Morphing into Parents
Unsurprising I suppose. Leaving Yaroslavl for Moscow, Yasik’s maiden voyage in his new family, he sat quietly in Dave’s arms at first. I sat quietly as well but Dave knew where my quiet was coming from. He bent to my ear to encourage me not to be shy while he and Yasik played это и то — This and That. Must have seemed odd to the two in front that I was holding back. I did not yet quite know how to open the door to motherhood.
I may not have been the first uncertain parent the orphanage staff had ushered into parenting for a large number of we adopters are parents who have yet to actually parent. Likely aware of this, the staff sent Dave and I off with a warning against feeding Yasik while driving for he would vomit. No fear on that score. It had yet to occur to me that food should always be on the list of standby items for a kid. The driver, Alexi who may have been a father, and the translator, Tatiana, must have brushed off the no food warning for before the trip was over, they had given him 3 bananas and a candy. Tatiana later played a hand slapping game with him and he warmed, losing his shyness, and surprising us by laughing out loud, talking and teasing. In a bit, we were too.
Quickly we moved to overly rambunctious. Soon Yasik lost enough shyness to playfully hit me. Oh God, barely an hour into parenting and we’d lost control of our child. Added to that, at one point on the trip, Alexi stopped for a cigarette break and Yasik needed to pee. With Dave’s help. Pants pulled up, we climbed back into the van and Yasik yelled to the driver to get going again. The driver shrugged, laughed and returned to the van and off we went again. Dave’s shoulders refused to shrug. He worried that in mere hours we were undoing all the orphanage niceness and order. But hey, Yasik never settled to sleep and we were learning more Russian than we planned – don’t get excited, we are talking more than 2 or 3 words.
The drive back to Moscow, as return trips often seem to do, passed much more quickly, pulling out all the sweet memory stops: a beautiful prairie sunset and a harvest moon. We got back to the apartment and Yasik ate only an apple and had some water, all the while talking and poking around, exploring the little apartment. We showered him, got him pee-ed and into bed in a room adjacent to ours after covering the bed sheet with a ripped-open plastic bag. Parenting instincts were perhaps kicking in.
We read to him but that was pointless for every few minutes Dave was flipping through the dictionary for words we couldn’t figure out how to pronounce right anyway. Yasik just looked at us. The barrier was bigger than we thought I wrote in the journal.
I gave him a flashlight with low batteries. It began to waver so Dave put a new battery in and Yasik was off and playing shadow animals and faces and NOT slowing down. He said something to Dave and Dave said, “Nyet”. We left. Moments later we thought we heard him cry and both leapt up. He had us on a marionette string. I went through the living room and into his room to turn the flashlight off and only succeeded in showing him how to turn it on, which he did. So what do you do? Rather than going all strict parent, I started laughing and had to duck out. Later we pulled it together into parent mode, going back onto the battlefield to turn the flashlight off. I stayed and held his hand. When I checked on him in the middle of the night, he appeared to sleep well.
6:30 am and Dave couldn’t wait so brought him in with us.
Dave’s expression of waking to our first day with our son:
And I knew that we were not alone
when I put my arms around your waist
My heart, I felt would burst
As we kissed
In that cold room in Moscow
I felt we were more than two
And as the tears fall now
Running down my face
I hear his voice
and I can feel your
Body so close to mine
In that cold room in Moscow
And I love you.
We had breakfast only after he got his shoes on, with his PJs. Was he, as John Brooks suggests in The Girl Behind the Door, our new pet?[i] Maybe. Surely there is some of that for every parent, biological or adoptive, in the honeymoon period. So why not enjoy the happy surprises that come with this new venture? I say that because those days were a honeymoon for us. I also recognize that Brooks is making the point that in doing so we may have been detrimentally oblivious to other, less obvious, needs our child had. Brooks goes on to say that later on their first night with their baby, they wanted to sleep so parked the infant in front of a TV, likely was not her orphanage night time routine. They might have more deeply met their child’s needs by simply holding her until she fell asleep.
It also strikes me here how much I mention Yasik talking when later we will deal with questions of the use of language for communication.
Larissa, the landlady, was inundating us with food. When we couldn’t eat it all (the bread was amazing) I threw it down the toilet, the only way no one would know we didn’t eat it because the garbage would be gone through, likely causing a situation unsettling for the landlady. Not wanting to offend can lead to questionable actions. An essential paradox. She did see some food in the garbage one day and left a note asking us to let her know if it was too much. Turns out the simple solution for our culture would have also worked in her culture. So, we did tell her and that was the end of the wonderful bread.
We spent the days waiting for the adoption process to be completed mostly playing tourist. On the Metro, people gave up their seats to me and even to Dave when he was holding Yasik. One woman gave Yasik a 2-inch-long chocolate and he popped the whole thing in his mouth. She thought that was fine and went on to tell us that she had 7 children.
On our first full day as parents, we visited both of the largest art galleries – the Tretyakov and the Pushkin- and were quite simply blown away. The Pushkin had 5 soul-satisfying Van Goghs.
All of this demanded over 4 hours of walking with a 4-and-a-half-year-old boy who had known us only a day or two. The paintings didn’t do much for him but the big pieces of sculpture caught his attention, and being 4 1/2, he managed to put us in apology mode with security more than once. Next stop: MacDonald’s, where probably for the first (and last) time, Yasik was more interested in feeding the chips to the pigeons than tasting the wonders of a kid’s pack himself. And this will sound obviously naive, but Yasik took us by surprise with his speed at darting away from us to chase a pigeon and try, like Dave, to get them to feed out of his hand. We quickly began to tighten our grip on his tiny hand.
True to tourist protocol, we ended this fairly long day with Red Square pictures. When we returned to the apartment Yasik conked out and slept about 12 hours though to this point the only solid meal he had was at breakfast.
Completing Documentation
We were picked up early the following day by the driver, Alexis, Tatiana, the facilitator and a new translator, Anna. Anna was young, well-educated and full of hope for the future of Russia. She had moved from Yaroslavl for the prospects Moscow offered, to become what they referred to at the time as the ‘new Russians’. She was a sharp contrast to the translator who helped us in Yaroslavl, someone with the same education, yet who wanted to emigrate, seeing little hope for a better future in Russia.
We were taken to the Canadian embassy for Yasik’s visa. Here because of whatever contacts or methods Tatiana had at her disposal, she and Dave moved directly to the front of the line in a crowded office. It reminded me of other times I have experienced preferential treatment as a foreigner. Yet, tidily enough, it yielded another stamp of certainty that Yasik was now our son.
Establishing Parental Roles
About two days in we could already see or were groomed by our own upbringings to see that either Yasik had led us or we had led Yasik to assign us roles. Very quickly Yasik took ‘Nyet’ well from Dave and played with him; he cuddled up to me. I wrote in the journal two days into our family experience, “So I’ll nurture, Dave will lead – whether we want to argue roles or not or try to bend the roles or whatever – they are still there; by instinct he or we have placed us so his life is complete and secure”. Yes, it is not a Duggar family message of a wife with Nancy Reagan’s smile pasted on her face and obedient, modestly dressed children under the stern but wise and responsible husband’s umbrella, but for traditional or psychological makeup, cultural, societal, whatever, it is what it is.
Looming Threats?
Bouncing, giggling, chattering in Russian and making sure he had those shoes on, Yasik started each of these days. One of those last days in Moscow, in the midst of these happy little family moments, Larissa came over for the rent, bearing gifts of food and a book of Pushkin for Yasik. While we settled the payment, she talked with Yasik in Russian. Yasik, who moments before had been giggling, broke into fairly hysterical sobs. We were shocked for a moment and then I picked him up and took him into the bedroom. He continued to cry for quite a while, hanging on to me. He quieted and said, “Poppa”, so I took him to where Dave was giving the rent money to the landlady. She talked to him again, and again he started to cry. Dave took him and I ushered the landlady out. Had she suggested to him that as an adoptee he was a lucky little fellow who better not screw up for then he would be sent back to the orphanage, losing his mama and poppa?
When I joined Dave and Yasik in the bedroom again, Yasik began to quiet, though we too were by now emotionally swamped. To divert him, we walked to a nearby park. Yasik didn’t try the swings but then I don’t remember seeing a playground at the orphanage so perhaps he was not about to attempt the unfamiliar. Instead, he chased the birds and when some Russian kids approached, he and Dave played ball with them and flew the paper airplanes we had brought. We left the planes with the kids and they responded with a polite thank you. When Yasik piped up with ‘Ka Kas’ we took off for the apartment.
The landlady stopped by once more with an art book and candies and this time Yasik warmed to her but we never received an explanation for the outburst. We were only left with an awareness that for Yasik this was a much more emotional time than we had comprehended.
Yasik also managed to give us a further scare one afternoon by hanging over the little balcony before we caught him. That night my body tightened with the memory of a time a child in my care was almost blown off the roof of an old church in the Philippines. Dave, too, already asleep, began to twitch and heave short, panicky breathing. He’d had a night mare of falling while trying to catch Yasik who was about to fall. We were rushing head long into parental fears.
One or two more days playing tourist, and though we didn’t realize at the time, enjoying the larger portion of our maternal/parental leave, we were coming to know our son as bouncy and curious about everything that had a switch or button or handle. Turning on light switches remained a fascination for several days.
As we packed to return to Canada, we were surprised to find a couple of Yasik’s new toys missing, none which had been taken out of the apartment. We found the toys stuffed behind the old piano in the living room. This was our introduction to what I have since read over and over again as a side effect of orphanage living, the habit of hoarding or simply claiming something and knowing the only way to hold on to it would be to hide it from the other kids. Here’s an odd bit on the problem with ‘hoarding’: a Scottish contestant on America’s Got Talent [ii] gave a performance as a ‘regurgitation artist’. He had learned to swallow things to hide them from other kids at the orphanage. Apparently it has led him to a “busy touring schedule” Wikipedia says. Still, to be fair, I wonder if there are any set of siblings, bio or adopted, who don’t try some level of hoarding with toys not clearly designated.
Footnotes
[i] Brooks, John The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide Scribner, 2016, 182, 183
[ii] ‘Regurgitation artist’ America’s Got Talent June 2, 2015
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