Time For Reading

Over the next hour, Peck asks the usual questions. Today the caller is a Tennessee kindergarten teacher who adopted a former student out of foster care about a year ago only to realize she cannot handle the girl’s emotional and psychological wounds. But the conversation was much the same on other days with other callers: the mother in the Midwest who brought four boys from Poland who she thought were biological brothers and came to realize that one was not related to the other three at all and that he needed a home where he could get individual attention; or the mother of a 5-year-old in Virginia, born in the Congo, who killed the family pet and threatened to stab his adoptive siblings; or the mother in Ohio whose 7-year-old would not stop masturbating in public and was acting sexually aggressive toward her older brother.

Does she hurt animals? Peck asks the Tennessee mother, as she asks every caller. Have extremely different behavior inside and outside the home? Treat you worse than she treats your husband? Have eating or food issues? Bodily function issues? Irregular sleep patterns? Does she lie? Make false accusations? Hurt herself? Hurt other children? Do you hide the kitchen knives from her at night? Worry that she will turn everyday things into weapons?

Even as she asks all this, Peck is pretty sure that most, perhaps all, of the answers will be yes. Peck knows this world intimately — she is the mother of nine, and of the four who were adopted, three have tortured psychological histories. She also knows this world professionally. She is one of a tiny handful of adoption professionals in the U.S. who specialize in finding new homes for children whose original adoptive parents give them up, and she’s arranged about 80 of these since she began five years ago.

Technically this is called “disruption” (if the interruption comes before the adoption is finalized) and “dissolution” (if it comes after). Those who are appalled by the very thought often call it “rehoming,” as if with a pet. Those like Peck, who believe it has been the dirty little secret of the adoption world for far too long, prefer “second chance adoption,” which is what Peck calls her agency.

It’s her mission, she says, to make the process open, nonjudgmental and safe, rather than confused, shameful and marginally regulated, as it has been for decades.

“To shame the parents and push it underground when it happens is no help to these families, or these children,” she says.

Peck recognizes that desperation. But missing from coverage like that, she says, is the message that “all the parents who give up these children are not monsters, all the parents who give them a new home are not pedophiles, and there is a legal, safe, loving way to do what is best for the child.”

Most of all, she says, “These children are not doomed. Just because they cannot live with a first adoptive family doesn’t mean that they can’t have a happy life with a second one. I see success stories most of the time.”

Peck’s caseload is the closest thing there is to a database of what works and what does not when placing a child in a new home. She is, she admits, a self-taught and solitary expert, and she would like to change that, too.

“We need to talk about this, study it, share experiences,

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