May 2020 – Adoption As Family

Post # 6 Orphanage Risks

Post #6 Orphanage Risks

I regularly ask myself why I am writing in such detail about a ten-day adoption process from as faraway as the ’90s. The adoption process in Russia and many other countries has improved. John Brooks (The Girl Behind the Door 204) notes this as well about Poland’s treatment of orphans, “transitioning from institutional orphanages to foster homes“. A shout out to organizations like LUMOS cannot go amiss here.

So why rake over long dead coals? I keep saying it is for personal insight. Is it relevant to a wider audience? Out of curiosity I googled current (at the time I wrote this post) adoption processes to see if any remain that process in a manner similar to our process and found the site, International Adoption.org, which points to several countries that continue to process adoptions almost as quickly and at roughly the same cost as our process in the 90s: Malawi, South Korea and India among the list. There is still some relevancy, beyond the personal, to my pursuit. And now, as noted in Entry#3, crises around the world are leaving daily numbers of orphans. How will they be cared for?

Back to the journal where we are still in this tiny receiving room meeting Yasik. I know most parents meet their child in the midst of hovering professionals; adoptive parents experience no more privacy. Nurses or doulas may be bending over a new mother learning to breast feed. In the case of adoptive parents, orphanage staff are hovering around as these new parents are taking in their introduction to their about-to-be child. Taking him from Dave’s arms, I held him too. But I could see he was becoming overwhelmed and then he cried. My first real mommy moment and I scared the kid. Good start. Thicker Than Blood by Marion Crook, tucks in a healthy bit on page 65 to ease a new parent’s fear of bonding/attachment– sometimes it happens instantly, sometimes it takes a while, but either way it is going to happen she affirms. However, … toward the end of the same page she does temporize with “Bonding can occur despite …”. I who may have been in thrall to the wonder of my emotions for this child surrendered Yasik wordlessly to the sweet-faced doctor he knew was his protector, to someone who had far more well-honed mothering instincts. She took Yasik from me and folded him into her lap. Now all the women were crying, maybe even the one who never looked up from her work. Dave though appeared thrilled, beaming face and expanding chest.

Yasik consoled, we moved from this room to the doctor’s office and she elaborated on information we had earlier been given by the translator about Yasik’s time for the first two years in the hospital. I am using the word ‘elaborated’ loosely. The questions I was encouraged to note as we drove to the orphanage, as I mentioned in Entry #3, were mostly met with blank stares and dodges back into safer territory, translator or no translator, it seemed to me. When I think back on what we gleaned in that first meeting, the sum message was positive. They were telling us Yasik was their little assistant with the younger children. I guess in an older brotherly sort of way. He helped a two-year-old Down’s syndrome girl learn to walk. They said he was their favourite; watching him, we nodded happily. On a kindergarten outing a few months later another kid was left behind because the staff were focused on taking pictures of Yasik. But maybe a sales pitch is given to all adoptors. Who knows? We had no trouble believing it. They also said he was an intelligent, beautiful and loving person. We just kept saying ahh … ahh … ahh.

Here’s a heads-up: I hope that parents are now more informed. The Origins of You, by Vienna Pharaon, looks at William Wordsworth’s observation: the child is the father of the man. Learning as much as possible about this child about to become your child may be helpful in guiding the child into adulthood. We would have been well served if this orphanage had been prepared to provide more of the kind of awareness now available through research and experience. Case-in-point: the father’s contribution to the make-up of a child to be born to a couple has been given research attention in recent years, research that suggests the father too needs be more responsible to provide healthy sperm, even to being aware of his diet in the months leading up to the conception and birth of the child. What kind of diet did Yasik’s father have in the months before Yasik’s birth, this father who was being paid in ceramic dishes for his work at the factory and who had issues around alcohol? (https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/your-father-s-diet-before-you-were-born-could-have-affected-your-health-a-new-study-suggests-1.6927409)

What can you find out about the parents’ lives? What can you find out about the way the orphanage is managed? How much hugging has your potential adoptee been offered? These questions are not suggested to dissuade adoptors from adopting but rather to help them be better prepared to ignite the child’s potential. As the excerpts and articles in Orphanage Risk Factors present and perhaps nearly every adoption book I have read reiterates, adoptors are well-advised to be as prepared as current information offers both about the adoptee’s needs arising from the child’s pre-orphanage life and life in the orphanage and about the adoption process the adoptors will be dealing with. This will hopefully keep their expectations more grounded. There is now much information for adoptors to draw on as they begin the adoption process.

Yasik did not walk until he was moved to the orphanage. Some of the orphanages in Russia have what is termed ‘lying down’ rooms. Was Yasik in a ‘lying down’ ward in the hospital? In other words, did he not walk because he was not given opportunities to get out of bed to walk? Was he left to lie in bed for much of the time he spent in the hospital? Did he have rickets because of the lack of proper diet and exposure to sunshine while he stayed in the hospital? Or did he come into the hospital with rickets due to the lack of care he received from his biological parents? No appropriate judgment can be made. And concerns about rickets? Childhood rickets do not have lifetime impact if treatment catches the problem before disabling deformities develop (lots of downer ‘D’ words there which did not come to pass for Yasik). To be fair, I actually could not at the time have fathomed asking why he had rickets or why he could not walk until the age of two. My questions were more mundane: “What does he like to eat?” Not mundane enough though. I received no answer to that one either. And maybe it was pointless from their perspective to waste time answering that sort of question, given they may have assumed if we could come all this way to adopt a child, we would be providing a different diet than orphanage fare. (I say this, aware of a potential stereotyping profile and the gossip monger’s love of scratching around in the dirt). At any rate, Yasik took over responsibility for teaching us his likes and dislikes the moment the van left the orphanage the next day.

The negatives brushed over, the conversation skipped on to positive notes. Perhaps even allowing us to know about the rickets and slow start to walking was to suggest that though the parents and/or hospital provided poor care we could be assured the orphanage rescued Yasik and gave him the vitamin D he needed to deal with rickets and the stimuli to encourage him to walk. And we have never doubted that his bones and coordination were not hampered by the lack of care previous to his move to the orphanage. As I write this, I have to conclude this sweet looking doctor was doing what she had likely done over and over, focusing on the positives unless it was necessary for the future of the child to bring up the negative. Yasik learned to walk. Notching the positives up, the doctor went on to say Yasik had musical interests and liked to draw and within a split second, Dave whipped out his ever-present sketch book and crayons. He drew a circle on the page and Yasik got right into it, drawing lines to connect the circle. Then he carefully returned the crayons to their right place.

We saw no males in our brief time in the orphanage but I didn’t question why when Yasik needed to go to the toilet, he chose Dave to take him, a male he knew only as a hugger, circle-drawer and gift-giver. He said to Dave, “Kakas” (I doubt I need to offer translation), and taking Dave’s hand, led him to the toilet. Dave helped him do his job and pull up, Yasik stopping first to point out his deposit.

Before this one opportunity to learn about the first four years of Yasik’s life was brought to a close, we measured his feet and took him with us in the van to buy a pair of shoes and get his passport picture taken. Can you imagine that? This four-year-old child had barely known us for one hour, yet my notes say he went with no hesitation, allowing Dave to carry him out to the van in the company of four strangers: Dave, me, the driver and the translator. In the van, he held my hand, and as Dave talked to him, he started to talk back with shy little words. When we arrived at the store, all shyness slammed to a halt as Yasik and Dave spied a motorcycle. Yasik squealed out the Russian word for motorcycle,мотоцикл, as something that sounded like ‘matikli’ to us. We have three pictures of the thing; it could have been a fly caught in a scraggly bush to me but to the two of them, it was awe-inspiring.

The store we went to was a set piece for an early twentieth century western movie, the shoes were a little boy’s oxfords from the middle of the century but the clerk was the first retail person who smiled and treated us with genuine friendliness – likely responding to Yasik’s charm. This little shopping trip included taking Yasik to a passport office for a picture before returning him to the orphanage.

I was 47 in ’97 and had dreamed of being a mother to an adoptee for more than half my life, yet until that afternoon I merely stood to the side looking on at mothering. That was lots of time to develop either a sense that like any other job I had handled to that point, hopefully I would learn sufficient competence, or as in my case, a deep insecurity about how to do it right. In Thicker Than Blood (70,71), Marion Crook writes, “…[M]otherhood wasn’t a professional job or a test for which you got a grade. It was a living situation that changed constantly, and I was expected to simply do as well as possible”. She concludes when she came to terms with how her mothering was going to play out that she was “happier with myself when I accepted that I wouldn’t be perfect”. So far, I had managed to make Yasik cry when I first held him and when we needed to make Yasik a bit more presentable for his passport picture, I was at a loss taming his hair. Three other women in the passport office, more maternal than I perhaps, jumped in to help me out or at least to comb his hair in what looked right to them as Russian mothers of the 90s.

I tripped over a new label recently though apparently it has been identified since the late 70s: ‘Imposter Mother Syndrome’: feeling you really aren’t the best mother for the child who is yours. It could be massaged to include adoptor parents for I am unlikely the only new adoptor who has felt “a fear that at any moment you might be exposed as a fraud“(https://theeverymom.com/imposter-syndrome-as-a-mom-how-to-overcome-it/.

Returning Yasik to the orphanage, we hugged and kissed him – was it a natural or expected response? He followed us out of the room and then the journal says “I was last to leave and he peeked through the banister to smile and wave. The image I was left with at the end of the day – a happy smile”.

In the evening, writing in the journal, I concluded, “He was beautiful in every way. His ears are big! He looks directly and openly, and intelligently and he has such a sweet smile”. (And now as I read this, I wonder what the big deal was with noting – both by the staff and myself- that he showed intelligence. I mean he was cute as a bug’s ear and certainly seemed happy and comfortable with us. What more was needed?)

Our first day with our child-to-be before he became legally our child less than 24 hours later.

Post #5 We Meet Our Soon-to-be Son

There were two small couches in a corner of the receiving room, across from the woman at the desk. I sat on the one by the door; I think Dave was left with no option but to stand. The doctor sat on the other one. The translator too was in the room but must have operated simply as a disembodied voice to me for while I can remember exactly where the doctor, Dave and I were, I only know that the translator said stuff to us, but from where I do not remember. And the woman sitting at the desk was still concentrating on her work, not looking up. A woman brought Yasik to the door. I turned, and not a foot from me stood a little boy, looking a bit pale and scruffy. Then for some reason the woman whisked him back out- a sneak preview? Dave said out loud, but probably to himself – “That’s it?” It says in my journal our translator cooled his enthusiasm; “He’s not yours yet.” Why did she say that? We had been following her all day, asking few questions, and getting few answers, as much because we had little idea what to ask as the facilitators reluctance or inability to provide answers. We had only a bare outline of the process. Now each of us in that tiny room was part of a profound emotional moment. This disembodied translator handled it with a tamp down. Cautioning us that there is more to the process than just, “Here is your son, you can take him now”? Looking at this journal note today, I can only say, I think she may have been trying to maintain some control as her role demanded, unable to sense all the role’s expectations in this very human exchange. It is one of those things I notice flit across my mind in the years since when I have been a player in other moments of tense emotion. The awkward, the mundane, the irrelevant all interact with the profound.

OK so we needed a warning not to grab the kid and run. There were protocols yet to complete. Relax. He will be yours entirely in barely 24 more hours. We tucked our necks back in and mutely nodded, “Oh, OK.” And in truth, we wrapped the adoption all up in under two weeks, a plus for our budget and emotions in the moment. We do not fully know what it was doing to the caregivers, the facilitators, the child. And it can be said it seems the process, perhaps because of tensions like in that moment, still not understood, led in the decades since to reflection, which in turn, led to a process for foreign adoptions showing more regard for the child, possibly for the bio-parents as well, than the adoptors and the facilitators. Now, even if foreigners do get to adopt from Russia, I have read they come for a ‘meet and greet’ of three weeks and then return at a later date to remain again for weeks before the child is theirs and can return with them to their home country, at a cost double our expenses.

However, just as international adoptions were about to expand in the ’90s and criticism of adoption would, of course, follow, Elizabeth Bartholet’s Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting steps into the debate with the observation that one thing international adoptions do is make it harder for the countries with a burden of parent-less children to hide their lack of care or options for domestic adoptions (152), as would have been the case after the collapse of the Soviet Union (The Sunday Times, 28 December 1997, (20).

With this insert: Google sites in 2021 suggest it may currently not be possible for Canadians to adopt a child from Russia. See the Government of Canada site: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/important-notice-regarding-adoptions-russia.html. In 2012 the U.S.A. passed the Magnitsky Act in response to the imprisonment and death of a whistle blower in Russia. By 2017 Canada had passed a similar act, Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (quite specific) which Putin warned was participation in “very nonconstructive political games”, nice touch, but couched in anti-same sex righteousness: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-november-2-2017-1.4382427/how-russian-law-affects-canadians-trying-to-adopt-orphans-1.4382469.

Not all Russian accepted the government explanation of the stop on American/Canadian adoptions. ‘Tens of thousands ‘ protested in a ‘March Against Scoundrels’, calling President Vladimir Putin a ‘child-killer’ for the trumped-up ban, using orphans as pawns who would be the ones to suffer (24 news, January 14, 2013 and Harper’s Magazine, October 2013).

Adopting less than 10 years before these changes, some of the good of the adoptee, and some to suit the political moves of a dictator, we were in a room with a disembodied translator trying to manage our emotions. Whatever our translator was saying to us, her message was floating on by somewhere just above us. In our hearts, where for us in those 20 minutes, reality was grounded, Yasik became our son. Dave said later Yasik became his son the moment he picked him up and that has never changed. Yasik has since August 18, 1997 always been his son. I am certain of this because a few minutes later Yasik was again brought in. He was led to stand in the middle of us – the doctor, the translator and Dave and I. We just stared at him at first which must have set him on edge a bit. He stood there with fine, sandy blond hair, hazel eyes, scratches on his nose, a band-aid on a finger, dressed in pink leotards, a faded pink sweat shirt and a pair of little girl’s leather shoes too small for him. And a bit of a smudge under his eyes. Yasik had just woken up. Dave went to him with a gift, and I held back, starting to cry – my default response to emotional moments, right. Yasik liked the plane Dave gave him, grabbed it and held on. It was happening so quickly of course. My next memory is of him in Dave’s arms and me seeing, not him, but Dave’s face for Yasik was turned into his shoulder. Dave’s face sealed the deal for me. Just like that I saw stamped on his face his love for his son of two or three minutes. Yasik had become his son. And my heart received our son then as well. Later Dave told me he had never felt anything like what came over him in that first moment holding Yasik. This is our becoming a family moment, however unconnected it might be to blood.

There is a story, “These foreign places we call home” in a compilation called Somebody’s Child: stories about adoption (Torchwood, 2011, 37-42),written by an adopting mother about her uncertainty of her right to be her adopted child’s mother.

-As she watched her about-to-be son being born she writes: “I can feel it in my bones. I know I will not let this child go”. Yet when it is time for the birth mother to relinquish the child to her, she is fearful, even as she and her husband drive away from the hospital with their new born son, that someone may stop them, demanding she return the child. And then she says: “I did not give birth to my son, Jack, but it does not change the way I love him”. Just over a year later the writer gives birth to a girl and says this: “my children are two equal sides of my beating heart — seamless, without division”.

When we returned to the hotel later, I recorded the day. I marveled at the immediate and complete arrival of such a love, but I did not doubt it. For a while, just as euphoria floods the brain when we fall in love, we were apparently awash in oxytocin, because …adoptive parents also form lifelong attachments to children. Some evidence suggests that the presence of an infant releases oxytocin in adults, “persuading” its caretakers to love it. Oxytocin therefore might help to assure that parents and others will engage with and care for infants, to stabilize loving relationships (https://imperialbiosciencereview.com/2021/02/19/love-a-cocktail-of-chemicals/). For myself and my husband, Yasik was our child that day. We loved him; ergo, he was our son. A Russian woman had given birth to this child. He had been taken from her home to a hospital and then to an orphanage. He stood in the middle of the room parent-less and we had come to Russia to claim him.

But what does it mean to say, “Wow, he is our son.”? Because we fell in love with him and would the next day hear a gavel affirm our legal parentage? Was that really all there was to it? In both her books, Betty Jean Lifton comes down quite hard on the adopters’ narrative of ‘The Chosen Baby’, the story adoptors construct to tell the adoptee he or she is the lucky little devil given by God or carefully searched for and found by his or her new parents. None of this willy-nilly result of a happy night of lusty sex stirring up a random mix of sperm with an available egg. The search-and-choosing-of-the-‘right’-child-for-a-couple story works for the new parents but is seldom ultimately satisfying to a child, especially when the new parents are uncomfortable recognizing the identity given to this child from the bio parents. Actually, with time the ‘Chosen Baby’ story is likely not all that deeply satisfying to the new parents either.

What about the mother who gave birth to him? The father? Or those who cared for him in the hospital and at the orphanage for several years? Who we are, the love we feel and offer, the environment we provide does not allow us to assume we are the totality of our child’s attachment or whatever it is that comes wrapped in the concept of the adoptee’s family narrative.

The little blond boy, the third part of the triangle that was this new family, what was happening within him? We, in those 20 or so minutes, believed we were bonded or the other word ‘attached’ to the little fellow. But the neuro-transmitters flooding our brain with love … or oxytocin or vasopressin or dopamine or serotonin, were they flooding his in the same way or degree?

Here I provide another voice to address Betty Jean Lifton. Elizabeth Bartholet, in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting suggests the narrative of the importance of blood over legal attachment is soaked in myth and biased language. Opening adoption records and searching for the adoptee’s family of origin is the stuff of stories, movies and news pieces. “But who are her real parents?” or “How wonderful that you have rescued this little one from a difficult life by taking her into your home”. It is assumed that “[Some] aberrational and perhaps altruistic motive must be involved” (167). Bartholet does not disparage this movement but does note how it can ‘throw shade’ on a family made by adoption. Later in the book Bartholet provided empirical studies to show that adoption for the most part works well, shocking news articles aside, certainly better than alternatives such as leaving children in places with inadequate parenting options.(174-5).

We understand we are not the norm: we have to redefine ‘family’ to accommodate all the people assembled into the adoptive configuration as Marion Crook advocates. The adopted child has not only one set of undisputed parents, but two or more. In Thicker Than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world, Marion Crook caught my attention immediately for she starts out by saying, “We work hard at finding ways to support membership in their first family while firmly establishing them in our adoptive family” (27). I think the more we understand our child is a child whose Hero’s or Heroine’s Journey must always straddle two families, the more we ease the child’s burden, and likely our own. Accepting this reality, we massage the definition and then go on to the wonders of being family. Elizabeth Bartholet ends a chapter on “Adoption and Stigma” in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting with “Adoption creates a family that in important ways is not “nuclear.” It creates a family that is connected to another family, the birth family, and often to different cultures and to different racial, ethnic and national groups as well. Adoptive families might teach us something about the value for families of connection with the larger community” (186).