Wonderful article. Reminds me why I came to salon in the first place.

Just...wow.

Thank you for this.

Wonderful.

I was moved by this article, but also made uncomfortable by the belated mention of the author's son on the second page. Maybe his presence is felt more in the book, but it felt like the living child was being lost in grief for his sister and then in the author's journey to adoption.

Ann, thank you for sharing your story. I'm the father of two girls and I can't imagine your agony or the joy at having Annabelle. When I was done with your piece, I called my wife, who's out of town for the weekend with my two daughters visiting family, and told her I loved her and them.

Until now.

Yes, stories like this are part of why I came to Salon, too. Shang di ju fu ni.

I have a feeling that if mothers knew all the things they should be afraid of, they wouldn't be able to function at all.

Thanks Salon for this excerpt - just bought the whole book for a friend of mine.

Wow and thanks.

Thank you.

if any of my children died. (I have three.) I realized after the birth of my first that I would not be able to be noble and strong and continue living if anything happened to her. I have since come to realize that I would have to continue living for the sake of the other children; if not for them, I would still just take the least painful route and kill myself.

I do have one question (and I mean no offense)...

Why did you decide on a foreign adoption? It seems that you were open to a non-white child, and supposedly there are plenty of those here.

There must be good reason why so many people choose the foreign route, and I am curious as to what those are.

Please understand, I am not challenging your decision, I just want to understand it.

Don't take for granted the goodness of mothers.

I feel sad for your son. Maybe it's just the way the excerpt reads, but I get the feeling that you were so consumed by grief that you were not present for your son. Why on earth should your son be responsible for trying to make you feel better? Were you attending to his needs, too? In any case, I'm sure Annabelle is adorable and full of life. But please, dear god, celebrate Sam as much as you do her.

For the story, which is very touching and life-affirming, but also to the posters who strive to find something, anything, that they can use as a bludgeon against the author.

Oh, but what about Sam, the posters ask? OK, how old is Sam? Maybe he is old enough that he requested not to be in the book. Many authors and even musicians, honor the requests of their children to be excluded from books and TV shows. If I remember correctly the eldest daughter of the Osbournes wanted no part of their TV show and they honored her request for privacy.

Perhaps Sam is a young man or teenager now. (She mentions jigsaw puzzles in the story, which are usually a "toy" of older children.) Why are we assuming that he is close in age to his first sister? Perhaps he wants his privacy or the author is giving him his privacy until he IS old enough to consent to be part of her writings. Perhaps the author is anticipating that he might want to tell his own story of those years. If so, she is one up on Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who fought for years over who "owned" their lives and who could write about it.

Calm yourself folks and read the book before you give Sam buckets of "sympathy" he might not need or want.

I almost didn't read the letters because I knew that some of them somehow would be managing to pass judgment on the author. This is a three page excerpt from a book. The fact that her son is mentioned only in passing is no more significant than the fact that her husband is mentioned only briefly and her own mother isn't mentioned at all. (Even though the article is being printed in honor of Mother's Day!)

Those of you who are concerned that Sam wasn't mentioned enough - exactly which sentences and paragraphs would you have deleted in order to get the room to add in more words about him? To jump from his brief appearances in this article to some kind of concern that in real life he did not get the help and attention that he needed after his sister died is meanspirited and bordering on cruel.

Unless you have read the book (and I have not) you have no idea how much the author wrote about her son when she told the story in full. And, as flyover said, he may have wanted some privacy. If he was 10 when his sister died (and the article suggests that he was) then he is 16 now. Even allowing for the time delay between the completion of a book and its publication, he may well at 14 or 15 have wanted not to have his younger self exposed to the public.

I changed my mind and read the letters because there were only 15 of them. This whole phenomenon of letter-writing on Salon puzzles me. I hope that this touching article doesn't come in for the full treatment.

I too am the mother of a child adopted from China, and I'm about to celebrate my eighth Mother's Day with her (she just turned nine). She is a blessing in my life and continues to bring me happiness and joy every day. She is my only child (my ex and I were unable to have children and chose not to do the fertility treatment route - interestingly he did choose this route with his second wife and they are expecting a bio child in the fall).

My ex and I chose to adopt from China because of the certainty of the process - we are both very security-conscious types and the uncertainty of pursuing a private adoption, in which we would essentially "compete" with other parents for the privilege of adopting a child (I guess maybe our egos were not prepared for that? (grin)) was too much. Other international programs at the time involved suspected corruption or long stays away from home, which didn't seem to jive with our careers at the time. And like many other parents, we felt that China was where the child we were meant to parent was, period. I hope that helps the previous poster re the question "why China"?

Happy Mother's Day to all moms!