written by Racialicious deputy editor Thea Lim; originally published at Racialicious
[Editor's note: Though we briefly discussed Anita Tedaldi in this space last week, I wanted to share Thea's post about the issue. We discussed the Racialicious post on this week's Addicted to Race show, which I am certain Carmen will post later today.]
I get a little sensitive when it comes to how transracial parents represent themselves and their families.
So when reader Carleandria sent us a tip about Anita Tedaldi, the white adoptive mother who 1) terminated an adoption (i.e., after 18 months with her adopted South American son, she put him up for re-adoption) 2) wrote about it extensively for the New York Times AND 3) in early October went on the Today Show to talk about it, my stomach turned. It was like watching a car wreck. I couldn’t stop myself from following the links to ingest more and more about this woman, and the portrait she draws of herself.
A little backstory: Tedaldi was already the mother of five biological children when she took on the baby she calls D. D. had a host of physical and emotional issues, Tedaldi writes, all the result of being abandoned by the side of the road. When D. came to live with her, Tedaldi found that D. was not forming a bond with his new family. And Tedaldi’s family did not really take to him either. So Tedaldi found a new home for D.
Now. I should make it clear that my issue here is not that Tedaldi chose to give up the baby. She chose to adopt a special needs baby when she already had five kids and a deployed husband. That seems like a pretty bad choice, but I’m glad that Tedaldi was able to admit to herself that she was not fit to parent D.
What really disgusts me is the way that Tedaldi is trumpeting this story all around town. And while very little has been made of race in this story, I wonder what Tedaldi’s white lady privilege has to do with her apparent total lack of guilt. Or let me correct that: Tedaldi doesn’t just seem remorseless. She seems proud of herself.
Like everyone, I have some skeletons in my closet. But I wouldn’t have Matt Lauer interview me about them. I might write an essay about the things I’d done if I wanted other people to learn from my mistakes, but I’d probably publish it anonymously. Why? Because I am ashamed of my skeletons. Isn’t that the regular human response when you realise you’ve really messed up?
Yet in Tedaldi’s essay, she doesn’t show self-reproach. She shows herself to be distraught, she writes extensively about how bad she feels; but she does not once use the word “sorry,” for example. Or “regret.” Or “I was wrong.”
And sometimes, she recounts horrifying details with seemingly no self-awareness at all. Behold the moment in Tedaldi’s essay that gave even the gushy and fawning commenters on the NYT some pause. Describing the moment that D.’s new mother came to take him:
My daughters were watching SpongeBob and said goodbye to their brother almost nonchalantly, as if he was just going out for a bit and would soon be back.
When I was 8 I adopted a bunny. After about a week my parents decided it just wasn’t working out, and we gave the bunny away. I remember trying to talk to the bunny and say goodbye to it. If I was more concerned with my week-long bunny companion than Tedaldi’s children are about their adopted brother, then something is really really wrong.
Yet Tedaldi doesn’t say so. That’s all Tedaldi tells us about her daughters’ reaction. She doesn’t say that she needs to address this pretty shocking callousness in her children. She doesn’t worry that she did a dismal job of creating familial feeling between her bio children and her adopted child. She includes this scene, but it seems more as a means to illustrate 1) how hard it was for her and how alone she was 2) how justified she was in giving the baby away because clearly her family didn’t like him.
It almost feels like Tedaldi is on a mission to represent her behaviour – which deviates pretty wildly from the regular mothering narrative (at least I hope so) – as natural. Or she wants her actions to be viewed as a symptom of the complex nature of human life. The copy on the NYT article states that Tedaldi wrote the article in the hopes that:
it will trigger a deeper understanding of how fragile and fierce the bonds of adoption can be.
The tagline on Tedaldi’s blog says:
Beware, by coming here you may be exposed to the frailty of human nature and to the many contradictions that permeate our existence
In the comments section of an adoption blog criticising Tedaldi, Tedaldi chimes in:
I chose to share the inconsistencies and the human contradictions in my own life in a public forum precisely because I believe we are all made up of good and bad
There’s something of an obsession here. When faced with her own horrible mistake, instead of examining her actions, Tedaldi starts waxing philosophical. Hey, it’s not that she messed up by taking in D. when she had no business doing so, it’s that the whole world is messed up! It’s that adoption is just so complicated! It’s that human nature is just so frail!
Bullshit.
In the material that I read about Tedaldi and D., there is no mention of race anywhere, or that this was a transracial adoption. Yet to me there is something here — if not particularly of white privilege — then of massive gargantuan privilege of some kind. Because the more privilege you have, the less likely you are to feel guilt.
This is because people of privilege are encouraged to think that it is logical they should have better Everything than people without privilege. As people of privilege they are entitled to almost anything they want, even when what they want is a very sick baby that they do not have the means to care for. People of privilege are also strongly discouraged from feeling compassion and connection to the world at large. And people of privilege are discouraged from taking on responsibility or guilt.
Just look at said NYT comments section (and hang on to your lunch):
Anita – thank you for sharing. It really was courageous
I admire Ms. Tedaldi’s honesty
Thank you Anita. You are one courageous woman.
You did your best
God bless you.
This is a cliche, but has the whole world gone mad?
Why is this woman seen as being brave, why is she getting spots on primetime daytime, simply for admitting a grotesque mistake? Apparently because she was honest enough to admit she made a grotesque mistake. But where do you draw the line between honesty and shamelessness?
And not everyone who admits to wrongdoing gets a hug from the internet. See, for example, the stark difference in the way the internet treated Britney Spears, another unfit mother. So why the Tedaldi love haze?
I guess because her story comes under the rubric of the mommy industry. But I figure most of all everybody loves Anita because the one she let down is not really human. At least not according to her.
Nowhere in her tear-stained narrative does Tedaldi tell us enough about D. to turn him into a human being. Most of what she tells us about him has to do with his health problems, the quiet implication being that no one would want such a difficult baby:
The first few weeks at home, people often asked me if he had experienced a brain injury. D. also suffered from coprophagia, or eating one’s own feces, which my pediatrician assured me the majority of children outgrow by the age of four. Most mornings, when I went to pick him up from his crib, I’d find him with poop smeared on his face and bedding.
Instead of details about what D. looked like, or what made him smile, or what kinds of things he liked to do – or even some unique ways he acted out! – we get this heartless description.
Why didn’t she just say “he had coprophagia,” explain what that was, and leave it at that? If we love someone, we usually try to describe their moments of sickness with the most dignity and respect possible. But Tedaldi gives us this extremely graphic image and does not say anything like “but obviously it wasn’t his fault” or “but it was ok because he was my son and I loved him.” For all her faffing about the intricacy of human nature, Tedaldi does not give D. the chance to be human.
If she thought of D. as human, would she be telling everyone who wants to listen the story of how she rejected him? The fact that D. might one day come across these articles and interviews of herseems like reason enough for Tedaldi to freakin’ shut up.
But she doesn’t. And the print/TV/internet circus around Tedaldi accepts this dehumanisation because in the age of Angelina and Madonna, this is how we have learned to treat transracial adoptees. D. is just another news item about a body of colour who needs to be rescued by white people.
At the end of her article, Tedaldi describes what D.’s new mother said to her:
Samantha squeezed my hand and reassured me that D. would know I had loved him and that I had done a good job.
And then Tedaldi to Matt Lauer:
“I’m not sure that I failed him. I loved him and I tried my best — in that respect I didn’t fail him,” she said.
When a person of privilege is accused of having been negligent (or racist, or sexist, or…), a classic move we often see is the accused dissolving into sobs. They will berate themselves, they will proclaim how terrible they feel, they will soak your t-shirt with their tears. In other words, instead of owning up for whatever they did and focusing on the pain they caused – and how to reduce it – they completely focus on their own pain. In fact, they revel in it, Tedaldi-style.
Discussing Tedaldi’s article in the context of their own adoption process, AfroSpear states:
The one thing that has stuck with me is the words of one of the [adoption] counselors that impressed upon us that once you adopt a child, it’s no longer about you! Once that child enters into your care, their well-being is now are your primary responsibility and you must be committed to deal with “the good, the bad and the ugly”. They are not disposable, like a family pet that is returned to the pound after a few months because no one wants to be bothered to care for it…This [adoption] is not about her, although I did find that her article is all about her and her feelings.
Tedaldi’s article is one of the most grotesque manifestations that I have ever seen of the way that privileged people make EVERYTHING about themselves.
Tedaldi describes her feelings as “grief.” Grief is what we have when we lose a friend or a family member to death, or to the vagaries of life. Grief is not – at least not mainly – what we have when we utterly fuck up and totally let someone down. That is called guilt.
Grief is also what we have when we lose a dream. But D. is not a dream, not a realisation of the adoption fantasy Tedaldi admits to having had her whole life. He’s a human.
This is not a story about a mother and a child. This is not even a story about a woman and a baby. It’s a story about two humans. But that keeps getting lost in the mix.
Thank you for finally saying what I have been thinking ever since this story broke. I thought I was going mad reading all the different articles and all the insane comments in support of HER! I knew that children of color have long been viewed as disposable – by the school system, the legal system, and society in general – but have we no shame? This woman should be ashamed of herself, and I’m glad that someone finally had the stomach to say so outloud.
This is a minor point, but I am not sure it is clear how many bio kids Tedaldi had at the time of the adoption. Although she has five children now, I think she may have had only one or two children at the time of the adoption. The timeline from the NY Times story is difficult to figure out. I’m also not quite clear on how long she had the boy, or how old he was when placed with her. Please note: These possible discrepancies don’t negate any of the points in your essay.
I do find it odd that Tedaldi claims to “love” the boy but says they didn’t “bond.” Maybe if I had a child with attachment disorder, I could understand what seems like an oxymoron to me. I’d be interested to hear someone speak more about whether and how love and bonding differ.
Also, re her not showing guilt: To me, she seems to be in denial by saying that she didn’t end the adoption; instead, she says she made another adoption plan for D. (whom she calls “the child”, which seems more distant than saying “my little boy” or “my son”). As I commented late on the other post about Tedaldi (sorry for being redundant), there is no doubt: this was a failed, dissolved adoption. I wonder if Tedaldi is looking for some kind of public absolution; if so, I think that would correspond with the lack of guilt she professes.
I am guessing the denial of guilt might be a psychological self-preservation method. The alternative–defining herself as a failure as a parent, something I bet she feels is key to her identity–must be horrible to her. I am not defending her; this is just my perception based on limited information. I am sure there are other people who would be more honest with themselves and who would have handled this situation differently in the first place. And there are agencies that would not have placed a special-needs baby with her.
(I have no idea if being white makes people more prone to this type of negative coping strategy. I can, however, see how this kind of denial of guilt would help perpetuate white privilege, but I’m not sure white privilege is responsible here. In fact, I’m not even sure Tedaldi’s white. At least, she wouldn’t be among the most advantaged among us whites, since she does speak English with an accent.)
All that said… I feel like people are drawing a lot of inferences about Tedaldi, based on fairly limited information that has been provided (i.e., through the NY Times, her NPR interview, and her TV interview).
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Yes. This.
This story is so tragic. I really struggle with this story because obviously so many mistakes were made, but ultimately I think (hope) they were resolved. Tedaldi is a difficult figure to be sure. Of course she is trying to posit herself in a favorable light. But while the article in the NY Times was one thing, making the media rounds is another. It comes off as self-congratulatory tosh. I wish she had the self-awareness to take this opportunity and turn it into a more teachable moment/activism. But I suppose if she had that level of self-awareness in the first place, none of this would have occurred.
Ugh, she reminds me of the attorneys I used to work for several years ago. No matter how wildly inappropriate their behavior, no matter how much they screwed something up for a client, it got re-written in their heads. They were always either the victim or the hero. I guess that’s how you live with yourself when you don’t have the guts to face yourself.
Thank you for articulating what I couldn’t quite put my finger on about this woman. Certainly there are others to blame (anyone who signed off on this family for adoption) but at some point we are accountable for our choices. She is not the victim in this story. While I am glad this child ended up with a loving family, her whole media tour makes me sick to my stomach.
As I learned from the comments on Racialicious, the baby was actually Ethiopian. She supposedly changed the country to “protect his identity.” Nice try, AT Perhaps you could have better protected his identity by NOT spreading your story all over the media. Shame!
PS: AT is definitely white. White as me, at least. She’s Italian. And although she is an immigrant, that does not in any way negate white privilege. When I think about how I am able to make mistakes without having them attributed to all people with my racial/ethnic background I feel so ashamed that others aren’t given that same courtesy. In this situation, I hate to think how AT would be talked about if she were a WOC… And I also wonder: what if this were her biological child and she just “didn’t bond” with him? Would a parent that gave birth to a child with special needs receive so much encouragement and support for giving that child up for adoption so that “he could have the family he deserves”? I would hope not. I have never adopted, so I do not know how it feels. But I have several adopted family members and, as far as I can tell, they are no more and no less their parents’ children than the children via biology. And if a bio parent gave a child up with these circumstances…whoa. They would be vilified. Why is this different?
Correction: AT supposedly changed the geographical location the baby was from to protect him.
As the white adoptive mother of a beautiful black daughter, I have been distraught by this story. This analysis is refreshing in that it touches on the issue of D’s (or David’s or Matteo’s, depending on which blog post of Tedaldi’s you refer to) race, which most other commentary hasn’t addressed.
I would like to weigh in by saying that the only good thing to have come out of this is that this child is now with parents who truly, genuinely love him. A worse scenario would be for him to be raised in a home where he is a second class citizen to his parents and his siblings. I hope he is deeply loved in his new home.
As for the rest, it is a series of failures and offenses—mainly those of Tedaldi—that inflict damage on the perception of adoption in general and more particularly, on those of us who choose transracial adoption responsibly and out of the desire to be parents.
In my opinion—formed after reading too many of Tedaldi’s archived blog posts that contradicted the image she sold the rest of us over at the NYTimes (where Lisa Belkin was complicit)—Anita Tedaldi considered herself to be some sort of great white hope to this child. Tedaldi is now the “Style Maven” over at The Huffington Post and I left a comment asking her whether she thought it was stylish to adopt a black child or to give him away when he didn’t meet up to her fantasies. She moderated my comment into oblivion. Ultimately, this is a woman who was seeking absolution and, too, fame and she did it at the expense of this innocent child who clearly meant little to her. All the “grief” and “sadness” expressed in her piece as well as her fluff interview with Matt Lauer was feigned. Not a bit of it felt sincere and just a little bit of internet sleuthing confirmed that something wasn’t right.
To clarify, Tedaldi didn’t have five bio kids at the time D. came home. That would almost have been preferable. What she had was three bio children when she began her adoption process. It was during this time that the adoption agency and social worker had doubts, but Tedaldi pressured the social worker into approving her. Surely, this agency is at fault. However, during the adoption process, Tedaldi knew she was pregnant with number Four—a big no-no with any reputable agency because it’s not in the best interest of the child being placed—and didn’t tell her social worker. So, she brought D (or David or Matteo) home (from South America or Ethiopia) had her fourth baby, became pregnant again and had a fifth. Then, despite writing a scathing attack about a Dutch couple who disrupted their adoption and despite writing rather extensively about how great D. was and how his doctors said he’d caught up developmentally, this vile woman gives her adopted son away as if he were a dog from the pound who kept peeing on her carpets. One cannot help but ask the question we all know the answer to and it is this: Would she do the same if she didn’t bond exactly right with one of her bio kids?
My point is, this woman is a compulsive liar or is mentally ill or both. She should never have been given the NYTimes platform and she is an embarrassment to many of the adoptive parents I know. And, too, she is definitely, without question, a person who would never admit to her copious amounts of white privilege that will continue to let her get away with, and even reward her for, being the fraud that she is.
I don’t think this is necessarily a race issue or an issue of “privilege.” I don’t know what her motivation for writing it was, but based on what I’ve read, I’d say this was a poorly thought out adoption that should never have been allowed and Teddaldi certainly hasn’t presented herself in a flattering light. Adoption disruption isn’t talked about that often. Maybe it should be so other people will be better prepared before adopting a child they aren’t prepared to care for.
The woman had a number of other small children at home and a husband who was deployed overseas and what was apparently a poor support system. She was ill-equipped to take on a baby with reactive attachment disorder and other special needs that ideally required a family with no other young children and a mother who could stay home and devote most of her time and attention to bonding with him. I don’t know that I blame her other kids for not bonding with this kid who ate his own feces and may well have been notable mainly for taking up their mom’s time and attention and disrupting the environment with his crying. It’s not the child’s fault for reacting this way after being abused and abandoned and sent to a strange country to live with total strangers, but other little kids aren’t going to react with automatic love either. The sisters’ reaction was one more indicator that this was not a placement that had been successful. At least Teddaldi found this boy a home with people who probably are better prepared and have more time. She hasn’t provided enough identifying information to disrupt their lives or the boys’. This is her particular story that she is putting out there, not the kid’s.
“D. also suffered from coprophagia, or eating one’s own feces, which my pediatrician assured me the majority of children outgrow by the age of four. Most mornings, when I went to pick him up from his crib, I’d find him with poop smeared on his face and bedding.”
This section really bugged me too. I could have written the same things about one of my dogs when he was a puppy, and probably showed him more love through it than she showed her son. I loved my dog, i cleaned him up, i called the doctor, and we kept working on it until it was resolved. Because i loved him.
Anyway…
I’m also uncertain whether white privelege was the main culprit here. I’m not saying it wasn’t a factor, i have no idea really, i’m just wondering if maybe “reality TV” is more to blame. (“Reality TV” meaning reality tv, the media, today’s society in general.)
The media–and the public–thrive on sharing the details of our private lives on camera as if it were no big deal. We encourage it. We applaud it. We enjoy “the show.” And in the process we encourage people to become spectacles. The attention is more important than anything else, to us the viewers and to them in the spotlight. (I offer last weeks’ “balloon boy” fiasco as exhibit A.)
I’m not saying race wasn’t an issue. I find it odd that the child’s race wasn’t mentioned in the NY Times article. Though i wonder if people would react differently if it were? Shameful that race was glossed over, but wouldn’t it also be seen as shameful if race were implicated?
Thank you so much! Very well written. When I first read about this child my heart ached. Then I got angry. I went to her blog and basically told her what I thought of her (not much) and that she had no business sharing this story – it’s not her’s to share, it is the child’s story. She stole it from him with intent to profit from it. She’s lower than low.
I would agree that anyone who is white benefits from white privilege. But I could see someone else professing the exact same story as Tedaldi’s, in exactly the same way, if he/she had adopted a white special needs baby. So I didn’t necessarily see evidence that white privilege was a driver behind Tedaldi’s adoption fantasy and subsequent adoption dissolution.
As an aside, I agree with the point that white privilege is separate from immigrant status (and from one’s accent, which also may be separate from immigration status and race). But I would also say that the way one speaks can also accord privilege or lack of privilege, though I think not to as great a degree as race. So, if we’re considering how white privilege played into this situation, it seems relevant to me to keepin mind that Tedaldi has at least one small disadvantage (in terms of how she is viewed by the dominant culture in the U.S.) b/c of her accent. I admit, my point is probably a VERY minor point in this whole story.
This said, I’ve only read Tedaldi’s NY Times article and one other blog post in which she acknowldeged previously condemning another adoption dissolution. I can easily believe that aaryn b. found clear evidence of how white privilege played a role in this particular situation from Tedaldi’s other blog posts. (Thanks for providing the additional background and the clarifications, arryn b.)
Thanks everyone for the comments!
@Sharon
After this article was first published, and I realised via the Racialicious comments section that what I had reported about Tedaldi was untrue (ie that she had 5 bio kids at the time of adoption), I considered adding an update to my post to say that my information had been inaccurate.
However, it occurred to me that the reason why I said Tedaldi had 5 bio kids is because SHE SAID she had 5 bio kids. In that sense I felt absolved of “misrepresenting” her – I simply reported what she had said in her own article.
In fact it is quite shocking and makes her even more despicable that she clearly actively hid the fact that her bio kids were born before and after she adopted D. The way I reported the story – based on her own obfuscations – actually makes her sound better.
So I guess I disagree that we are “drawing inferences on Tedaldi” from limited info. I would agree with you if other people were reporting her story. However all the information we have – from the NYT and the Today Show (I didn’t look at the NPR source) – is actually info supplied directly by Tedaldi.
@ Andrea and #13 Sharon
Just to clarify, my line of questioning about Tedaldi’s privilege had more to do with wondering how privilege intersected with her apparent lack of remorse (and also the way she has been received), rather than thinking that she either adopted or disrupted b/c of privilege.
Many people adopt and many people disrupt for a complex range of reasons that I really don’t think I am qualified to speak on. What I wanted to talk about more was the way Tedaldi represented herself, the way that representation has just been eaten up by media outlets, and what privilege has to do with both.
“But D. is not a dream, not a realisation of the adoption fantasy Tedaldi admits to having had her whole life. He’s a human.”
Yes, exactly. Thank you for this well written and well thought out article. You articulated perfectly what I think many of us have felt about this whole tragic story.
I am the mother of two children, one biological and one adoptive. I agree with all of you who point out that this adoption never should been allowed to begin with. I also question Tedaldi’s motives for adopting. However, I can tell you that when we adopted our son, it was for life. At fifteen months, he became a huge behavior issue and pretty much put our lives on hold for the next three years. Last year, he was diagnosed with a hearing loss and now wears bilateral hearing aids. We have been through insurance battles, IEP meetings, switched his schools, driven across town weekly for speech, and I have pulled him out of the district’s special education program because his teacher didn’t believe in him.
Now, this is in no way as severe as trying to parent a child with reactive attachment disorder. However, attachment is a two-way street, and it sounds like Tedaldi was also too busy with her other children to do what my husband did when our son came home (he sat in a chair with him for 24 hours, cuddling and talking to him, feeding him, loving him). And his older sister thought the world revolved around him.
I, too, am grateful that “D” is now in an appropriate and loving family. Tedaldi was clearly right to give him up. But I can tell you that never in all of the chaos that ensued with my son did I ever consider “giving him back.” He is my SON. I could no more pass him off to another family than I could my daughter. The fact that he has special needs makes the thought of what Tedaldi did even more frightening.
I hesitate to judge, but I agree that this story is disturbing on a number of levels. I do not understand. And perhaps that is a good thing.
I have white privelege and class privelege.
I have adopted a son of color and have bio children.
Our son has been an incredible blessing to our family and always will be, no matter what.
I cannot see how white privelege can take the blame for this person’s reprehensible behavior. I think it is something much more pathological than privelege and I do not like the idea of being lumped in with her because I am white and have adopted a son of color. How is this not racist?
@Laura — I’m also a white woman with class privilege and 3 children: an adopted daughter who is black and two biological children who are white. I don’t feel lumped in with Anita Tedaldi in any way.
That said, while it’s hard to say for sure, I do think that unintentional racism may well play a role in this story. D. was treated very differently than her bio children. Given many white people’s implicit preference for lighter skin it’s hard not to imagine that playing a role in how Tedaldi parented D. (Project Implicit – https://implicit.harvard.edu/ – is pretty eye-opening, or at least it was for me). Someone with a healthy acknowledgment of issues surrounding racism and unintentional bias works on reducing bias in there life, every step of the way. I think someone like Anita Tedaldi breezes right on by.
I don’t think Anita Tedaldi is representative of adoptive parents though, just a reminder that their is a lot of work to be done to protect children in adoption and particularly when it comes to transcultural and transracial adoption.
thank you. thank you. THANK YOU.