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From the moment my husband, John, and I adopted our daughter, Annelise, I worried about how we would tell her that she was adopted. I wanted the realization to come gradually, naturally, gracefully. Of course, in the world of parenting, things rarely happen gradually, naturally, or gracefully. But reality has its own mysterious grace and rhythms, as I discovered one summer in Brittany, when Annelise was four. The three of us had spent the year in Italy where John taught at NYU’s Florence campus, and Annelise attended an Italian preschool. (The kids spent most of their time racing around in little cars at dangerously high speeds–good practice for whizzing around Florence in their Vespas when they got to be teenagers.) In May, when the school year was over, the university stopped paying rent on our Florence apartment. Since our house in Pennsylvania was rented through June, we needed someplace to go until then. Miraculously, we found a beach house to … Read on