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You know, people will think that you're doing this great kind of selfless act and I always

always say, well, like before you compliment us, like find out what kind of parents we are

because we could be bad at it. Welcome to How To. I'm Amanda Ripley.

Five years ago, Marsha Chatlin and her husband decided they wanted to adopt a child

and they seemed like perfect candidates. Marsha's a Pulitzer Prize winning author and a professor

of history in African American studies at Georgetown. You might also recognize her voiced

from Slate's podcast The Waves where she was a beloved co-host. My husband and I made the decision

to become adoptive parents very early in our relationship. My husband had started a Ph.D.

I had just finished one. We were early in our careers and we just knew that we needed a lot

of building time and I felt like I didn't want to feel like we had to become parents at,

you know, this moment because of my age or because, you know, this was the time to have kids,

but rather that, you know, we really had a deliberative process.

But adopting a child in America is kind of like getting on a rollercoaster ride. The kind that

can last for, well, years. There are dark tunnels, sharp curves, highs and lows, intrusive questions,

and weirdly inappropriate comments from strangers. It's incredibly, incredibly confusing,

and the internet is also infused with very kind of biased or very framed ideas about adoption.

In the beginning, they pursued an international adoption, which seemed logical.

I'm from an immigrant family. I figured it would make sense for us to adopt from Haiti

...