Boarding a plane in Moscow in the early morning, we left a harvest moon in our wake. For Yasik transitioning from a Russian social setting to a social setting in a western Canadian family and urban community was a transition from life on the moon[i] to what? The image of the moon seems apt enough. Barren and life limiting. Wildly different from what we believed we were inviting Yasik to share with us in our family and community. Promise of a chance for a good life.

A young judge proclaimed Yasik our son from now on because his bio-parents had neglected him. Conventual wisdom tells us how amazing we are for adopting a little waif. We need to remember that resume building for sainthood is also a rap sheet for the sins of the first parents, as “flawed and unworthy“.  The child becomes a “lucky-adoptee” and the parents with whom the child will always carry some connection, are endlessly brought to mind with a whiff of lessness. “This causes a split in the [adoptees] hearts and minds that’s very painful.”[ii]

Building a new mindset about family

Yasik left behind an understanding of family that led him to say “I have a poppa and momma now.” After knowing us less than 24 hours.  Dave carried him into the Vancouver airport with no moon hovering.  An extended family greeted him as he was whisked into a community with a van, a house and lots of toys. “In one day, these children become part of well-educated, affluent, stable and loving families”.[iii]

I’ve said in earlier posts that Yasik left the orphanage with nothing other than what we provided. Not quite true. His strabismus had not been accommodated. And in time we would find that he struggled to keep up in the classroom. Was this because at the orphanage staff were stretched to find time to sit and chat with a little kid or answer the ‘Why?’ questions of a three-year-old?

Yeah but, No but …  let’s shake off the clutches of an apocalypse. We humans, however we are packaged, have flexible minds and bodies. While Yasik remains seldom the talker in most groups, he has always found ways to adapt.[iv]

Maybe the orphanage staff read stories of families to the children; maybe he saw the parents of other social orphans drop by. Maybe he had some idea of poppas and mommas. He certainly seemed ready to embrace a family setting.

As far as we could tell, our setting as parents was not consciously hierarchical or paternal. Dave and I thought of ourselves as partners, forming a nuclear family.  Yasik chinked into that assumption when almost from Day 2, he assigned us the traditional roles, taking ‘Nyet’ from Dave, cuddling into me.  We wondered if such a role assignment was wise – but for whatever reason, in the journal – as a 3^rd day parent- I write “we want to argue roles but they are still there; why did he assign roles that way? We may believe we have a more liberal or sophisticated view of Ma and Pa in parenting but it would appear we are building on ancient structures that remain part of our thinking”. Did Yasik want us to maintain some image he had of a papa and mama? Or maybe it is simply some personality vibe we gave off and he responded to for, though I cannot be certain, from two years old to life with us, his caregivers were likely all female, allowing for little opportunity to see how the male role played out.  

What does this mean for single parents or same sex parents? Do they too have to work through some pre-conceived image the child has of parental roles? Almost from the start Lesbian and Gay Foster Care and Adoption 2nd ed.[v] begins to consider this question.

My earliest journal entries note that Yasik’s explanation of his story showed that rather quickly he began working on his story, developing his mindset. While he thought he came from the moon, he would for a time also refer to his arrival in Canada as “when I was born”. He told us that there are kids who come from mom’s tummy and kids who are picked kids. But at the same time, because he knew I could not have any more kids and we have to assume he was hoping for a sibling, he suggested that maybe Dad could have a girl. At other times he said he liked being an only child.   The one certainty is that we cannot deny he had family narratives for relationships on his mind from almost the beginning.

Being four and half at the time of his adoption, he knew he was different, that parts of him belonged to someplace else.  The other kids in his class had narratives of life with their parents before kindergarten.  No surprise then when that one question belonging only to non-biological families, the ‘real’ parent issue, came up rather early as well, so we talked.

One day he made it clear that he was aware of his differences from his buddies with the blunt and direct, “You aren’t my real parents.” Another time he asked where some part of his being (whatever it was, I didn’t record it) came from in him and then said, in a tentative manner as though uncertain whether to say it or not, that this part must have come from his ‘real’ parents. I wonder where he picked up the term ‘real parents’?

There were no blatant physical differences between Yasik, Dave and I as Susanne Antonetta has experienced with her Korean born son, but the baseline experiences of the ‘real’ parent issue are the same. I will paraphrase some of her experience with ‘The Question’ and then encourage you to read make me a mother.[vi]

Around the same age that Yasik was beginning to piece a narrative of his story together, Antonetta’s son, Jin, was also working out how he came to be. It was hard for Jin to accept the story, though true, but the explanation was given to him in an age-appropriate narrative: “For him, it’s hard to understand being flown somewhere to be given to two strangers, however good everyone’s intentions.” But for the most part initially Jin did not seem to be giving too much thought to his adoption says Antonetta although she wondered if he “struggled with something I could not put my hands on to fix.”

Antonetta and her husband did follow one of the top ten guidelines for adopters: Be open about the adoption; answer your child’s questions. She adds something interesting to this advice: Because her son had heard that babies come from mommies’ tummies, she thought her son likely “heard the story with the coda of the tummy belonging to another woman”. When Jin was eight, he began to ask about his bio-mom, telling Antonetta that thinking of her made him feel sad. He told her he thought it was unfair that he didn’t even know what she looked like.

Antonetta’s response was likely the response of most caring adopters: “I hadn’t expected it all to be so hopelessly confusing”. She sought to draw him closer but sensed his uncertainty, however vague.

One particular instance of the awareness of difference that tends to call up a sense of lessness came when she and Jin were playing together at a park. Antonetta had gone for her bag and returned to where Jin was playing to find him being questioned and taunted by some young boys.  Seeing her ‘Caucasianness’ and his ‘Asianness’ they asked why Jin was with her and then asked if he was an orphan, following the question by then throwing the word “Orphan!” at him. Antonetta had been expecting to deal at some point with the question of adoption and the differences that come with it, but she was unprepared for it happening in an arena of being bullied for the differences.  Jin actually thought the bullies would not have made a scene if they had not seen the racial differences between herself and her son.  She says of the experience:

He was in a rage at me.  He couldn’t forgive me for having been with him, for being who I was. He cried and repeated that I should have just stayed away from him, all the way home. I hurt for him. I hurt in a way that ripped me apart….

To bridge or help Yasik as he built his own narrative, Dave told Yasik of his own adoption and then told Yasik he has a bio-brother, bio-sisters and a bio-parent set. Dave explained that probably money problems are why his bio-mother left him in the orphanage. Dave then reaffirmed that Yasik was all ours and we were his now. We also talked about the orphanage, telling him all of the scant story as we knew it then. About all we could do at the time was to be sure that the questions were answered as satisfactorily as possible hoping that he still felt secure.  At the time I wrote: “Some [of that sense of security] can’t happen – he is divided but may it never destroy his spirit”.  And when you think of what I have just recorded from Susanne Antonetta’s book, you have to wonder how Yasik was receiving the narrative we were presenting to him.

Of course, being a kid, he used the narrative too at times.  Dave had a shift and was juggling, just once I might add, getting a babysitter for Yasik. He responded by becoming frustrated and obstinate, saying to me, “Why is it parents are meaner to kids who have a different beginning and come from a different place?” Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents suggests feelings like this may come from the fear of losing another parent and advises against too much daycare until the child has a sense of security within the family.[vii]  So let me repeat in our defense, our memory is that we called in a babysitter once for our disgruntled son.

Building a new mindset about community

Yasik not only had an active part in setting up our family setting, he also, as a school-aged child, led us into most of our social engagement outside of family. We three were Caucasian, each with at least some eastern European genes; Dave and Yasik are males and I am a female; Dave and I are Canadian born and Yasik is naturalized.  Yasik and I have a large age difference but Dave and Yasik are fairly appropriately spaced.   Dave and I, with some post-secondary education, were working to hold on to a yet tenuous grasp of the middle class. These parts of each of us fit us into certain societal slots. We would want to find a social setting that would accommodate our comfort levels. Or so you would think.  Yet we were almost irrevocably part of a community based mostly on the decision to buy a house within our means found for us by a realtor who was the son of a friend of our friend. He showed us two houses: this one looked cuter than the other. Decision made.  We dove into the community pool of life in our little neighbourhood.

Yasik was learning to swim in this community pool guided from the pools edge by teachers, coaches, music teachers, parents of buddies, friend of ours. Each was impacting his environment, influencing his spirit, mind and body in not only big ways, but often in almost imperceptible ways. Yasik and I were watching a video sent home with him from school about a snowman who takes a little boy and flies away with him to a snow land.  Yasik said, “Mom I didn’t know snow persons could fly”.  I almost corrected it to ‘snowman’ and then realized he’d been taught to be politically correct.

Yasik’s community school was a block away and most of his classmates lived within walking distance of the school.  Day upon day, walking him to school we came to know the other mothers, fathers and caregivers walking his classmates to school.  First a tentative nod, then a ‘Hi.” And then “Hey, can Yasik come over to play?” and the doors were swung wide open to our little community. We signed him up for the T-ball and soccer clubs.  Some of his classmates were on his team. Quite naturally, these kids became his playmates and standing on the sidelines or waiting for the kids after school, the kids’ parents became our playmates.  The thing about these social relationships is that they are most often ad hoc.  There is little to no opportunity to review resumes, ensure that we are leaving our child in the best of hands, filtering out characters or the impacts of characters who may not share all of our values.

Via school and neighbourhood, Yasik made buddies. For parents this can be a two-edged sword.   Yasik loved to play with the kids, free time for us. I suppose a ‘Yipppee!’ and ‘Goodie!’ might have erupted from time to time in our thoughts as friends begin to tip the scale in their favour over time with parents. One year in a DIY bid, Dave bought a pair of clippers and gave Yasik a buzz cut – I think the one and only, but visions of dollars saved were dancing in Dave’s head. Yasik looked like a miniature Dave, but big whoop.  After the cut, Dave told Yasik to go look in the mirror.  Yasik looked and let out a mighty wail.  “Dad, nobody will know my name”. Sooner than an adopter of an older child might want, attachments were expanding and shifting.

Meaning there are negotiations to be made.  It could be said interacting in your community is learning to swim in life’s community pool.  Mostly it was fun to be with the kids, but it meant struggles too.  Each of us parents benefit by the de facto babysitting but we are uncomfortable with our child being watched over in play over by another parent who may have no problem with yelling at the kid or smoking around them, or with seeing our child bested by another.  We may want to helicopter parent when letting well enough alone leads to growth in confidence.  It is a gamble between stepping in to fight our children’s battles or holding our breath and allowing them to work it out on their own.   For the most part we let Yasik work it out, checking on him after the fact.

At Yasik’s eighth birthday I noticed him laughing that covering, defensive, too loud laugh he used when his two main buddies bugged him and he got upset and rightly so.  One of the two would needle just to get a rise (in fairness the little needler was dealing with family issues too). I asked Yasik how he felt about it and he said it got him, so I said, “Just laugh.” (Duh, that is what he was doing) and then he said, “It gets in my head” – meaning it made him angry before he could stop it.  I was impressed with his self-awareness.

And while these encounters may have started a learning process in relationships, I do think for Yasik, already aware as an adoptee that he perceived himself and was perceived by those around him as different, the kind of lessness Jin felt was also being developed.  Hidden Daughter-Secret Sister, Bitterroot: a Salish memoir of transracial adoption and Monstrous: a transracial adoption story [viii]all speak to the sense of differentness and lessness.  Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies[ix] calls it a “sense of separateness“. (If these suggestions are not enough, then my page Sources offers a good number more books with this message).

I took Yasik and his buddies to Lazer Tag one evening and Yasik – though no one expected it when they should have as he often did so – got the highest scores. He shot people well. In a group including adults he came in second and the young braggarts in his group came quite last.  He was that way in baseball too – consistently doing well – not in fits and spurts of glory. At the end of one season in soccer Yasik got carried off the field like a somewhat shocked but very happy hero.   Yet the myth of his lessness persisted.

While playing lacrosse after school with The Two, Yasik’s primary buddies, the ‘who-gets-to-be-on-which-team’, a learning hurdle so many children have to face, became the lesson of the day. Number One as usual took the lead in choosing whom he saw as the better players, first inserting himself in the important position. Yasik would not contend the setup, slipping immediately into second place but mentally focusing on his anger or hurt or revenge and seeking to get even.  In this case, checking in frustration, not Number One, but Number Two in an unfair way. I made Yasik stop immediately and took them all home. Number One ran to tell his dad with Number Two following.  I assured the father I was dealing with it but before I had begun meting out punishment, Yasik stepped forward to apologize to Number Two of his own volition. Number Two, always a peace maker, returned the apology, maybe realizing that because Number One had to head to hockey practice now, they would only have each other to play with.

The ‘who-gets-to-be-on-which-team’ lesson surfaced again for Yasik the next week at school.  Yasik was faced with the ignominy of once again not being chosen for the favoured team.  Whatever revenge Yasik sought to enact, when Dave came to pick him up at school, he was told Yasik had been made to ‘stay after school’.  We all know what that phrase means. Dave went to the classroom to get Yasik. Upon seeing him, Yasik started crying hysterically. The school authorities figured he had been punished enough. Talking it over later that evening, Dave and I decided he had too much competitive tension and wanted the school to redirect him from Mr. Number One, Mr. Number Two and Mr. Number Three triangles.  He was handling his pressures with explosions, and we were hoping to show him alternatives. In a social circle of great importance to a school-aged child, one that encompasses after-school playtime, soccer teams and social interaction between the adults attached, it is difficult to find other options, factoring in that these kids see each other as each other’s best options for great times together.

Still the question: Is it such a big deal?  Jennifer Traig cites a study that found that siblings argue 3.5 times per hour, 80% of the time over toys.  (Incidentally, and likely part of being in Phase VI on child development registers – joining in and finding my place-, parents get to be the issue only 9% of the time).[x]

Julie Lythcott-Haims, in How to Raise an Adult: break free from the overparenting trap and prepare your child for success[xi] says

Sometimes kids are bullies…. When bullying happens, kids need parents and other advocates to help them disentangle themselves from it and recover….

A definition of …True bullying — intentionally disempowering or isolating individuals and systematically demeaning and hurting them over a period of time.

But as Susan Porter wrote in Bully Nation, in a lot of situations we parents label something a bullying incident when it’s a normal passage through child development and socialization…. Porter encourages parents and educators to avoid the bully label and instead help children develop the resilience needed to handle the harsh social challenges of life.

(Incidentally, Alexander McCall Smith, in The Sweet Remnants of Summer, Chapter 8, offers a nice example for how to handle the tricky uncertainty of fault assignment in children’s squabbles.)

Yet, via bullying or not, if a sense of lessness becomes a worm embedding in a child’s already weak sense of self, then what?

The idea of lessness (it is tempting to suggest the term ‘marginalized’) was also fertilized by adult opinion.  Yasik had listened in on enough conversations to know he was different in his birth narrative, in his shortness, in his struggles with learning.  And at times it got capped off by adults like his soccer coach who, Yasik’s skill to the side, wouldn’t let him be goalie because of his height, again letting him know he was coming up short (I couldn’t let that one go).

As I note in Set and Setting: social, first Russia as early as four years old, children have begun to recognize the false beliefs in others’ messaging[xii]. While it seems Yasik’s mindset around family had to find accommodation for two families, his mindset around community was making use of the awareness of false belief. For whatever words came out of the mouths of those around him, he believed they saw him as less. And his reactions in these moments clearly state that he felt that was both wrong and unfair. 

Footnotes

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[i] He is a Person  www.adoptionasfamily.org

[ii] Easterly, Sara, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies   Rowman, 2023, 40

[iii] “Orphanage experience alters brain development”

W News, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 17, 2003  https://news.wisc.edu/orphanage-experience-alters-brain-development/

[iv] IBID

Human Rights Watch “IV. THE “GILDED CAGE” OF THE DOM REBYONKA: INFANCY TO FOUR YEARS” https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/russia2/Russ98d-05.htm

[v]  Hicks, Stephen, and Janet McDermott   Lesbian and Gay Foster Care and Adoption 2nd ed. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2018

[vi] Antonetta, Susanne. make me a mother: a memoir. WW Norton, 2014, 135-142.

[vii] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 34.

[viii] Mooney, Kim   Hidden Daughter-Secret Sister   Austin Macauley, 2020, 23

Harness, Susan Devan   Bitterroot: a Salish memoir of transracial adoption   University of Nebraska Press, 2018

Myer, Sarah   Monstrous: a transracial adoption story First Second, 2023

[ix] Easterly, Sara, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden   Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies   Rowman, 2023, 60

[x]Traig, Jennifer   Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventures in parenting   Ecco, 2019, 180.

[xi] Lythcott-Haims, Julie   How to Raise an Adult: break free from the overparenting trap and prepare your child for success    Holt Paperbacks, 2016, 23,24

[xii] Hare, Brian and Vanessa Woods   Survival of the Friendliest: understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity Random House, 2020, 57, 89

‘They’ say we are social beings, maybe on a spectrum from extrovert to ambivert to otravert to introvert to …, BUT most of us do seem to want people in our lives.[i]

Being part of a group, with family ties and community provides protection, access to resources, and opportunities for cooperation.

For the individual in the social group, being accepted by others, feeling valued and having a social identity within a group tends to ensure better physical and mental health helping us climb a notch or two higher up Maslow’s ladder to a sense of self-worth.[ii] A setting seeding a mindset.

For his first four years, Yasik had family and community. What mindset was being constructed from these connections for him?

Year one, 1992-1993 approximately: Yasik is in the bosom of his bio-family, with parents, an older half-brother now going to school at the age of 6, and two sisters, one a half-sister and the other his full sibling, born a year earlier.

Sometime around his first birthday, social services found Yasik in his crib unattended. His parents were working in a factory and being given food and china made at the factory to sell. As I wrote in the post, Court Proceedings, we were only told that his mother “moved around a lot”. Boris Yeltsin’s Article 13 of the Family Code allowed social services to rescue/apprehend children when parents “shirk duties involved in his/her upbringing and maintenance, for over six months”. A Yaroslavl court spelled it out when examining Yasik’s parents care for their children. This court concluded that “the parent’s neglect their children, do not care for their lives, do not support them”.  

It would seem I can be justified in saying these rulings imply a lack of infant care. Let’s assume that Yasik did his bit, crying for care and getting his bio-mother’s oxycontin juices flowing. Her breasts should have been leaking, tingling with heaviness and wanting a letdown.[iii] Not feeding him, she may have been packing around some painful breasts, perhaps even infecting them.

Yasik’s mom knew what to do with packed and painful breasts. The greater pain was left to an infant to absorb. Something as simple as skin-to-skin contact would have washed away stress and added protection against a physical backlash of infection and the possibility of hindering brain and body development. Oxytocin which “reduces feelings of threat and enables trust” would have been offered in the breast milk. Eye contact would have would have not only increased his feeling of being loved but would have begun to stretch his nascent theory of mind as he looked where she looked and at the things she might have pointed to. Had his mother picked him up when he was crying, not only would she have halted his crying, but she would have helped him relax and sleep better. Long term she would have encouraged his growth hormone and directed his mindset to trust the caregivers in his life.[iv]

Year two, 1993-1994 approximately: social services stepped in to take the children from the family. The older brother brought the family to social services’ attention with his bruised body and his plea not to be returned to the family. Yasik was taken to a hospital, almost certainly low on staff and supplies. There is no good way to note that his mother actually came to visit Yasik at the hospital to seek money designated for his care. She stopped coming to visit her youngest son when she was denied this money. And with no family money to pay for expenses, Yasik would have been given second-class treatment in a struggling hospital[v]. He was not given the opportunity to learn to walk while he was there.  Rescue, rinse, repeat.

Year three to four and half, 1994- 1997 approximately: Yasik was moved to an orphanage as a ‘social orphan’. He had family. Once again there is no good way to say that to sell the factory china the parents needed to travel past the care homes three of their children were in.  Not once did they stop to check in on their children.

A Russian doctor with years of experience working with orphanages called the baby house orphanages “Gilded Cages”. They received international attention and appeared better equipped than the average orphanage for older or disabled children.[vi]

But an orphanage is still an orphanage. An orphan, social or totally without family, faces prejudicial stereotypes: the stigma of abandonment.[vii]

_{Someone’s children in a Russian orphanage}

The mindset Yasik was forming of family may have been written in one word: abandonment.

What of community? Orphanages were state institutions. State institutions still held the collective Soviet philosophy of the group over the individual.  There was no reason to offer orphans personal possessions for most would have a hard time acquiring much once they left the orphanage. Case in point: Yasik’s dirty, too small, pink runners. This is also where a mindset to hoard geminates. While the orphanage proudly shared that Yasik had given to the other children our first gifts to him (code for they were taken from him?) the things we gave him as we tourist- parented in Moscow were hidden behind the apartment piano. 

Even in the best case, children who are closest to normal health at birth become [socially, intellectually, emotionally and physically stunted] to some degree after these four years of collective living, deprived of individual nurture. Even the nannies who “love” them, treat them mostly—really like pets. They do not really see that there is a person inside who could think, or learn something. [viii]

Even when a staff is concerned enough to try to give the children some concept of family, it can often confuse or add pain.  After meeting us for a short time on our first visit, Yasik was heard to say, “I have a poppa and momma now.”  What understanding had he of parents and family with no memory of his own family and with, at best, only glimpses of others’ family life?

From our earliest infancy, we are absorbing a mindset and a theory of mind. We watch where our caregivers’ eyes are looking, where their hands and bodies are moving, particularly in relation to us. We are coming to understand how we are cared for and what that means for our place and value in our world.

Yeah but, no but. At four and half, Yasik was part of a group with family ties and then orphanage community. You could say he had been provided with protection, resources and opportunities for cooperation.

Henry Wellman, a psychologist, makes an interesting observation about the development of our theory of mind, and I would include, our mindset. He reasoned that by the time a child is four years old, he or she is equipped to know when “what someone else thinks is mistaken.”[ix]

Footnotes 

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[i] Perina, Kaja “Why Most Crave Connection—and Why Some of Us Don’t” https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/beyond-school-walls/202408/why-we-crave-connection-and-why-some-of-us-dont September 12, 2024 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introvert-extrovert-ambivert-you-might-what-think-wanda-thibodeaux-co2fc

There’s a new personality type called the ‘otrovert’ and one major trait sets it apart

[ii] Cherry, Kendra   “Understanding collectivist Cultures: individualism vs collectivism” https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-collectivistic-cultures-2794962 June 4, 2026

“The Importance of Connection on our Well-being” https://executive.berkeley.edu/thought-leadership/blog/importance-connections-our-well-being

“Social connection linked to improved health and reduced risk of early death” https://www.who.int/news/item/30-06-2025-social-connection-linked-to-improved-heath-and-reduced-risk-of-early-death 30 June 2025

[iii] Martino, Jessica, Jennifer Pegg, Elizabeth Pegg Frates   “The Connection Prescription: Using the Power of Social Interactions and the Deep Desire for Connectedness to Empower Health and Wellness” American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine 2015 Oct 7;11(6):466–475. doi: 10.1177/1559827615608788

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6125010/Top of Form

[iv] Kumar, Karthik, MBBS, Medical Reviewer: John P. Cunha, DO, FACOEO   “How Do Hugs Make You Feel?” MedicineNet, Inc. 11/4/2024 https://www.medicinenet.com/how_do_hugs_make_you_feel/article.htmTop of Form

Alloway, Tracy P, Ph.D.  “What 20 Seconds of Hugging Can Do for You”  Psychology Today, January 19, 2022

Hare, Brian and Vanessa Woods   Survival of the Friendliest: understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity Random House, 2020, 74, 97

[v] Human Rights Watch “IV. THE “GILDED CAGE” OF THE DOM REBYONKA: INFANCY TO FOUR YEARS” https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/russia2/Russ98d-05.htm

[vi] IBID

[vii] IBID

[viii] Human Rights Watch “II. THE ODYSSEY OF A RUSSIAN ORPHAN” https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/russia2/Russ98d-03.htm

Paddock, Richard C. “The Grim Face of Russia’s Orphanages” World and Nation Dec. 17, 1998 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-dec-17-mn-54995-story.html

“Orphanage experience alters brain development” University of Wisconsin – Madison News  February 17, 2003​​  https://news.wisc.edu/orphanage-experience-alters-brain-development/

Cacioppo, Stephanie   Wired for Love: a neuroscientist’s journey through romance, loss, and the essence of human connection   Flatiron Books, 2023, 21, 23

[ix] Hare, Brian and Vanessa Woods   Survival of the Friendliest: understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity Random House, 2020, 57, 89, 91

Orphanage Risks  adoptionasfamily.org

If you had asked us point blank, we would have assured you that we were going to honour Yasik’s Russian heritage.  I guess by going to Russian meet-ups and by eating piroshkies, but in reality – likely because we gave it no conscious thought to what retaining his Russian heritage might mean – we were going to be turning Yasik into a Canadian with little pretense of retaining his Russian beginnings. He was going to adapt to or take on Canadian society’s behaviours, language, art and institutions to showcase Canadian values, ideas or beliefs.

Again the question, what were we missing of Yasik’s mindset already in place?

Culture

Maybe it is not particularly common to smile at others while walking about downtown Vancouver, but in our small town, we smile as we weave in and out of others on the street or at the grocery store. Downtown Moscow, we felt a bit affronted that when we smiled, we received non-committal, even frowning, return stares. Apparently it was considered rude to smile automatically at strangers. Smiling was reserved for connection that is just not there with a stranger. Connection is with family. Perhaps because their history is soaked in hardship and distrust of strangers.[i]

Yet with Yasik in our arms on the Metro, people gave up their seats to us, just as they did for Dave carrying a sleepy Yasik home at the end of a day in Canada.

Would it not inspire pride in Yasik’s heart if we were to stoke whatever embers of first-culture awareness remained?

 adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four[ii] provides a list of suggestions for how adoptive parents might strengthen ties to a child’s first cultural heritage.  We would have loved to take him on a holiday to Russia or found more people to spend time with who were culturally Russian.  Other suggestions were over the top for us, ranging from reserving a special night each week to soak in all things first-country, or hunting down a barbershop or salon that catered to the child’s first world. 

And so it was that there was no trip to Russia though we have always encouraged friendships with people from Russia whenever we encountered them.  But it dribbled to a stop there. Our adoption organization offered continued Russian connection, but other than one or two visits, we did not maintain this connection.  Yasik showed little interest and Dave and I are not extroverted enough to seek out those kinds of social events.

We allowed Yasik to be swallowed up by Canadian culture instead as limited as that seems to be.

Perhaps because we Canadians see ourselves as a mosaic of cultures, off hand, only a couple of customs stand out. We say sorry all the time. We are also known to say ‘Eh’ at the end of our greetings and we take our shoes off at the door. No resistance actually for Yasik as, maybe because Russia and Canada are well above the equator, Russians take their shoes off at the door too. 

As a family we celebrate Christmas on December 25, not January 7, the Russian Christmas, and have fun or sleep in on most of the rest of Canada’s statutory holidays.

Music, Art, Literature

Yaroslavl is the birthplace of the professional Russian theater. Fyodor Volkov founded the first permanent public theater there in 1750.

Canada’s cultural scene had no need of an art museum the size of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg,

Dave worked on art with a motorcycle focus; I read where ever my current interests took me.  Neither Dave nor I have the sense of holiness that Europeans seem to have for art and literature. It should also be noted that we had no idea what stories or fairy tales had been told or read to Yasik in the orphanage though my orphanage interview notes say he liked to be read to and learned poems by heart.  Someone was taking time with him.  Yasik was given a Pushkin story before we left Russia; we were scarcely aware of who Pushkin was to Russia.  Because we had little idea of these aspects of Russian culture, beyond a beginner’s understanding of art and literature, and did not sign Yasik up for weekend classes, he had almost no exposure to Russian music or art or literature.

Acknowledging this, we may be coming off as intransigent boors with our lack of engagement in Yasik’s culture. Still with maybe a slight shrug, I can comfortably note that soon Yasik was collecting Pokemon cards, not more Pushkin.  Besides which Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents[iii] notes that Russian children have been told things like: “Close your eyes at night or the witches will come to peck them out“.  Not so different from our “The boogie man will get you“.

We were told he was attuned to music, but the orphanage staff did not elaborate other than to encourage us to put him in music classes.  We did that.  As these classes advanced, they were more and more directed to classical piano.  By the age of 12, Yasik was pleading to be freed of them although it could be argued that he started to give strong hints almost from the start as he flopped his head down on the piano keys and moaned.  He wanted music but whatever the radio gave him to bounce and chant along with in sounds perhaps between Russian and English. Maurice Mierau’s youngest did the same, making “tuneless word-sounds that were neither English nor Ukrainian”.[iv] Be that as it may, Dave and Yasik were listening to a CD while driving somewhere one day.  Dave noticed Yasik in tears and parked, pulling Yasik into his arms.  Yasik broke into serious sobs even though Dave assured him it was only a song.  That was the power of music for him.

Food, Clothing

If Yasik’s orphanage was as Russian as we have to assume, he ate a fair bit of the staples of a northern climate: cabbage, beets, and potatoes or borscht, lucky kid. To help Yasik transition, our friend Tony directed us to some sausage shops and a store that made great piroshkies. Yasik definitely was into these and so were we. I am not sure Canada has any truly recognizable Canadian dish other than maybe poutine and lots of fish. Again, no problem for a kid who started life next to the Volga River. Yasik had no interest in MacDonald’s in Moscow but he soon cottoned on. And maybe Kraft macaroni and wieners are a Canadian dish. He adapted to that dish very quickly.

Clothing was pretty much jeans, T-shirts and hoodies across the globe so that was never an issue.

Language:

Being Slavic means belonging to the largest ethnolinguistic group in Europe, with over 300 million people sharing ancestral roots and languages like Russian, Ukrainian, Polish.[v]

Via language, values, attitudes and worldviews are communicated. Here are two cherry-picked proverbs from the languages listed above, all of which use the Cyrillic alphabet.

Не имей сто рублей, а имей сто друзей

Translation: Don’t have a hundred rubles, have a hundred friends.

With hardship a given for many Russians throughout their history, this proverb would likely have nurtured the value of having friends. How might that have been messaged to an orphan, even a social orphan?

Не выноси сор из избы

Translation: Don’t take trash out of the hut.

In Russian culture, family and private matters are to be kept within the home. It implies that exposing personal problems to outsiders is inappropriate and potentially shameful.

Could this have been why the orphanage never provided much detail about the bio-parents shameful behaviour? Did Yasik pick up on anything shameful in connection with his family?

I do not diss a language as rich as Russian. But learn it to ease Yasik into our life? We were adopting well before the possibilities now available in language-learning. Not that we were not encouraged to try. Our translator tried to screw a few phrases into our brains as we drove toward the orphanage. Yasik used words that were easily connected to motorcycles, airplanes and the need to pee. But slipping in a little suggestion like “Also, perhaps learn his native language before you bring him home…” Learn your child’s language while he learns yours might be a bit over the top.[vi]

Getting an invitation to adopt may only arrive 6 weeks before the adopters are expected to fly over to the child’s country.  Maybe I am old school but I continue to believe that even with all the aids available today, to learn the child’s native language requires some serious investment. I googled just to be sure. With apps, Russian generally takes 11 to 14 months of daily study to reach a level just below intermediate, which would be enough to get to know your child. Much adoption literature, perhaps more ‘practical’ in this regard, notes that most adoptees will become comfortable with the language of their adoption within months of arrival.

Yasik, thanks to Forest Gump (and yes, other sources), managed just that. Hidden Potential: the science of achieving greater things by Adam Grant suggests that “kids tend to absorb foreign languages faster than adults.“[vii]

Their brains enjoy more plasticity, less prior knowledge to convolute and little to no fear of making mistakes. Dave and I, with at best 10 Russian words between us, only remember having fun with his renditions of words, like “sillyphone” for telephone.  We saw no bother on his face when we giggled at his chatter.  We did not look for a school offering weekend lessons in Russian.  

The time also came when he was quite certain he did not remember any Russian, although my brother-in-law maintains a fantasy that he heard teenage Yasik talking up some visiting, and very pretty, Russian girls at a hockey game.

And yes, long term and for that matter even short term, that was/is a loss for Yasik.  If at some point in his life he has the opportunity to spend time with his half-brother and half-sister in Russia, any connection of depth will be hampered by the need for a translator.

Religion: 

Yasik may have had some experience with the Russian Orthodox church. One in Rybinsk has been around for quite a while, if 1697 qualifies.  That it is still there speaks to a long and deep partnership between the church and the government.  

Dave and I, like many Canadians of our generation, had moved away from organized religion into a less structured belief in God.  Some of this generation move back into religion for a stable social world for their children but we could not see any viable reason to make such a choice.  We played together on Sundays.

And we were not particularly unusual in our casual attitude to Yasik’s heritage.  John Brooks in The Girl Behind the Door:

Casey never showed much curiosity during [conversations about her origin story].  She never asked about her birth mother, whether she had siblings or who her birth father could have been.  Much to [her Polish-origin adoptive mother’s] dismay, she had little interest in Polish culture, never watched the hours of video [her adoptive parents] shot during [their] trip [to adopt her in Poland], and when asked if she wanted to meet her birth mother someday waved [them] off, annoyed…. As time passed, the orphanage became a distant memory.  [The adoptive father] hoped it had been completely erased from Casey’s consciousness.  She was a member of [their] family now – no different from a biological child in [their] minds …. But in truth, [they] had no idea how [their] words resonated in her sharp little mind.[viii]

We cannot be certain we are making the best long-term decisions when we don’t offer more access to our child’s first heritage. Maurice Mierau’ father was born in Ukraine. It is understandable then that in Detachment: an adoption memoir Mierau writes that he and his wife enrolled their children in a Ukrainian language nursery school for a few of months and took them to a Ukrainian store for goodies.[ix] But quickly the couple were introducing birthday parties, celebrated with their Ukrainian speaking babysitter and several Ukrainian friends and buying goofy outfits for Halloween.[x]  “The only religion in [their] house since the boys arrived was Star Wars”.[xi] Within a year of their adoption, the younger son thought of Ukraine as part of a long distant babyhood and the older son said he wanted to be a Canadian.[xii]

Nonetheless Mierau’s older son, who was adopted at 5, had no memories from before his life in an orphanage yet “he’d told [his adoptive parents] about a dream that seemed to go further back”.[xiii] In the dream an image approaches the child whom he believes is his mother but this image vanishes when the child tries to come closer to it. Would more connection to the culture of origin have helped the boy gain a sense of contact with the past or given the parents a deeper awareness of his mindset?

This exploration of our child’s heritage has uncovered some awareness of where the Russian distrust of strangers comes from. Why did Yasik show so little of that after knowing us for only an hour or so? Had he picked up enough understanding of family that his little mind was firmly set on it? Had his mind been given enough prompting to have some sense of a ‘higher power’? Dare I say a god? Would it have been too onerous to ferret out more Russian literature from our public library?

Footnotes

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[i] Sheldon K. M., Titova L., Gordeeva T. O., Osin E. N., Lyubomirsky S., Bogomaz S.

“Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model”

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 2017. Vol. 48. No. 5. P. 718–733.

[ii]  Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children er age four. New Horizon Press,2014, 82.

[iii] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 151.

[iv] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 102,103.

[v] Sheldon K. M., Titova L., Gordeeva T. O., Osin E. N., Lyubomirsky S., Bogomaz S.

“Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model”

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 2017. Vol. 48. No. 5. P. 718–733.

[vi] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press, 2014, 64.

[vii] Hidden Potential: the science of achieving greater things by Adam Grant suggests that “kids tend to absorb foreign languages faster than adults.” (55)

[viii] Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 55,56.

[ix] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 103.

[x] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 131.

[xi] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 161.

[xii]Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 133.

[xiii] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 176.

In my mid-teens I was on a train coming from Edmonton and headed to my home in the Fraser Valley for the Christmas holidays. I’d fallen asleep and woke in the early morning as the train was pulling into the Blue River station which was right up against a mountain. That mountain assured me that I was again surrounded by mountains; my entire body slipped into its comfort zone. I was home. My aunt, on the other hand, a lifelong prairie woman, found it hard to breathe when she visited us in Chilliwack.  Back on the ‘bald prairie’ she was home. In Yasik’s mind, what is ‘home’?

The physical worlds Yasik inhabited

Yasik began life in what we understood to be a ‘small village’ in the Yaroslavl oblast, Rybinsk.

Maybe it was a small village in Russian terms, but even in the 1990s, Rybinsk had a population over 200,000.

Yasik’s bio sister’s family sent us the two following pictures, taken on their visit to Yaroslavl a few years ago. Yasik’s family lived in an apartment that may be one the buildings in these pictures.  Perhaps this was much as it looked in the 1990s. Perhaps by this time it was an abandoned building in need of much repair.

When the social services took Yasik from the apartment around his first birthday, they first placed him in one of the hospitals, maybe in Rybinsk, maybe in Yaroslavl, and maybe one that offered pediatric care. Whether Rybinsk or Yaroslavl, because it was the early 1990s all over Russia, the hospital would have been struggling with overcrowding and basic medical shortages.

By the time he was two, he was living in an orphanage for young children.  The orphanage seemed to be off a dirt road, back a bit of beyond.  Perhaps similar to the one pictured, a Yaroslavl orphanage in later decades.

There was a piece at the side of the house that looked worn enough to likely have been a playground. It reminds me of how Tony describes the playground of his orphanage in 1930s Saskatoon (A Canadian Story of Adoption in the 1930s).

On any outing he would have been part of at the orphanage, it would have been hard to miss at least a glimpse of the Volga River. The longest river in Russia and in Europe, it runs through the entire oblast. The land on either side of this river all through the Yaroslavl oblast was a mix of urban and rural, farm and forest, though with birch and aspen, it looks more like central and northern prairies. It feels more like the prairies, as well, with warmer warm and colder cold seasons.

A plane ride and he entered a city of roughly 50,000 but so closely tied to a larger urban region, it took a moment to think which city we were in on any outing. We had a comparable river running through it but instead of aspens and a more prairie look, we were surrounded by mountains.  Our climate saw more rain but much less snow.

Whether any of that registered with Yasik, our 50s era home with a small backyard, did.  After just three hours in his new home, when Dave wanted to simply rearrange parking, Yasik thought he was being made to leave this home. He howled.

Our background playground wasn’t scruffy; it was non-existent as neither Dave nor I had yet given much thought to the yard.  But now we had Yasik. We had a yard and we needed to see what we could do.  Or Yasik very quickly, very naturally, rearranged our thinking and awareness of what might please him.  Or we fell back on what our parents did with us. Whatever… the environment our house and yard offered became kid oriented. 

We attempted some gardening, built igloos the odd year we had sufficient snowfall and played itsy-bitsy soccer on the front lawn. The house was tucked in among a string of streets trying to be a suburb but so infused with businesses and institutions that there was little point in denying it was part of a much larger urban setting, with cars everywhere. Nonetheless Yasik learned to ride a bike in the alley between our house and the Chevron station and biked on sidewalks running alongside a street that boasted 40,000 cars a day.

At the bottom of our little tree-lined street, on the other side of the river of traffic, the elementary school had the word ‘Community’ in its title and across from the school was a park with baseball diamonds, a swimming pool and even a creek bordered by trees and picnic tables. An hour or two out of town our bodies and minds could ‘heed the call of the wild’ with hiking or swimming in rain-forested provincial parks.

When the city began to feel just that, a city, we moved ‘out to the country’, the bedroom city of Maple Ridge, settling into a half-acre piece bordered by muskeg, bush, trees that fringed the coastal range circling the Fraser Valley.

The physical body Yasik inhabited

People see my mother’s face stamped on mine. Likewise for my siblings, you can see my parents on their bodies. Yasik can see that he shares facial features with his bio-sister but it is very unlikely he will ever hear someone say, “Oh you look just like your mother” or “Yes, he looks just like his dad”.

His birthplace though is evident. While it is disputable that there is a Slavic DNA, it is interesting that in the UK and some other places, Slavic ethnic groups are sometimes viewed as distinct cultural minorities rather than part of the dominant white majority. So DNA or not, he does carry some of the features considered Slavic: oval-face, straight nose, fair-skin, hazel eyes and blond hair that aged into sandy. All these features were fashioned into one cute little human being.

Whatever the combination is for cuteness, it can come in handy.

Cuteness is the signal nature sends to us that says that a creature is young, vulnerable and needs nurturing.  Seeing cuteness is usually pleasurable and cues us to interact positively with children...[i]

But put bluntly, for Yasik, cuteness was not enough to draw his biological father and mother to dote on him. Nor was the fact that he had been put together with genes from their parents and themselves.   We know that he was found in a bed, unattended as an infant. Our child carried their genes and experienced their lack of nurture. We would be parenting a child bearing the expression of genes that were developed over generations of oppression and whose infancy was soaking in that atmosphere.  Added to this, the early, caring nurture that helps a child develop resistance to stress and encouragement of the growth hormone was lacking for Yasik.  As well, it is possible his convergent strabismus in one eye may have been inherited or come as a result of his parents’ prenatal drinking.[ii]

We cannot therefore ignore the possibility that their lack of care was pre-natal as well as post. It is possible they were uncaring because alcohol was their ‘go to’ in the difficulties of their days. It is possible that Yasik’s mother was drinking while pregnant. It is equally possible that it mattered that his father was drinking for it is now accepted that a father’s drinking can also infect the fetus.[iii]

I see no reason to do other than leave this section with the following for whether we know details how Yasik’s genes were developed or what epigenetics were in play with a poor start to life, we do know this:

…[I]f stressful events occurred during certain trigger periods in a child’s life, they would leave an epigenetic imprint on that child’s genes…[iv]

…For instance, early brain growth depends in part on diet… Brain growth slows and complexity advances less if an infant or toddler is deprived of protein. During the first three years or so, the problematic development of the malnourished child can be corrected to some extent if the child is given a better diet, with milk, meat, eggs, or other good protein sources included. Catch-up growth can then help bring the brain closer to normal size, although the child’s stature may always be short.[v]

On Yasik’s first doctor visit he was pronounced physically fit, perhaps, because he’d built up a strong immunity to childhood diseases in his orphanage and likely because the orphanage did its best to provide a better diet.

Days after we returned to Canada, our facilitator met us at a café to put together the post- adoption paperwork. She herself did not plan to adopt as her husband was wary of adopting a child who might not be quite as perfect as the child they had birthed. Was the direction she then moved the conversation an attempt to smooth over this admission from a cache of comments offered to new adoptive parents? She marveled at how much Yasik look like Dave, and to draw me in, she pointed out that he had my eyes.  Not a hard sell. We both have Slavic origins as well according to our histories. John Brooks and his wife wanted their girl to think she looked like Brook’s mother as a young girl.[vi]

Why do we adopters want a child who does not have our genes to, if at all possible, appear to have them? What if the only adoption route open to us at the time was China?

Yasik was growing, pink cheeked and fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which member of the family you asked, unable to miss much school time due to illness.  Yasik, with his button nose and soft blond hair, also came into the family cute enough that on a pumpkin patch trip he so mesmerized the staff they end up leaving another child in the field, but they certainly had lots of pictures of Yasik and the pumpkins. This did not, in this case ‘manage stress’ or ‘soothe’ the other child’s mother.

Maurice Mierau and his wife were told something similar by one of the women at the boys’ Ukrainian nursery: “Your boys are so good-looking, and that’s an asset in life, you know”.[vii] Mierau felt encouraged by the comment. 

So there you have it. The natural environments of Yasik’s birthplace and the world he moved to at four and half shared some similarities. The bigger difference would have come in each place that was home for a short time, the apartment, the hospital, the orphanage and finally our home.  I do know that of all the places he has lived, that little house in New West meant the most to him. The word ‘home’ for him may be accompanied by a picture of the little house on Kelly Street.

Footnotes

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[i] Perry, Bruce MD, PhD. and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: what traumatized children can teach us about loss, love and healing. Basic Books, 2017, 369-370.

[ii] Olitsky, Scott E., MD., Errol W. Chan, MBBS, FRCOphth; Sonal Farzavandi, FRCS(Edin)

“Strabismus: Accommodative Esotropia” American Academy of Opthamology, JAN 20, 2016

https://www.aao.org/education/disease-review/strabismus-accommodative-esotropia

Shah, Dr. Ritka, BDS, MBA, Dr. Fadel Husrom, MD, reviewer, Rohit Garoo, BSC, MBA, Shinta Liz Sunny, M.Tech, fact-checked  “Strabismus (Cross-Eye) In Infants: Signs, Causes & Treatment “ Mom Junction, Jun.19, 2025

https://www.momjunction.com/articles/strabismus-in-babies-and-infants_00349137/?sem_campaign=DynPMAXMomjunction_Canada&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23492009242&gclid=Cj0KCQjwp9vTBhCWARIsANaUrjunXHyIhHj8Ah0MGqvPzZuDnD1eEowrLgYRYg5R92V3xELei3AQjyQaAj9KEALw_wcB#what-causes-strabismus-in-babies

Gummel, Kristina and Jan Ygge    “Ophthalmologic Findings in Russian Children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome”  European Journal of Ophthalmology Volume 23, Issue 6 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5301/ejo.5000296

[iii] https://jheor.org/post/2235-new-research-points-to-dad-s-drinking-as-a-significant-factor-in-fetal-alcohol-syndrome

[iv] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children er age four. New Horizon Press,2014, 64.

Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joschko. Scientific Parenting: what science revels about parental influence. Dundurn Press, 2013, 173.

[v] Mercer, Jean. Thinking Critically About CHILD DEVELOPMENT: examining myths & misunderstandings, 3^rd ed.  Sage Publications, 2016, 156.

[vi] Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 56.

Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 151.

[vii] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 103.

Parenting an Adopted Child reminds us “that children’s lives do not begin the day they are adopted.  Regardless of the type of adoption, children have biological relatives and genetic histories of their own”[i].

When seeking to know an adoptee’s mindset it is likely in the best interests of adopters to acquaint themselves with anything available of the child’s origins.  Though when the child is not yet 5 years old and from an unstable home in a country with bigger concerns than the life of one social orphan, there may be little information offered.

That doesn’t mean I can’t sift the bits available to better understand the dynamics of family via adoption.

Yasik was plucked out of a historical setting designed over centuries. With all this time, Russia had also run the gamut from monarchy to authoritarian government.  Unfortunately, all that time did not lead to ideas for a healthier economy.

This is not about trying to compare Russian history with Canadian history, Russian politics with Canadian politics, Russian economy with Canadian economy.

It is nonetheless worth examining for some of the history, politics and economy would be written in his genes. Some of the history, politics and economy would be impacting those genes via the nurture he received as it came through to him in the tiny world offered by his orphanage in the 1990s.

Historical setting

History is the narrative of human experience in time and place.  We have, as I have mentioned often, only a bare history of Yasik’s life in Russia, things adopters are now heartily encouraged to check out. Yasik was born in Rybinsk, a city within the Slavic region, Yaroslavl Oblast. Had we checked, we would have found that Yaroslavl Oblast is part of the ‘Golden Ring’ with a history that began as the birthplace of Russian statehood and developed into a craft and trade center. It is also the region where Peter the Great built a flotilla that became the foundation of the Russian navy. (Wikipedia). Dating back to the westward movement of Germanic tribes in the 5^th and 6^th centuries, the Slavs acquired their name and identity either because for centuries they were an enslaved people or because the word ‘Slavic’ comes from ‘slovo’ which means ‘word’ or ‘speech’ and identified Slavs as a people who spoke the same language. Either way, as I have said before, Yasik is steeped in a long Slavic story and there is every reason to appreciate and honour his history.

Marion Crook understood this about her adopted children. When one child pulled off a “stupid prank’, someone saw it as what must be expected of an adoptee. Crook shot back that both the child’s bio-parents and adoptive parents “…are thoroughly ashamed of him at the moment!”  How dare he imply my son’s heritage was inferior!”[ii].

Yeah But, No But. I will add a comment from Born For Love which is focusing on the conditions in Russia as they impact children raised in orphanages there. Examining the period of Russian history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Richard Hellie, a professor of history, ties that period of darkness to the present day as having “replicated itself as each generation continued to traumatize the next and build brains for reaction, not thought[GV1] ”[iii].  Just as Jewish history has marked Jews with a tendency to anxiety, Russian history has marked Russians with a sense of fatalism; suffering uplifting. Offering us some cultural preparation for our trip to Russia, our adoption facilitator shrugged while warning us against smiling in public for “We [Russians] have unsolvable problems”. Is ‘grin and bear it’ embedded in Yasik’s psyche?

Yasik was carried through immigration to a country not yet two centuries old with a history that has rarely failed to put high school students to sleep. A country with a history played out on a landscape somewhat smaller than Russia’s but contested over much more recently.

It is the landscape that would most impact Yasik’s new experience of history: picnics by the lake, hikes up the mountain, and long commutes to everywhere unlike the country side around Yaroslavl which was more central- Alberta-like. And the commutes themselves expressed a different history. There were the universals for a child: school, hockey rinks and soccer fields to be seen everywhere but there would be no very old monasteries and towers standing solemnly between.

Political setting

Those old Kremlins, monasteries and towers were the first icons along that gamut Russian governments have run from monarchies to the Soviet regime. As we witnessed during our short stay, the Soviet period shunned the ornate icons, preferring “gray concrete boxes” messaging a political ideology showcasing efficiency and standardization.

Then the Soviet regime came undone. Could the next icon have been a tank?

Yasik was unlikely following the news when Yeltsin ordered tanks to bomb the parliament, constitution be damned, leaving Russia fragile. The agenda he was pushing was an attempt to move from authoritarian to more democratic agendas, but it turns out showing up with tanks is not quite enough to change political agendas overnight. It all takes money and that was in short supply.

This had both a negative and positive (depending on your point of view) ‘trickle-down effect’ on Yasik’s orphanage life.  America came to Russia’s aid offering money and business connections with the West. So while Yasik’s bio-family were destitute, and orphanages had limited budgets, Russia was very open to international adoption.

The reader is left to decide.  Are international adoptions in aid of a struggling country a viable option or the kidnap of Mother Russia’s future?

Meanwhile, whether Yasik knew a quasi-democracy from a constitutional democracy or not, he now moved to Canada which, for a mere 130 years at the time of Yasik’s arrival, had stuck with a constitution based on democracy.

Dave and I would be his guides into a good democratic Canadian mindset. When Yasik was yet well below the voting age, we would take him with us to get up close and personal with his right to vote for candidates offering the Canadian version of a choice from left to right. We wanted him to see we were not squandering our democratic right to vote. However, … we did not always do our homework beforehand, so what the heck, we would let Yasik choose for us.

Economic setting

However Yeltsin understood democracy, he too may not have done all his homework. At about the time Yasik was born, in the 1990s, Russia’s economic classification was (the now abandoned term, Second World) or Transition Economy with Lower-Middle class incomes. On the advice of Western economists, he instituted ‘shock therapy’, sudden and radical transition to free-market policies, flipping on the switch for a wild roller coaster ride. This may be why Yasik’s parents, while working at a factory, were being paid in food and china they were free to peddle, why poverty was evident everywhere. Russia’s reputation as a poor country became such a given assumption in the pool of common knowledge that even Jennifer Traig, in her book on hypochondria, Well Enough Alone, uses Russia as an example of somewhere you might expect to find people with bad teeth. She is writing of her own gray-coloured tooth, and wonders how the tooth turned on her. “I’d known other people with discolored teeth, but they’d always had a story. They’d fallen face-first into a tree, or grown up in Russia”.[iv]

Considering that Yasik was given over to us with not one item he might have called his own, we can assume that he was living below the poverty line.  His parents had left him nothing; the orphanage would not let him take anything. 

But did that necessarily mean that Yasik had a sense of deprivation in the orphanage? Perhaps with nothing to compare and three squares a day, he was unconcerned about his economic state.  Yet as we packed for the return trip to Canada, we found he had been hiding his toys, a kind of hoarding common among institutionalized children.

When we landed in Vancouver we may have been at the airport for almost an hour. The drive to our home in new Westminster may have taken about an hour. Sitting down with family for a meal may have taken an hour. So maybe three hours after landing in Canada, Yasik was showered with more gifts than, we assume, he had been given in his first four years. He was now in (the now abandoned term, a First World) or Developed Nation.

Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four reminds adopters: “Remember your child has gone through many losses; the loss of their biological family, the loss of caretakers and friends, the loss of culture, foods, familiar smells, sights etc. They are sometimes overwhelmed when they come to their new family and home…”[v]

How does a child with too small shoes comprehend shoes that fit, clothes of his own, and toys, lots of toys of his own?

Overwhelmed Yasik may have been, but as Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist, reminds his readers in Stumbling On Happiness, moving farther up the money scale doesn’t make a lot of happiness difference. Coming out of desperate poverty does.[vi]  Perhaps Yasik saw a child’s reason for shifting his mindset from an adaptation to his economic situation in Russia to happy adaptation to his new economy.

Yasik defined his economic state this way: he said he got all he wanted one Christmas and then wished we were rich so he could get everything he wanted. What was that about I thought at the time.

And yeah, yeah, I know, all the adoption guides say don’t swamp him with stuff.

 Footnotes

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[i]Lancaster, Kathy, PhD. Parenting an Adopted Child, 2^nd ed.  Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 2009, 37.

[ii] Crook, Marion. Thicker than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 131.

[iii] Szalavitz, Maia & Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Born For Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 119.

[iv] Traig, Jennifer. Well Enough Alone: a cultural history of my hypochondria. Riverhead Books, 2008, 163.

[v] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press,2014, 65.

[vi] Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on HAPPINESS. Vintage Canada,2006, 239.

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 [GV1]

Yasik was now a Canadian Vincent.  It was time to move from his Russian nurture to his nurture in our family, not ignoring that he would be bringing his Russian-transferring-to-Canadian nature and nurture along.

I heard Dr. Phil once say, in a context I may be misconstruing, that ‘it’ (life/relationships) is all about perspective or perception. Likely he made this statement in the context of whomever he was interviewing in the time frame of his show.  It seems to me that we have to get a bit snoopier than to simply look at the beliefs or perceptions and perspectives that energize a person’s experience of life. We have to take a look at the root holding up the bunch of leaves, flowers and fruit of the belief bush. We have to ask what generates our perspectives, perceptions, and ultimately our beliefs. 

I was reading Louise Penny’s A Fatal Grace this morning while waiting for the house to heat up enough to start the day comfortably. It’s nice to slip into the world she has created in the small village of Three Pines, murders be damned.  Chief Inspector Gamache is talking with Myrna, a former psychologist, in her cozy little bookstore about a child who has been abused by her parents. Myrna says the young girl may be damaged for life by the beliefs instilled in her about herself by her parents. This brings to Gamache’s mind a quote by Mahatma Gandhi:

Your beliefs become your thoughts

Your thoughts become your words

Your words become your actions

Your actions become your destiny.[i]

We have made the case that Yasik is a person, not a parent’s stuffie. How has Yasik come to the beliefs or perspectives he holds?

Set, as in ‘mindset’, and setting are terms for a theory that refers to the psychological, social and cultural parameters which shape the response to psychedelic experience.[ii]  I would like to apply that thought to the perceptions of an adoptee with ‘mindset’ being both the genetics and the perspective or perceptions the adoptee brings to family and ‘setting’ as all that influences the development or nurture of the adoptee’s ‘mindset’: historical and cultural, language, political, economic, social, physical, economic and spiritual environment that impact the relationship (even with a list like that I probably missed something).

To have a good psychedelic trip both mindset and setting must be taken into account. To have a good understanding of the way each individual handles his or her life journey again mindset and setting must be examined.

As I seek to understand the ‘setting’ for Yasik’s mindset, I begin with a point being made by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician and oncologist, in The Gene: an intimate history about the interconnectedness of genes and environment.

…. whether nature predominates or nurture is not absolute, but depends quite acutely on the level of organization one chooses to examine.… in the estuarine plains of crisscrossing information, history, society, and culture collide and intersect with genetics, like tides.  Some waves cancel each other, while others reinforce each other.  No force is particularly strong – but their combined effect produces the unique and rippled landscape that we call an individual’s identity.[iii]

Mukherjee comes back at the end of the book to “recall the scientific, philosophical, and moral lesson of [the] history [of the gene]” in 13 points. In point #6, he offers a good example of how Nature and Nurture are seen as working together.

#6. It is nonsense to speak about “nature” or “nurture” in absolutes or abstracts.  Whether nature – i.e., the gene- or nurture – i.e., the environment – dominates in the development of a feature or function depends, acutely, on the individual feature and the context.  The SRY gene determines sexual anatomy and physiology in a strikingly autonomous manner; it is all nature.  Gender identity, sexual preference, and the choice of sexual roles are determined by intersections of genes and environments – i.e., nature plus nurture. The manner in which “masculinity” versus “femininity” is enacted or perceived in a society, in contrast, is largely determined by an environment, social memory, history, and culture; this is all nurture.[iv]

I happened to read both The Gene and The Myth of Normal at the same time.  The Gene gave me some understanding of Nature and The Myth of Normal focused on Nurture. In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté, a physician who specializes in childhood development and trauma, warns against diagnosis for those elements of our humanity that are not “all nature” as Mukherjee says above.

…. [A]study looked at the prescription records of almost one million B.C. schoolchildren over an eleven-year period and found that kids born in December were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than classmates born the previous January. The reason? December kids entered the same grade nearly a year younger than their January counterparts – they were eleven months behind in brain development. They were being medicated not for a “genetic brain disorder” but for naturally delayed maturation of the brain circuits of attention and self-regulation.[v]

Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, put the idea this way: “Genes and family may determine the foundation of a house, but time and place determine its form” for as Dr. Nicole Letourneau, who focuses on predictors of child health, says on the preceding page, “Genetics may determine how easy it is to push a person’s buttons, but the finger that actually pushes them belongs to the early caregiving environment – how a person was parented.”  ” … regardless of who raised them“.

Dr. Nicole Letourneau and Justin Joschko explain it further as entwined in this way:

To divide traits into genetically determined and environmentally determined compartments is to misunderstand how genes work.  Consider hair colour, a trait that, on the surface, seems to be determined solely by a person’s genes.  A child’s hair is seldom a colour that does not have some familial precedent.  By contrast, the influence of the environment on one’s hair seems nonexistent.  Blonde Nordic children adopted by Chinese families do not spontaneously develop black hair.  However, this does not mean genes alone are responsible for a person’s hair colour.  After all, genes can really only do one thing: instruct cells, … genes cannot, on their own, dictate the colour of a person’s hair.  Hair colour is determined by melanin, … However, in hair the degree of melanin accumulation is decided in part by the concentration of copper to the cells producing that hair.  When that cell has more copper, the hair is darker.  Should the intake of copper be reduced to below a certain threshold, hair generated by the same follicle will be lighter than it was previously, when copper supplies were plentiful…. Such is the case with thousands of environmental factors we take for granted….[vi]

I guess all of this allows me to continue to use the set and setting metaphor. It also allows me to stand back to better see the overall effect of a tapestry showcased at a craft show, to see what the entwining of set and setting have created.  Yasik has moved into a new setting, one that will also be threading a perspective on his mindset. I will begin to consider the world, the setting Yasik has moved into, and its part in the development of his mindset.

As we strove to parent in a way that we thought offered love and care to Yasik, what perception was he forming of family?

When we took this person, Yasik, to the park to ride the teeter totter, he was a tidy little package of 40 inches by 40 pounds and whichever one of us got on the opposite side of the teeter totter that stood a mere 2 feet above ground was north of 3 times 40 by 40. Sometimes Yasik was in danger of being tossed into the air; other times he could be stuck on the ground as we and all that pertained to his new world of family strove to find a good experience on life’s teeter-totter. Riding together with tiny on one side and extra-large on the other can still be wonderful fun if extra-large is caring and responsible and the mechanism that holds the teeter totter together and the playground it has been set in are copacetic (a weird word Dave used to love).

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I will look at our set and setting in the next posts by laying out our setting of family via adoption with the hopes of culling some awareness of the perceptions Yasik was developing.

Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire,

to know nothing for certain.

An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

― William Least Heat Moon[vii]

Footnotes

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[i] Penny, Louise Thorndike Press, GALE, 2006, 391-392

[ii]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325?__cf_chl_f_tk=wx6hqyVqb0RnV29Gf0GY1iteYWJvyMH8sq_TQ9AEMvk-1783019840-1.0.1.1-cZK3lldW7m0xg6YL2M6OaxdRDhoyJWzL9tdXr.gB.F0

[iii] Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: an intimate history. Scribner, 2016, 368-9.

[iv] Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: an intimate history. Scribner, 2016, 481.

[v] Maté, Gabor with Daniel Mate. The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada, 2022, 241-243.

[vi] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joschko. Scientific Parenting: what science revels about parental influence. Dundurn Press, 2013, 56,57,70,34,35.

[vii] Heat Moon, William Least. Blue Highways. Eine Reise in Amerika. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1383812-blue-highwasy-a-journey-into-america