as someone who works in this field, you seem frighteningly unaware of many crucial issues in adoption. Clearly your "gruelling" home study was incompetent and your post placement support inadequate.

Clifford - if you are "someone who works in this field" then you are probably as incompetent and inadequate as many of the people who work in social services, adoption and child protection, so please spare me the lecture.

I have not disputed that there is sadness and tragedy and grief in adoption but I maintain that adoption isn't "always messy" and that ours has been pretty bloody marvellous.

Of course I cannot know how my dd will feel as she gets older but I refuse to be pessimistic about the future of a bright, shining, happy little girl. I am probably as informed as you are, Cliff, though I dispute your stats, probably because I know many older inter-country adoptees who are not the angst-ridden creatures you like to portray.

Should my daughter have problems when she is older then she will have a mummy and daddy to help her through them - it's what we're there for, not just for the good times.

Tonight she is curled up fast asleep in her own bedroom not an orphanage dormitory. If she wakes up upset in the night my DH will carry her into our bed as he did last night. She knows how loved she is and she loves us back - we're her mum and dad.

Of course it is heart-breaking that her birth mother had to relinquish her but I hope she would find comfort, if only she knew, that her daughter is growing up in a loving family with health care, education and opportunities she could not even dream off.

I'm not on a high horse, just very proud of my resilient little girl and grateful that this spirited human being isn't growing up in an orphanage.

You can be as condescending as you like about my feelings but this has been my experience of inter-country adoption and given that the media insists on misrepresenting it, I feel the need to redress the balance when I have the opportunity.