Dear Reader,

I welcome my stepbrother, Matt, to this public discussion of our private business. I owe him thanks for the clarification of our conversation from the other day. I think I follow his argument, but I’m not completely persuaded. As he writes, behavior results from an interaction of genes and the environment. Our parents were a fundamental part of that environment when we were growing up. My point is not to blame them. They acted out of a kind of idealism when they got into their group marriage. But I don’t want other parents to take the same decision lightly. There’s a reason why our civilization stopped practice polygamy a thousand years ago.

I’d like to point out as well that none of the four children from that group marriage have not gone on to raise their own biological children with a partner. I don’t think that can be coincidence.

As a doctor, I’m trained to see bodies as machines. But as a parent of adopted kids, I know there’s something more than deoxyribonucleic acid involved in the cock-eyed way my daughter Chloe is looking at me as I type this. She knows this half-smile, her head tilted to one side, will draw me away from my keyboard, knows from all the experience of her thirty-five months of life that I can’t continue to ignore her when she plants little kisses on my shin… I’m signing off…