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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 ethiced.

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 voice 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 PhD. 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 be parents at this moment because of my age, or because this was the time to have kids, but rather that 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, where my family is from, because there's fewer cultural kind of barriers.

Years went by. They researched agencies, gathered documents, got many things notarized, underwent background checks and home visits and on and on.

At one point, Marsha even got on a plane to hand deliver her documents to the agency in Indiana.

I had a bunch of documents like that, copies of our marriage certificate, copies of birth certificates, all of this stuff done.

And the idea of putting it in a FedEx envelope. And so I think I got like a plane ticket for like $120.

And I was in the privileged position to both have the time and money and energy to just fly it on a plane, turn it in and just fly home.

As a professor and a writer, I had a little time off, and this is what I did with my time off.

And I was thinking to myself, if this stuff is gone, what am I going to do?

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