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LOVE OUR WAY
Julia Rollings, Harper Collins, 2008
ISBN 9780732288136
Reviewed by SM Macrae, MA, PH.D
(Editor, EMK Press; Adoption Panel Member, Surrey Children’s Services,
UK)
Intercountry adoption has grown exponentially in the last ten years.
There’s been increasing exposure of child trafficking within various
intercountry adoption communities. The publication of Julia Rollings’
book LOVE OUR WAY is timely. It will assist families, administrators
and politicians in reviewing the fierce joys that intercountry adoption can
bring to parents and children alike. It also addresses the reality she dealt
with when her family found that two of the children they had adopted were
both stolen and trafficked. Though a personal story, how Julia dealt with
the blows to her family offers others a ‘family way’ of coming to terms with
trafficking.
Don’t look in this book for a strident or political expose of trafficking
in intercountry adoption. Julia has simply written her family’s story. LOVE
OUR WAY is the narrative of her children Akil and
Sabi: stolen from their Indian mother, trafficked by their Indian father,
and adopted by the Rollings family. It’s about the pain of discovering
trafficking, and the sheer guts required to work to give the children not
just their story but a present reality of it. It recounts Julia’s own
instinct to open her children’s story in a way that involved her family as
much as birthfamily. It’s her personal journal of the crisis of trafficking,
surprisingly gentle and without rancour, looking more for solutions to help
her children than create a stir. Julia sets out to show that with ‘love our
way’, search, reunion and the coming together of birth and adoptive family
as ‘our family’ is not a scary option or indeed politically impossible. The
basis of this book is indeed love…it’s an intimate family story made public.
It’s a passage to India, to Auntie Vidya, Julia’s dear friend and
facilitator there… and to Sunama, the children’s mother, and her present
family. It’s a story of poverty and dignity. It shows the kids making sense
of a story that beggars belief. It shows the children’s ties to both
families, but that Australia is home. Moreover, Akil and Sabi’s reunion with
birthfamily in India has produced an exponential emotional narrative for all
the Rollings family; Julia has a large family of adopted kids all of whom
have been affected by the journey their youngest siblings. She gently teases
out how her older children are affected by the journey that Akil and Sabi
take… she is savvy enough to check that ‘love our way’ produced benefits,
not jealousies. And the royalties from this book will augment the economic
support the Rollings have pledged Sunama and her family.
The adoption community has as a tenet that love is not enough. Does this
book suffer from that, from being built on love and healing rather than the
politics required to begin the end of trafficking? Julia does have the
questions that the politicians need to hear in her concluding
chapters. YET the import of this book lies more in the descriptions
she offers of feelings. So we see …Julia’s feelings regarding the
possible loss of her children to their birthmother once the trafficking was
exposed (she tells she would NOT have given her children up, something her
children needed to hear)…. The Rollings children’s conflicted feelings about
their roots and their rooted place in their Australian family… We feel for
Akil and Sabi’s family - Sunama and her husband Babu. Feelings.
This book therefore is about TOUGH love; feelings are at the centre of
this book, and the fulcrum is ‘love our way’. The book shows that
trafficking is a family, and a personal issue, as well as political.
And so - this book is required reading not just for families, but for
those politicians and administrators who administer international adoption.
‘Love our Way’ shows one family’s FAMILY solution to the absolute distress
and suffering that trafficking causes…. |
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