Author: Gail Vincent

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!”

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.

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 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.

_{^{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. 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.

My desire to take a closer look at our adoption-as-family was ignited as I listened to someone ‘enlighten’ me about issues surrounding adoption with, “I’ve always said it’s in the blood.”  Offended by the smug tone, I set about looking into the matter myself as a kind of ‘sample of one’ personal study of nature and nurture to find what it means to call the relationship between adopters and adoptees ‘family’, recognizing the cultural understanding of family and the biological, social and personal need for connection. I agree with Marion Crook whose book, Thicker than blood, leads the reader right from the start to come to an understanding that the adoptive family must not only “nurture our family but also support the child’s nature.” As an adoptive family, we understand we are a family growing into a family tree that shares space with another family tree because as Marion Crook says: Some parents deny there is any difference between adopted and biological children. This attitude prevents exploration of possible differences and creates problems in the future.  I agree there is no difference in our ability to love our adopted children or for them to love us, but there are differences in how they live in the world.  

_{^{Crook, Marion.  Thicker Than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world  Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 27, 82}}