NYHOMESTUDY BLOG

Originally posted on www.nytimes.com

April 25, 2006

After the Adoption, a New Child and the Blues
By LAURIE TARKAN

When Dr. Michele Zembow, 45 and single, adopted a 15-month-old girl, Kaydi, from China five years ago, the two fell in love instantly. Dr. Zembow had taken three months off work to ease the transition. “I thought it would be like a vacation, this wonderful time with the baby,” she said. Instead, she felt overwhelmed by the round-the-clock demands of the baby. She experienced anxiousness, had bouts of weepiness and felt somewhat isolated and lost. At times, she found herself yelling and short-tempered with Kaydi, whom she adored. “I had an anxious type of depression said Dr. Zembow, a psychologist in Maplewood, N.J. “I felt like I had this romanticized, idealized version of what it would be like that was not at all true.”
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By Allison Martin

Lift Off

An immense cargo plane shuddered into the sky over Saigon. Inside the cabin,
frightened toddlers and older children were strapped in with seat belts along the hard aluminum benches on each side of the aircraft. Down the center of the plane ran a row of 2-foot square cardboard boxes, each containing a precious cargo of two or three babies. A long strap stretched over the row of boxes securing them in place. Agency workers, Air Force personnel and volunteer parent escorts shook off their own fatigue and fear to scurry about trying to quiet the crying. Another flight of Operation Babylift had lifted off. Its cargo of orphan children had now left war torn Vietnam on their way to new lives in a distant country.
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