"It's not the same."

Maybe every adoptive parent recognizes this sentence. It's all over the internet. It's a quotation from Rebecca Walker's book, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. I should come clean and say that I know Walker a bit from our overlapping days in college (hers) and graduate school (mine).

One day, Miranda and I were talking about the girls, and she mentioned Walker's book. She summarized the part where Walker writes: "I don't care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn't the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood." I felt a little fire get lit in me. The fire was made of anger and fear. I googled the book, and found that this passage had ignited the rage of many others, as well.

Like many people, I resent being told how I feel. My reaction to her words would have been different if Walker had characterized them as her own feelings, and not mine, or yours. But maybe this is the danger of such a young person authoring memoir after memoir, particularly someone who has been labeled, by her publisher and fans, as the voice of third-wave feminism. Maybe she has come to believe she is an ultimate authority. But this is an inherent failing in Baby Love. Because the projection of this kind authority works as a shield, a protection against vulnerability, which makes her seem more unsure than not. And it turns her subjective experience into something generic, which is not what I want from a memoir. How about you?

I don't buy her subsequent backpedaling. She says now that she only meant to suggest that there are different kinds of love a parent experiences for each child. On her blog, however, she writes that she felt she had a right to celebrate the absence of certain hardships that biological families don't have to confront. But isn't this like a rich person saying, "I have a right to celebrate my wealth because my life is free of the hardships that poor people face?" Maybe you'll balk at this analogy. I think it fits.

Here's where I remove my own shield. The point is, for me, that the passage inspires my anger because it goes right to the heart of the vulnerability that is part of my experience, so far, as an adoptive parent. The point is that, while I believe Walker is wrong, I will never know for sure. My girls are my only children. It's true that Walker has no adopted children, so she can't know, either. Still, I wonder, would my girls and I be closer, would they be more mine, if they had come out of my own body?

At the same time, I shake my head at myself when my mind starts wandering down this particular path. After all, if they had come out of my body, they would be different people, and I love them as they are. I love and honor their origins as they are. These "what if" thoughts lead nowhere, but they do provide good excuses for procrastination, however, as well as an exquisite means of self-torture.

Will they accept this love, this whole mother on earth thing? Eager to put off writing again, and seek out more anguish, I followed Google around to various anti-adoption discussions. I found one angry adoptee who takes Walker's critique to a new level. Her rants against adoption are born, if you will, of personal experience. Like Walker, she speaks generically. True to form, I took her words in. But I didn't feel the anger I felt when I read Walker's passage. Instead I felt sadness, worry, and guilt. Does every parent, biological and non-biological, feel guilt about their spectacular children, like they somehow got away with something?

The angry girl blames adoptive parents, it seems to me, for somehow capitalizing on the tragedy and pain of others in order to fulfill their selfish desires to create an "artificial" family. I hate the convervatism, the condemnation, the joylessness, and hopelessness in her beliefs. But the real question is, what will my girls feel? And yet, even at this point, just ten months in, I know that even if they become angry adoptees who blast adoption on the web and elswhere, the pleasure, the honor, of having loved and cared for them will be something I will never regret.

"Step away from the keyboard," my husband poked his head into my office to say. And, somehow, I wrenched myself away from the screen. "I feel guilty," I confessed to him when I turned around. "You should feel guilty for spending so much time googling when you are supposed to be writing," he said. "That girl is so angry," I said. "There are angry people all over," he said.

The truth is, no memoir, no blog, not even my own, can capture the deep, daily pleasure I feel in loving these bright, laughing sprits: my girls. In the end, we're only human beings, here on this earth to care for each other. I have always believed this. And when I turn away from the screen, my job, my joy, is simple and clear.