Adoption As Family

Author: admin

  • Name and Identity

    davevincent.com

    Written in 2020

    I have a snapshot in my mind of Dave and I driving through the intersection at Lougheed and Gaglardi Way in Burnaby testing out names for Yasik.   His birth name was Gurin, Yaroslav Nikolayevich –the surname, his given name and the patronymic.  Out Of Line: growing up soviet[i] says this about the importance of naming in the time of Soviet Russia: “In our culture names are very significant. Your name not only tells the world about you, but also about the people who came before you, because your father’s name, adjusted for gender, is added to yours“.  Yaroslav as I said was possibly homage to the region of his birth while Gurin and Nikolayevich connect him to his birth parents.

    A Google scan shows the questions around naming an adoptee are common among adopters, even though adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four does not mention the issue of appropriate names while asking adopters to consider ways to become aware of their child-to-be’s culture.  But then turn to Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness[ii] which has been considered ‘The Bible’ for adoptees.  Lifton devotes a page to the question of naming and her words carry a potency I do not wish to water down with paraphrase.

    As an adopted child, my birth name had been taken from me, and, therefore, according to the beliefs of many old cultures, I was vulnerable to all kinds of dangers.  A name was considered a vital part of you, like your eyes or your teeth, and had to be kept secret so that an enemy could not harm you ….  By taking possession of my birth name, by sealing it away [in sealed adoption files] with the names of all adoptees, society took away my power and the power of all the adopted.

    It is impossible to describe how adoptees feel when they learn that first or last name given them at birth.  The birth name is a confirmation that an individual was born and exists.  It is as integral a part of a person today as it was in ancient times.  As the poet Stanley Kunitz tells us: “Nothing is mine except my name/ I only borrowed this dust.”

    Even when they cannot have a relationship with their birth parents, adoptees may reclaim their names as a way of reclaiming their original identities ….  Sometimes adoptees will use both their adoptive and their birth names, as if not sure which is the real one and which the imposter.

    My husband would be one of the latter.  He has included his birth surname in his public name.  Does its inclusion suggest a question of identity?

    What impact would giving our son a more Canadianized name, shoving the Russian names to the back and deleting the patronymic, have on our son’s sense of identity? We have essentially deleted his birth history.            

    A follow up to Lifton can be found online. At the time I wrote this post, I found the following articles.  Robyn Chittister put up a piece on adoption.com to say a name doesn’t reflect a child’s personality, and it is easy [not sure about that point] to change although adopters do need to think about what impact a name change will have on the child’s world as best they can know at the time.  Jennifer Kadwell put up another piece on adoption.com to say there are no parental manuals to confirm the rightness or wrongness of their choice, but again, Lifton’s observation cannot be ignored. In our global village no name is too ethnic to be considered an albatross.  Jodi Meltzer wrote in cafemom, “It is not about erasing what happened in the past.  You build on their foundation.” which is the point Fraser McAlpine wanted to make in a Guardian piece, agreeing, “[I]t should never be about making the child ashamed of his [or her] birth world”.  In fact, Google has shown us how common our son’s name is in Russia, even attached to some illustrious persons in the Yaroslavl region.

    Impressions we picked up in the pre-adoption phase, seemed to be saying the same thing; recognition of a child’s past and culture is important.  With this in mind, we included Yaroslav in his name.  We cannot say that we did so in full-hearted desire to respect his culture however.  I thought Russia was a country with mysteries I might like to explore but I wanted my son to become as deeply Canadian as I was.  I think Dave felt the same.  Including Yaroslav as one of his names was a requisite nod to approved behaviour for adopters.

    Still that moment in the van testing out names was our, emphasis on ‘our’, naming ceremony for our son-to-be.  We may not have called in the relatives or secured a reservation at the local place for religious ceremonies but the moment stays with me.  Naming a child has always seemed to me something held to be a precious privilege for parents, whether the recipient child would agree or not.   And with good reason sometimes. Case in point, a couple have just named their new born twins, Corona and Covid, as a way to provide a more positive message in a time of stress.  They were wobbling along the right track though, for most of us want to find a name that is a positive message to the child or a way to acknowledge those we love or is a name that sounds cool to us because it is a name trending in the particular decade we inhabit.  We were no different: we registered our son-to-be with a given a name we liked and then were happy to find had meaning that we thought appropriate. We tucked in a second name to honour three relatives in one. The end result was, with the inclusion of Yaroslav, our son’s full name is so long it never fully fits in the allotted space given for names in online documents.

    And on to Moscow.

    With paper work done, passport prepared for Yasik in the chosen name, some child-sized clothing bought, airplane tickets in hand, the night before the flight we opened one of the bottles of wine we had packed as gifts meant to smooth our way into Russian offices; we had crossed off every note on our naive checklist preparing for an adoption. We dusted off the peeling paint and sat on the cement steps of our front porch under what stars we could see through all the street lights and passing cars, and dreamed about our coming life with him.  We saw ourselves as very lucky people.

    In the morning we dressed for the nine-hour flight.  We had to get new American dollars to pay for the items on our Russia trip checklist, the one that would secure our adoption proceedings in Russia.  To be sure those American dollars looked crisp, Dave ironed them.  I had sewn a pocket in my bra for half of them and I had sewn a pocket in Dave’s shorts.  When we stuffed the pockets with the money – $5,000, I looked like I had three breasts but Dave was sporting a male fantasy. 

    Many of our extended family saw us off at the airport and then it was a nine-hour flight to Frankfurt.  We were on our way to the next level of a partnership – up to then we were more like friends helping each other through life, now we were evolving into a unit – a family- with a life bigger than just us.  The trip was cramped, but hey, they gave us each a small hand towel, maybe for the morning shower in the tiny toilet. 

    When we arrived, we were told we would need to declare our money.  I went into hysterical giggles wondering if we would have to be strip searched to declare, but no, so maybe it was all on paper; I don’t remember.  Our driver and hostess showed up to rescue us though they didn’t speak English. Driving through Moscow we kept seeing signs that read Mockba (in Russian letters) 850.  Having done no research before we left, we thought it must be a popular radio station.  It was the 850-year anniversary of a city with a long and rich history of which we were ignorant. 

    The driver, Alexi, took us to a Soviet-era apartment to our eyes in serious need of ‘renos’ – an ancient elevator, heavy, steel, double front doors, a tiny deck with ¼ inch steel siding.  You could see where a bullet had dented it –a design built out of fear.  The furnishings in the interior may have had the touch of a little old lady’s place from the 50s and may not have been Ikea branded, but a sense of art remained evident, complete with an old piano and beautiful wood furniture.    We turned on the TV, which had not left the 50s too far in the dust either. It was likely a news cast interviewing little men dressed in what we did not know was the traditional dress of Georgians, apparently declaring their proud determination to emphasize their independence from Russia.  We knew so little of Russia that we were not aware this program had to do with the worsening relations between Russia and Georgia.  Books encouraging an attempt at cultural awareness should be given heed.

    N.B. The name we use in these journal entries is Yasik, a diminutive of Yaroslav which we were unaware of until we met our son. Had we known we might have retained it for him; he was used to it; we liked it, and in fact, we used it in the early days, mixed in with our given name.  

    Footnotes

    [i] Grimberg, Tina   Out Of Line: growing up soviet Tundra Books, 2007, 6

    [ii] Lifton, Betty Jean Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness Basic Books, 1995, 268

  • The Adoption Process Officially Begins: choosing a child

    Written in 2018

    I have kept a diary since my 20s.  When I finally obtained a satisfactory level of cool, I started calling it a journal. Now when I am wanting to understand more about becoming and being a family via adoption, turning to my journals is like cautiously pulling the thread novelist Isabel Allende imagines in Of Love and Shadows [i] to unravel the conflict her story narrates. Allende may have used the metaphor to suggest that pulling on a thread would start a damaging unraveling but it struck me personally as a way to see what my experiences were made of. This is not an unusual curiosity.  I have read a library shelf worth of studies and memoirs written by people who because they themselves were parents, both birth and adoptive, or children of an adoption, turned to the study of adoption. They wrote to pull on the thread of their stories, to unravel the parts of their lives that helped them to see the knots and hopefully work them out. I think most of these writers, or artists, or musicians or film makers were compelled from within to do so.  I know this is why I read, watch movies or documentaries, sometimes get directed to music by my husband, sift through my journals- to seek some understanding of our family’s experiences as it has come through adoption.

    And a word to address veracity: Someone says, “I remember it like it was yesterday.” Science arches an eyebrow and responds, “I doubt you do.”  A first-year psychology text addressing memory makes the point that we are constantly reconstructing memory as time weaves new perspectives into our narratives, changing a certainty into a recollection well peppered with what must be acknowledged as fiction.  In the stories I share from my journal, there will be new perspectives and a fair bit of adapted recollecting but I do have a first-person primary source, my journal to guide each narrative.

    The entries I select to draw together into a post have been first read by my husband and sometimes my son.

    I start with an entry from June 24, 1997.  Yasik was about 4 ½ and living in an orphanage in Yaroslavl, an ancient city about 250 kilometers from Moscow. Because he was considered cute enough to still have potential for adoption, even at the advanced age of 4 + years, he had been allowed to remain in an orphanage for younger children and on a roster of adoptable children.  He had three older siblings in other orphanages or foster care.   His full name was Yaroslav Guerin Nicolavich; someone told us that Yaroslav is a name he was probably given more as representative of the region he was born into than because his parents saw their new born son as ‘fierce and glorious’, the meaning the name has in Slavic regions.

    Drawing by Nadine Paul Jacobs

    Dave and I had been trying to adopt for about two years; this is an average time though for those determined to have a newborn the wait averages out to seven years. Those two years were about learning what the process involved and then standing before the doors labelled: domestic adoption, open adoption, friend of a friend adoption, international adoption, guessing behind which door we would find our child. We chose the door labelled international adoption.

    Dave’s hand was firmly on the door handle.  My fingers were still a bit twitchy.  I have boxes scattered all over the floor and shoes well tested before I walk out of the shoe shop with a new pair of shoes. And there is much, much more to consider when looking for a child than a pair of shoes. Yeah, really.  

    In the midst of laying down money to the society facilitating our international adoption, I would find myself still toying with other possibilities.  Having a biological baby is a desire that is woven into our beings by biology, tradition, culture, religion, and societal expectations. I had once been told that I couldn’t be a full woman unless I birthed a child. This was a desire to experience as much of ‘normal’ as I could squeeze into my life, despite now living in a body beyond the age of reproduction. I was 47 and could no longer give my husband his own child, even though I had never wanted to do anything other than adopt.  But Dave, how was he feeling about never having a little David or Dianne growing into a remarkable likeness of himself?  Dave stopped me up by asking how he could make a big deal of having a child that came from his loins when he was adopted himself.  That settled my twitchy fingers.  We were on the same page about adopting.

    The first child we were offered when we started to apply to Russia was a 7-month-old boy.  The woman who was facilitating our adoption, Julia, told Dave to be considered for this baby he should shave his beard because it had gray in it. I was already well dyed.  But it didn’t help because Russia came back with a policy that said we had to be less than 40 years old to adopt an infant and we weren’t, I being more years beyond 40 than gray-bearded Dave.

    We looked at our options; a biological or adopted infant was out for us.  When I told a friend who was on maternity leave with a toddler, her less than sympathetic response was, “Good, you will not have to deal with diapers.”  I think she saw them to be a waste of good money.  

    The child was going to be an older child.  I was teaching adult education classes, Dave was working on his art degree, and he was meeting our mortgage payments with a week-end job.  We each tucked in minor surgeries; mine left me with a pee bag sloshing around on my thigh while I was stopping in at various offices to get signatures and sign away lumps of money. The pee bag would rock and roll as I rushed about and sometimes surprised me enough that I would jump or yell for what looked to others like no particular reason.

    So did we stop to check out what it meant to adopt an older child?  No.  We knew little even about the state of affairs in Russia.  Would the KGB be following us around? What would the weather be like in August?  At this point all we knew was our adoption process and a bit about the stories most common at the time regarding adoption, the miracle of a god given ‘forever child’.  I knew this label, ‘forever child’ as it had begun to trend, but I was decidedly unaware of the decent body of research on adoption beginning well back in the twentieth century.  No one hinted to us that we might consider even a visit to the SFU library where a study of Romanian adoptions was into its fourth year. We were simply running through a domestic to do list.

    We were working through pages of paper work about our home, our finances, our jobs, our families and our health.  And we had already started to put down money to pay our way through the process of adoption.  If we backed out now we would have to do all that over for another child.  Money always has a loud voice.  So we asked what was available to us if we were not going to be allowed a baby. Julia told us about a 3-year-old boy, wheel-chair bound with cerebral palsy, and a 4 1/2-year-old boy.  We were not open to the 3-year-old because we worked as caregivers for challenged people for many years. We thought we might have a hard time distinguishing between a sense of being at work and being in a family.  We wanted family, not more job.  Is there a stone to overturn here in terms of becoming and being family?  This was not the pursuit of altruism or joining the ranks of rescuers of the destitute. And we were not alone in the drive to seek a family rather than seek to save the lost or destitute. Valerie J. Andrews in her book, White Unwed Mother: the adoption mandate in postwar Canada, begins her study by noting:

    By the end of the twentieth century, adoption discourse shifted, as adoption practice and popular culture placed the emphasis on prospective adoptive parents, …. “the emphasis has changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of providing a needy parent with a child.”[ii]

    In I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country Elena Kostyuchenko writes of the tragic events of 2004 at the public school in Beslan.  Toward the end of the chapter, [iii]she notes that some people adopted children perhaps in an attempt to fill the void left by the children they lost that day. 

    Yes I was pursuing the dream that refused to fade which I write about on the home page.  But even my dream of adopting a little blond boy was not about saving his sorry little butt; it was because in my dream I had been given him.  And I know what flags pop up on the landscape with that admission.  I will deal with them in time.  And here is another admission found in this entry: Dave liked that the 4-year-old would allow him to keep going on his studies because the 4-year-old would go to school part of the day.  Doesn’t that sound convenient?  Neither Dave nor I had altruistic ideals fueling our desire to adopt.  We wanted a child and if we found one who would fit our finances and work demands, nice.  BUT… hear a very firm ‘however’ here: being near to aging out as prospective parents, and being low on discretionary funds, we had little leeway to be choosy.  We were two people stretching our necks to be counted as middle class, yet about to pack our lives with some serious financial demands. Factor into these constraints an odd little piece: our school had managed to get us unionized in negotiations that decided maternity leave for adopters could be dispensed with because those at the meeting knew of next to no one planning to adopt at the time.

    Julia gave us the first picture of Yasik: blond- just like my dream, chubby- well, pictures add 10 pounds, and one definitely crossed eye, and as someone at my school pointed out, a very cute nose.  I was looking at this picture of Yasik while calling Julia to tell her we had chosen to go ahead with adopting Yasik.  The little fellow in that picture was drawing me in.  A question I wrote down that day was: How do you hold back dreams?  We were about to do as James Michener suggests at the end of The Drifters when the character Brit says, “[people] ought to inspect their dreams.  And know them for what they are.”  We went shopping – always a nice way to put a dream in action.  We went shopping for a 4-year-old boy. Dave got him a book of paper airplanes.

    Footnotes

    [i] Allende, Isabel Of Love and Shadows: a novel Atria Books, 2016, 140

    [ii] Andrews, Valerie J.   White Unwed Mother: the adoption mandate in postwar Canada   Demeter Press, 2018

    [iii] Kostyuchenko, Elena I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country Random House, 2023, 215 & 216

  • An Update

    June 6’20, a Saturday morning.  Translation: in no rush to get out of bed, time to run a finger over my tablet, indulging in online newspapers. It wouldn’t have entered my head to check for any activity on my website.

    But Gmail, yes.  I check it daily.  A tap on my Gmail alerted me to a comment on my website.  The comment reads, “I believe we adopted Yaroslav’s older sister, Svetlana!”

    I believe we adopted Yaroslav’s older sister, Svetlana! Unapprove | Reply | Quick Edit | Edit | History | Spam | Trash

    For me this is one of those ‘time stops’ moments. I had given some thought over the years to Yasik’s ‘bio’ family, wondering how we might help him get in contact with them if he ever showed interest in finding them.  He had not yet expressed interest, at least to Dave and I.  Sometime in his later teens, I asked him if he wanted to look for his mother.  His response, “She never cared about me, so why should I care about her.’” I think that was a flat statement, not a question.   Still, we had the parents’ names and from time to time I googled them.

    That morning I showed no restraint hitting articles of political gossip, yet now I was restrained.  I rolled over and with eyes in full stun mode looked carefully at the alert, trying to comprehend that I even had one.

    “Daaaavve, I have an alert for a website comment.” I opened the website to pull up the comment.  And there it was.  Yasik might have a sibling trying to get in touch with him.

    Restraint again.  What if this was just another way in for spam?  A Nigerian prince wanting us to rescue him as he drained out our bank account?

    We let this electrifying comment hover over us all day like a drone trying to see if we were going to respond, waiting for or taunting us to get over our silly cautiousness and deal with it.

    Meanwhile the sender of the comment was on “pins and needles” so certain was she of her message.

    You see I had started putting out posts from my journal about our adoption experience.  In Journal Entry #1 I provide Yasik’s full birth name, Yaroslav Guerin Nicolavich, and the name of the city he was living in at the time of our adoption, Yaroslavl.  The comment sender, Cherie, had been looking for her adopted daughter’s younger brother since 2000, shortly after their adoption and with the aid of a set of documents not provided at the time of our adoption.  Good ole’ Google – as obscure as my site is – found the match.  Cherie put in the comment and crossed her fingers.  On our end we dithered until the evening.  Finally, we returned the email with a tentative response.  She phoned. And sent pictures of her daughter.  The evidence was in the pictures. Svetlana is Yasik’s sister.  Turns out the other two, though half brother and sister to Yasik and his sister, look amazing like Svetlana and Yasik as well.

    And this may not sound particularly PC coming from an adopter rather than an adoptee from whom the observation usually comes. As this discovery started to shift our thinking, I began to sense that in some hardly fathomable way, Yasik has a kind of fuller substance, is more substantial as a human being with a reality, a history with a bio family.  No longer a ghost as some adoptees describe feeling of themselves.   I don’t understand why this is and maybe it is an idea from societal constructs, still it impacts.

    Now we needed to get in touch with Yasik about this life–altering news.  Cherie says “our kids are complicated and guarded”.   And when Dave and I try to get in touch with him to share news that deserves a flashing Breaking News tag, it takes nearly a month to finally get him on the phone.   I sent him phone messages, wrote letters –one letter was one sentence in bold caps, as tall as the page allowed:

    IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN SOME LIFE-CHANGING NEWS … CALL THESE NUMBERS: numbers he knew well.  His sister and her family were getting as antsy as we were.

    Near the end of the month, Dave and I had an optometrist appointment at Costco.  Dave went in first and I waited for my turn on a plastic chair alongside a busy aisle of product and shoppers.  With some finger twiddling moments to fill, my default brain mode in times of Yasik stress is to try twisting God’s arm to get him involved, never certain that I have his ear.   “God could you please get Yasik to call.”  In this very poor excuse for a waiting room, God may have done something. My cell rang. I didn’t recognize the number.  I fumbled to turn it off, certain it was a robo-call in a foreign language.  But I answered it: curiosity? boredom? auto pilot kicking in? a prompt from God? maybe, certainly not because it would normally have been a good idea.

    A receptionist was on the line, calling from some medical office and wanting to know if we would be willing to offer our home address to give Yasik an address in order for him to receive MSP.

    “Of, course. Our address is —.  And uhmmm, would it be possible for you to get a message to Yasik for us.”

    “Want to talk to him? He’s right here.”

    “Oh, yes.”

    Fumble, mumble. “Hi, Mom.”

    “Yasik, I don’t want to tell you now. We are at appointments.  But please, phone tonight. We have unbelievable news.”  Or something to that effect.

    Yasik interpreted all this to mean that if we were at a doctor’s office, Dave must be having some medical issue, having no idea that I was going to be telling him he has siblings.  One as nearby as the USA.

    I was so excited myself that I burbled to the optometrist receptionist, who was trying to prepare me for my eye exam, something to the effect that tonight my son was going to be finding out that he has a sister in North America.  In the most blandly receptionist tone possible, she responded, “Oh, that would be weird.”   Really?  This is some of the best news I have heard in my life time.  Cherie says Svetlana was over the moon at another point in their developing relationship.  I was over the moon at this moment. But like Dave says, just because it is filling your heart and mind, it might not be registering in quite the same way to a stranger…..   Duh.

    Yasik called in the early evening.

    “Are you sitting down?” I asked in announcer mode.

    He thought Dave must be seriously ill.

    “Yasik we got an email and pictures and everything. You have a sister and she lives in the US.” And whatever other details came bubbling up.

    “So what do you think?”

    With a chuckle, “That sounds interesting.” There was happiness in his voice.  But no “Wow! Holy Shit! You have got to be kidding!”  Just – “That sounds interesting”.  Interesting?  It was mind blowing to me. I grew up being encouraged to express myself in the confidence that I was seen and heard.   It is unlikely Yasik and his sister were nurtured in this way. As Cherie noted, these two siblings are complex and guarded.  If from infancy, a display of emotions has been ignored or even discouraged, a guarded response is deeply ingrained.  Only the note of happiness in his voice was allowed to slip through.

    Svetlana had called that afternoon.  Like Dave and I, she and her mom were barely holding their breaths as well.  She wanted to know when she could call Yasik and I said, “It just so happens…. He called just today.” We were able to let her know we had finally connected with Yasik and that he would be calling us in the evening.  She gave us her phone number stat.

    I gave her phone number to Yasik.   He called her without hesitation later that evening.  Pictures were sent back and forth, pictures of Svetlana and Anya and Nicolai, whose picture could have been Yasik at different times; especially in the younger pictures, the similarities are obvious.  Cherie and Svetlana also sent copies of the documents we had not been given.  Svetlana’s passport picture at the time of adoption could have been Yasik’s.  So begins a new chapter of their lives.

  • Preface

    A hair stylist tipped my head back and told me ever since she was six, she wanted to style hair. Apparently it would surprise us to know how many people become aware of their life focus/purpose quite early in life. My desire to become an adoptive parent, as I have written earlier, began with a childhood dream.  Reaching adulthood, I, still at the teething stage of maturity, tried chewing like any curious puppy on a couple of what might have been initiations into the world of adoption.

    One of the winters I lived in the Canadian north I shared a 2-room squatter’s log cabin with a school teacher of elementary children who spoke little English outside the classroom. I, with a higher calling of course, was ‘doing God’s work’, financed by a religious community back home.  I was receiving from them something north (a blatant pun) of $100.00 per month which to me, in the seventies, seemed enough for food and the roof over my head. Who knows how much my roommate was covering.  I in financial naiveté never noticed.  I was the protestant fundamentalist equivalent of a hippie, though so otherworldly that while for most free love was more physically vigorous, mine was, like I said, otherworldly.

    One afternoon I was going through the motions of language study while my roommate spent the day addressing the needs of 40 clamouring, Chipewyan- speaking children. I was interrupted by a knock at the door.  A man, maybe in his twenties, stood in the porch; in one hand, he held a baby girl under one year old and in the other, a baby bottle. The baby was wrapped in a blanket: thank God for little mercies. The man, her father, held the baby out to me, telling me her name was Gladys. As I absolutely unhesitatingly took the baby from his arms, I did have the presence of mind to ask how long he wanted to leave Gladys with us.  “Oh, a day, or a week, a year…”, he squinted as he slipped back out the door.

    This was a Friday afternoon. My roommate with plans for a child-free weekend, came home to find me dragging a dresser drawer out on the floor next to the kitchen table, turning it into a make shift cradle – ‘enthusiastically’ she quite generously observed.   Finances, wherewithal, and most seriously, legalities never given a moment’s attention, I was fussing over what to do with a name like Gladys.  Gladys’ young mother had her priorities more clearly in order.  Within a couple of hours, she came to the door to ask if we had her daughter; with not another word she walked over to the drawer on the kitchen floor and lifted Gladys into her arms.  In a small town, word mercifully travels quickly.  The aborted first attempt to follow my dream summed up by my roommate: “Even you were relieved you’d dodged that bullet.”

    A few years later I was visiting someone who lived above the market in a provincial town in the Philippines. A visitor came to the door who may have heard an ‘Americana’ was visiting.  My coping skills in the language, Tagalog, were not enviable, but I could pick out enough words to know the person in the doorway was asking if I would like to buy a child.  Buying a child was doable in those years, with apparently little legal difficulty within the local community.  It was quite another thing for an expatriate on a work visa.  Maybe my prefrontal cortex was by then in the final stages of development or I had heard some scary stories for I had sufficient good sense to say, “Salamat po, pero hindi naman”.  (“Thank you, but not really.”)

    What you know of me so far is that I was at best comfortable with no stable income or clearly articulated reason for actually living a life on earth – something Joe and Josephine Normal think is foundational.  I had daydreams but played out each day as though only life after death had value.  I felt like a hapless bystander to life active around me.  Generously you might call me a late-bloomer.  OK.

    ‘In the fullness of time’ as it says in Galatians 4:4 of the old King James Bible the finances, wherewithal and legalities began to fall into place, and I could now begin to present myself as a viable candidate for adoption. I could begin to act on what seemed to me to be simply what I must do, rather than continue to dance around a romantic notion.  I secured sufficient financial independence and I accepted a date with a good man, Dave. The poet and Instagram personality, Yung Pueblo, encourages people to find “a partner who supports your dreams”, not an essential in adoption, but wow for lots of reasons, a very good thing. Jessica O’Dwyer, writes of her process in adoption in Mamalita: an adoption memoir. For O’Dwyer menopause arrived at 32.  In time, she decided to adopt.  The last sentence of Chapter One: “But first, I wanted a husband.” I agree!  We started planning for adoption quite literally on the first date and so we took the next steps together.  For most, these steps are paperwork, orientation and about two years of aborted adoptions; a few possible adoptions fell through before we were offered Yasik.

    I am writing this post to preface the story of our adoption as family, a story I will write on the template of Joseph Campbell’s interpretation of the ‘Hero’s Journey’.  Even the vague and naïve experiences above can be seen as part of a template for such a journey.  The Hero’s Journey is extrapolated from ancient stories as an explanation for why people have human experiences. As I understand the human experience as interpreted by myths like the Odyssey and many others, we as humans encounter shipwrecks, monsters, deep sleeps on some island and conflicts in our search for home, a stable life or to learn how to be human. Maybe as was Odysseus’ experience, many of us for a vast variety of reasons, do not take the most direct route to return to our homes or places of maturity.  Perhaps I took the slow boat to find what I wanted to experience in my life.  In Book 3 of the Odyssey, Athena puts Odysseus into a deep sleep in a cave.  I too may have gotten stuck on some island and put into a deep sleep.  I do know I certainly have always felt I didn’t fully awake or fully begin to experience life until I began taking realistic steps toward adoption.

    Now, with this blog I will look back on Dave and my experience with adoption. Perhaps what I am coming to learn now I might resonate with those who are considering becoming, have become or are still in the middle of being birth parents, adoptees, and adopters, or are like myself, looking back to seek understanding, hopefully continually learning a better way.

  • From Dream to Reality

    Posts

    Written pre-2018, the beginning of my original blog, Adoption As Family

    Listening to the radio on my daily commute, a rather over the top lead-in question caught my attention. What is being done for someone who has had ‘his soul ripped out’?

    My thoughts picked up the question and moved it to my context – concerns I have with the family in adoption. I became spurred by this question and my irritation with the smug assumption “I always say, it’s in the blood” when hearing of an adoptee exhibiting negative behaviour.  I wanted to understand the dynamics of the adoptive family when the adoptee has spent some part of his or her early years in an orphanage.  What does this start bring to the struggle of the adopted person and his or her parents, both biological and adoptive?

    This blog is about what led me and my husband to adoption, what it meant to adopt in the 1990s. My questions then move on to my search for information about life in a Russian orphanage in the 90s, the adoption process of that decade, the early years with our child, the changes that came in the teen years, and what our family has learned and experienced as my son moved into adulthood. And once some of the markers of these years surface, hopefully some understanding will begin to come to light. Perhaps in the telling, the reader will cue into what Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books (86) calls “essential paradoxes”.

    I offer my story.
    One summer day when I might have been seven or eight, I watched an afternoon TV movie. A woman who apparently knows she is dying goes to an orphanage and adopts a girl of five or six. They become very close. And yes, then the mother dies. The husband draws into himself in his grief and so the little girl feeling shut out runs off to sit on a big rock on the seashore to cry out her loneliness to the ghost of her mother. Of course, the father comes to his senses in time to recognize that his wife knew she was dying. She had planned to replace his loneliness with a child. The movie reaches a crescendo as he races to the seashore to pull the child from the rock before the tide comes in to wash her away.
    With even deeper impact, in my teens, and perhaps influenced by that afternoon movie, I dreamt one night that I had been given a child, a little boy with blond hair. I spent most of the dream struggling to get around a rock slide with this little boy in tow (I like to think it was around Angel Rock on the Port Alberni highway) but the impression I was left with was that, though there was some kind of struggle, this boy was for me. For reasons I cannot explain, maybe even magical thinking, I am not the only adopter to have had such a dream.

    My memory holds that I had this dream more than once or at least with enough impact that with it and the afternoon movie, I always seemed to have planned to adopt. Creating a child from the eggs within me never compelled me in the same way. Adoption had become my romantic ideal.
    Samuel T. Coleridge wrote of it in this way:
    And what if you slept? And what if in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awake, you had a flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
    Yes, “Ah, what then?”
    In my twenties and thirties I entertained half formed thoughts of adopting children I was asked to help with, but not until I was in my forties could I begin to act on what seemed to me to be simply what I must do, rather than continue to dance around a romantic notion. I secured sufficient financial independence and I accepted a date with a good man, Dave, who too had made attempts at adopting as the idea appealed to him. Together, over two years, we completed the requisite orientation and exploration of adoption options. Check, Check, and Check. As many who have adopted internationally know, the flurry of the final weeks makes up for the dragging months of the years leading up to the adoption. After rushing about getting medicals, references, finances and a wardrobe for a child of indeterminate size, we flew to Russia, drove to a large provincial town, and were introduced to our little, blond, four-year-old son. It still strikes me as noteworthy that at the end of the day we met our new son, we slept in a lovely old hotel in single beds – no sex required for the making of this family. The next day we stood before a very young judge who appeared charmed by our shy happiness, drove around town to remove this child from the Russian record system and then picked him up at the orphanage. In less than 24 hours of meeting him, and only having been told little more than that he seemed to love music, he was our child. It never occurred to us at that time to think that amazing.

    We assumed that we likely knew as much as any set of parents holding their just born biological child. Besides which, as international adoptions only took off in the ‘90s as a noticeable trend, little easily accessible literature was available other than memoirs offering the theme ‘God has given us the forever child we were destined for’. These memoirs were scarcely more than ‘chick-lit’ usually written about the pre-adoption period and the first two years post- adoption, a kind of honeymoon period for many adopting families. Any memoir we might have wanted to write at the time would have produced that same story line.
    Only once in that period was our bliss confused for a moment. An American couple called and tried to engage us in a conversation about why their Russian adoptee seemed so easily disruptive. We looked at each other blankly and tossed the problem off, assuming the parents lacked parenting skills.

    Yasik (the diminutive of his Russian name) was beautiful, sweet and cuddly. We cocooned with him in the nuclear family dream. But this blog would not have been created if that nice and normal dream had not taken a turn toward the need to understand why adoption creates its own brand of family drama. Yasik began to challenge our ideas of the best choices for his life soon after he turned 14. We chased him down a rabbit hole for several years but around the time he turned 18, the downtown community became the family and home he sought out more and more. We were asking him to make choices he could not maintain, and eventually we lost our son to the streets.

    As Coleridge asks, “Ah, what then?” The search to understand became unavoidable.

    (more…)