Sunday, May 11, 2008

Oops, I must eat my words...

...(well, some of them, anyway). The Star actually did have one really good article in its motherhood section yesterday. They interviewed Lesley Parrott, mother of Alison Parrott, an 11-year-old girl who was brutally murdered in the summer of 1986, when I had only been married & living in this city for about a year. The Parrott family home was about one subway stop south of ours, & the posters asking "Did you see Alison?" were everywhere for a long time after the girl's disappearance.

Although our situations are very different, Parrott is still a bereaved parent, & talks about grief in a way that had me nodding my head all through the article.

In other noteworthy reading, this week's issue of Maclean's (Canada's version of Time or Newsweek) had a great feature story about how difficult it is becoming to adopt from China (or anywhere else internationally, for that matter). It doesn't appear to be online yet (I guess because the issue is still on newsstands), but I thought it gave a good picture of the hurdles that prospective adoptive parents face. "Just adopt," indeed....

4 comments:

  1. I was impressed with the Friday & Saturday editions of our St. Louis paper. Friday's feature was on the hardships of Mother's Day for women whose children have been murdered, and Saturday's Lifestyle section featured a "Journeys to Motherhood" series about three women: one who became pregnant after many years of a childfree-by-choice marriage, another who conceived with IVF, and a third who adopted a child after many years of infertility.

    Of course, the next page was all high-end maternity fashions, but at least the paper made some effort!

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  2. This just might be the turning point! Between your stories and those that Ellen and Alacrity pointed out we may look upon this weekend and say the tide turned.

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  3. Thank you for sharing that article on Lesley Parrott and her daughter. It is interesting how similiar some of the feelings are even though the circumstances between her kind of loss and ours is so different.

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  4. On the China issue--I must admit that I used to be one of those "just adopt" people, until I became educated. Now, even though I still support the idea of someday adding to our family through adoption, all the trouble and heartache that goes along with it just gives me a headache.

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