"David Gerrold - The Martian Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

I'd gone to the National Conference of the Adoptive Families of America at the Los Angeles Airport
Hilton. There were six panels per hour, six hours a day, two days, Saturday and Sunday. I picked the
panels that I thought would be most useful to me in finding and raising a child and ordered tapes -- over
two dozen -- of the sessions I couldn't attend in person. I'd had no idea there were so many different
issues to be dealt with in adoptions. I soaked it up like a sponge, listening eagerly to the advice of
adoptive parents, their grown children, clinical psychologists, advocates, social workers, and adoption
resource professionals.

But my real reason for attending was to find the child.

I'd already been approved. I'd spent more than a year filling out forms and submitting to interviews. But
approval doesn't mean you get a child. It only means that your name is in the hat. Matching is done to
meet the child's needs first. Fair enough -- but terribly frustrating.

Eventually, I ended up in the conference's equivalent of a dealer's room. Rows of tables and
heart-tugging displays. Books of all kinds for sale. Organizations. Agencies. Children in Eastern Europe.
Children in Latin America. Asian children. Children with special needs. Photo-listings, like real-estate
albums. Turn the pages, look at the eyes, the smiles, the needs. "Johnny was abandoned by his mother at
age three. He is hyperactive, starts fires, and has been cruel to small animals. He will need extensive
therapy...." "Janie, age 9, is severely retarded. She was sexually abused by her stepfather, she will need
round-the-clock care...." "Michael suffers from severe epilepsy...." "Linda needs..." "Danny needs..."
"Michael needs..." So many needs. So much hurt. It was overwhelming.

Why were so many of the children in the books "special needs" children? Retarded. Hyperactive.
Abused. Had they been abandoned because they weren't perfect. or were these the leftovers after all the
good children were selected? The part that disturbed me the most was that I could understand the
emotions involved. I wanted a child, not a case. And some of the descriptions in the book did seem
pretty intimidating. Were these the only kind of children available?

Maybe it was selfish, but I found myself turning the pages looking for a child who represented an easy
answer. Did I really want another set of needs in my life -- a single man who's old enough to be
considered middle-aged and ought to be thinking seriously about retirement plans?

This was the most important question of all. "Why do you want to adopt a child?" And it was a question I
couldn't answer. I couldn't find the words. It seemed that there was something I couldn't write down.

The motivational questionnaire had been a brick wall that sat on my desk for a week. It took me thirty
pages of single-spaced printout just to get my thoughts organized. I could tell great stories about what I
thought a family should be, but I couldn't really answer the question why I wanted a son. Not right away.

The three o'clock in the morning truth of it was a very nasty and selfish piece of business.

I didn't want to die alone. I didn't want to be left unremembered.

All those books and TV scripts ... they were nothing. They used up trees. They were exercises in excess.
They made other people rich. They were useless to me. They filled up shelves. They impressed the
impressionable. But they didn't prove me a real person. They didn't validate my life as one worth living. In
fact, they were about as valuable as the vice-presidency of the United States.

What I really wanted was to make a difference. I wanted someone to know that there was a real person