Checklist: get landed
Taking Yasik through immigration, Dave was asked, “Is your wife landed?” Dave assured him, “Yes, yes, she is just over there, waiting by the luggage”. The customs officer tried again, “No, is she landed?” And Dave proudly repeated, “Yes, we both went to get our son and she is waiting by the window.” Did the officer’s training finally kick in? He clarified, “No. Is she a citizen?”
davevincent.com
And we were back in Canada. My parents, brother and his family, sister and her husband were there to pick us up and hustle our son into his new family, taking pictures, hugging and talking. We felt so full at this moment, with love, family, satisfying occupations and interests, sufficient money coming in to keep the roof over our head and the bills paid. We drove home to find my sister, Barb, had streamers, balloons, welcome signs, new toys, clothes, a car seat, and a big meal ready…. Book after expert advice book on adoption cautions against overstimulating a new adoptee with people, parties and presents, just so you know.
After eating, we gave the wrapped toys to Yasik to open. He picked up a gift but the wrapping stumped him. Goggle told me only recently that generally Russian gift giving etiquette says that cheaper gifts are not expected to be wrapped in paper, only expensive ones. It is safe to say that any gift he may have received up to that point came unwrapped.
For most of my twenties and thirties I lived in other cultures. At work I often talked with our foreign-born students about their experiences and the impact of culture shock on their hearts, minds and bodies. Nor was I personally a stranger to culture shock. Yet it did not occur to me or any of the other adults in the room, half of whom had dealt with as much culture shock as I, that Yasik, now in Canada for roughly three hours might be dealing with this phenomenon as well. It was merely cute that he needed his 3-year-old cousin, Kyle, to show him what to do with gift wrapping. Were Dave and I given any heads up about an international adoptee’s perspective on a new culture? Not likely as our adoption prep seminars focused on adopting locally. And remember, we had little time to prepare for an international adoption. Does that hold up as an excuse? Adopters today appear to have much more information to prepare them. Try a quick Google search for sites dealing with international adoptees and culture shock. You will find advice giving adoption sites and journals providing research of the issue.
Happily in this case, a little culture shock didn’t slow Yasik. He studiously set about practicing the gift unwrapping lesson Kyle offered. Any diffidence at being the center of attention in an unfamiliar social setting disappeared. The little gift-wrapping hiccup turned out so positively for him, he moved on to giving his new Aunt Rena Russian language lessons, laughing at her pronunciation. Some of our family’s first observations were that the orphanage must have taught him manners for he was polite.
After the meal as everyone prepared to leave, Dave scooped Yasik up, thinking he might have fun helping Dave move our vehicle out of the way. Yasik burst into tears. Given the lack of sleep and jet lag it shouldn’t have been a surprise but I noted the outburst in the journal because the tears stopped as soon as Dave returned from the driveway. This was one party he did not want to leave. Or could we dare to imagine it was an attachment hook we could hang hopes on?
My mom and dad gave Yasik a teddy bear almost as big as him. Dave found him at 4:30 a.m. the next morning hugging and talking away to it. Studies in Attachment began early in the twentieth century. Dr. Rene Spitz a psychoanalyst studying hospitalized infants
[observed that] these babies [abandoned infants who received little individual attention in group care] developed odd reactions to strangers, .… the usual behaviour was replaced by something that could vary from extreme friendliness to any human partner combined with anxious avoidance of inanimate objects to a generalized anxiety expressed in blood-curdling screams which could go on indefinitely”[i].
But he liked his teddy….
Checklist: look for kid fun, visit the dentist, visit the doctor
Having only a few days left of ‘parental leave’, we tucked in some family picnics and we slipped quickly into what most families in our neighbourhood seemed to do; we took him to the playground. Other than a bit of experimenting with a play water pump on the periphery, he simply stood to the side holding our hands, watching other kids playing. Getting him to actively engage took commandeering Kyle and climbing ourselves up the no-thrills slide the length of our own bodies.
We tucked in some introductions to our friends as well in those first days. As the first post-adoption report notes, initially Yasik “appeared reluctant to let [his parents] out of his sight“. Yet Yasik was quickly overcoming shyness around others. One relationship that particularly warmed our hearts was with Tony who himself was raised in Canada’s early adoption and foster system, one that was very difficult for him (SeeA Canadian Story of Adoption in the 1930s, Becoming Family). Tony showed Yasik his bee hives and he went home with a jar of fresh honey.
The honey bit is not a segue way into a dentist visit. Yasik’s first dental appointment was on the checklist regardless. He seemed to take lying in the dental chair in stride but he looked to me so defenseless that I found the experience more emotional than I had expected. He did not have the language needed to understand what was happening or to express his thoughts about what was happening. Heart strings were pulled and then snapped back a bit.
It was also actually imperative to introduce Yasik to our family doctor. The Hague Convention requires countries, of which Russia is one, to provide a translated medical report but adoption handbooks warn that this could be incomplete or possibly even inaccurate[ii]. Our pre-adoption medical report listed convergent strabismus (glasses were needed), adenoids enlarged (left to re-adjust on their own), dermatitis (never noticed it), speech delay (normal), short for age. His motor skills were in line with his age as were his eating and sleeping habits.
Our doctor agreed that other than being small for his age, a common side effect of orphanage life, he was quite healthy. It was the doctor’s opinion that he may have built up a strong immunity by more exposure to bacteria and whatever else did not have to battle Purell. And that seemed a good conclusion for he was never sick with any of the childhood plagues other children battled each year.
Odd, isn’t it? Impervious to bacteria yet not getting enough nourishment to meet standard growth charts. And it isn’t merely a matter of a lack of veggies and salmon as the experiment conducted by the German king, Frederick II, demonstrated in the 13th century. His curiosity about the development of language led to his forbidding care-givers in an orphanage to speak to or hold the infants in their care. The babies all died. Updating from the 13th century, here is a rather unequivocal research statement from the Psychology In Russia journal: The research literature suggests that institutions for children left without parental care do not provide environments that adequately promote children’s development, and that characteristics of orphanages should be considered as an environmental factor influencing developmental difficulties in children living in institutions and later in post-institutional families.[iii] Institutionalized children come into their adoptive families often pre-packaged with deficits biological, psychological and social. What was that doing to our son’s young heart, mind and body?
Born for Love gives Chapter Three[iv] to an examination of the repercussions of early life in an orphanage. The focus in this chapter is a girl adopted from a Russian orphanage but some of the research behind her story is taken from studies of Romanian children who spent their early years in orphanages during the time and under the experiments of President Nicolae and Deputy Prime Minister Elena Ceausescu. Not to sound like a snob but the deputy prime minister came equipped for this research with an elementary education and likely a doctorate obtained with the help of a professor. One of the charges for which they were ‘summarily executed’ as the saying goes, was the claim of their ‘research’ “that children will develop just fine without individualized attention and affection”.
The 25-year study at SFU on the Romanian orphans meets the appropriate definition of research. A paper which came out of this study under a heading titled “Physical Growth”[v] says:
While the malnutrition of institutionalized children contributes to their growth deficiency, another contributing factor may be the poor quality of interaction and stimulation offered by the low caretaker-to-child ratio in these institutions. This type of growth deficit, known as psycho-social dwarfism [now referred to as psycho-social short stature], can be very serious. However, upon removal from stressful or neglectful conditions, children suffering from psycho-social dwarfism tend to make tremendous gains in both height and weight….
Contrary to Deputy Prime Minister Elena Ceausescu’s ‘research’ findings, this article and others in this search make the point that lack of nurture in infancy and early childhood compromise physical growth.
Quoting Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard’s “Yeah but, No but…”[vi], it’s nice to be able to rebut that this can be mitigated once a child is placed in nurturing care. At our first post–adoption interview it was noted that Yasik “appears to need much cuddling” but that over the course of the three years of post-adoption interviews he went from 39.5 inches to 47 inches. Okay, so still not the class giraffe but also not the only one in the front row of the class photo.
Checklist: Forget the past?
We don’t know how much Yasik understood of his situation as a ‘social orphan’, for about those years, Yasik continues to say he remembers nothing or next to nothing before the jet ride to Canada. Did stress or even trauma from the first four years shrink his hippocampus, or put him in a dissociative state in order to cope with the lack of consistent nurture?[vii] Yasik had definitely experienced physical and emotional neglect, likely physical and emotional abuse, and had definitely been exposed to domestic violence and household substance abuse. See Orphanage Risk Factors for more on this issue.
Is it not possible to think that becoming a member of a family in a strange new world has added a further level of stress, however delightful the stress, to a young and still developing mind. The stress of transition to an entirely new life, now heaped on top of separation from first caregivers and accustomed living conditions, abusive or otherwise, may stymie memory. And then again, a young brain still developing, may not have retained these memories.[viii]
Two strangers are what he perhaps came to understand he was to hope for. I have read here and there that for children in institutional care, the hope of having parents is the Holy Grail. How is a Holy Grail imagined to a 4- or 5-year-old?
All of these strangers’ attention is solely on him and any desire he manages to communicate, but everything is new and mostly impossible to explain when these two strangers have neither language or culture awareness to reach out to him. Attaching in Adoption cautions: “The comfort and competence that children feel in their own culture is lost as they enter a new surrounding”[ix].
Checklist: start the re-education program
Those shoes Yasik wanted to put on the moment he awoke in Moscow. We bought him new runners and tried to make the shoes disappear for they were already cramping his toes. That evening we got the shoes off him and set them by the door. He wailed. He seemed to have the idea that taking off his shoes meant bed time, probably an orphanage routine. The wailing stopped when no one headed him off to bed. Taking his shoes off at the door like a good Canadian became a new routine he comfortably settled into. Like a proud mother, I also note in the journal that he was happy to help with household chores. And like a proud mother who believed in education I have noted that in those first few days we taught him A and B.
Yasik had now moved from émigré to immigrant in less than a week. He had moved from an orphanage setting to a residential home, no one but him in a large bedroom. Routines had been dismantled and recreated; cultural changes had been made with absolutely no orientation; no one spoke the only language he knew other than about 10 words to cover the necessities of life; he was interacting with two strangers whom he had been told are his mama and poppa; little of the food was familiar other than macaroni and sausages, and what about jet lag? All this newness at every hand and he was handling it entirely alone.
Footnotes
[i] Mercer, Jean. Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development. Praeger, 2006, 33-34.
[ii] Bosco-Ruggiero, Stephanie, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LMHC, and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting Older Children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press, 2014, 162.
[iii] Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children. Developmental Psychology, Volume #9, 2016
[iv] Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 53.
[v] Le Mare, Lucy, PhD, Karyn Audet MA
A longitudinal study of the physical growth and health of postinstitutionalized Romanian adoptees
file:///C:/Users/jacka/Downloads/A_longitudinal_study_of_the_physical_growth_and_he.pdf,
‘Psycho Social Dwarfism’ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6741153/
[vi] BBC production, Little Britain
[vii] Perry, Bruce D. MD, PhD and Maia Szalavitz The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook Basic Books, 2017, 49-50
Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 255
[viii] https://www.healthline.com/health/why-cant-i-remember-my-childhood
[ix] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents Perspectives Press, Inc., 2002, 149
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