And then it was time to take one last trip through Moscow in the middle of the night, arriving at the airport when a full moon was filling the waiting room.
The airplane offered even more technical curiosities for Yasik. We caught the wonder of earphones in the picture included here.
While waiting in Frankfurt for our next leg of the trip, we met an American couple who had just adopted two kids and a woman who came across as a self–appointed authority on orphanages. She was part of a church mission to help orphanages by setting up children’s camps. At that time Russia was quite open to foreign help, religious or otherwise.
One last leg of the flight and we were back home in Canada. Well, two of the members of this new nuclear family were returning home. The third member was only about to be introduced to a new home.
So let me jump off that word ‘introduce’ and take a moment to do just that. I have shared fairly liberally what we knew/came to know over time of Yasik’s background. I will round out what has been shared with some of the physical data of the child Dave carried off the airplane: Yasik was 35 inches tall and weighed 35 pounds, roughly the weight of our one-year-old niece and shorter than our three-year-old nephew. He had convergent strabismus in his left eye. He had soft, very light blond hair, a perfect nose and a tad over blown ears. His eyes remain hazel brown even though his passport has them marked down as green. Like I said, he was beautiful.
And the other two in this family? As I have exposed Yasik, it is only democratic to provide a basic sketch of Dave and me. Dave first.
Atn the time of our adoption, Dave was 40, five foot 11 inches, not overweight but not skinny either as he had given up smoking the year before. Our adoption home study says he has “blue eyes and glasses, balding short reddish blond hair”.
He was born in Calgary, Alberta to a couple whose marriage barely made it past his birth, their second child together. At the time of the home study, we understood his mother’s heritage was Metis and his father was of Scottish heritage. He remained with his mother who moved on to various uncles, two more marriages and 3 more children, half siblings to Dave and his brother. His relationship with his biological father was not much more than a single letter. The first step-father was simply criminally abusive. The second step-father, who legally adopted Dave and his siblings, was anyone’s definition of a dedicated, working-class father, although it is possible to say that a man Dave met later in life offered the kind of mentoring that qualified as the most impactful fathering of all. His mother, coming into a loaded adulthood poorly prepared, was, at times, supportive and, at times, unable or unwilling to be the mother she needed to be.
In his late teens Dave sustained a serious car accident which left him with visible facial scars and two years of intensive rehabilitation mentally, emotionally and physically, but as he healed, he was imbued with a strong desire to get back into life. He went on to train in welding and motorcycle technology even while still paying for the impact of his childhood and accident by going into a marriage ill-prepared and rather quickly abandoned. He also had many years training and working with challenged people which is where we met.
For a year or so we were little more than passing acquaintances. One fine morning he came to the group home to pick up a client for a day program. I was finishing up a night shift before heading off to the school where I taught. In greeting, I mentioned I was soon leaving the group home. He came back with an offer of a ‘farewell’ coffee on a Friday evening; we went for a drive that led to some house hunting, marriage, and moving into a house together a little over 3 months later. And whew …., this usually ill-advised route to marriage worked for us. A year after we married, Dave was accepted into Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD); he was going to school full time, working a weekend shift with a challenged client and practicing his interests in art and motorcycles in his spare time at home.
He was about to start the second year of study and part-time employment when we flew off to Russia.
And me? In preparation to writing this post, I wrote some preliminary notes and went off on a rampage about the religious world I was born into. I will spare the reader. In August 1997 I was 47, 5 foot, 6 inches tall and respectable weight-wise. Our adoption study says I had, “long brown hair with bangs, green eyes”.
I was born in Chilliwack, BC, to a couple who remained married their entire lives but were not well-equipped to maintain a healthy marriage. Both my parents had a few generations to deepen their Canadian roots but as was common in the 50s held on to their origins: mother’s family were British and Scottish; Dad’s family were German and Polish. Guess which one in post-war Canada was a source of pride and which one was best whispered?
Both came from families somewhere between fundamentalist and evangelical Protestantism. Whenever a question arose about what choice to make about most things from daily activities to finances to things more global, the tilt was toward the fundamentalist explanation of God’s truth. Was bowling a sin? Most definitely, until, of course, someone thought it was possible to skirt around the sinful dangers.
But we were a family and each of us, myself, my brother and two sisters, knew that our parents loved us and wanted us to be happy. Maybe they were too unsophisticated to be able to guide us toward to a conventionally successful future, but they would have resisted little of our inclinations, other than what was ‘evidently’ evil. Mini skirts made Dad squirm; drugs freaked him out.
I use the plural for this part of my life because we siblings were each a year apart. We all finished high school more or less and moved on to likely Canada’s largest fundamentalist Bible School. We each graduated and went into missionary service. I was in Northern Canada with my youngest sister and then we two joined my brother and other sister in the Philippines.
In what can only be considered ironic, it was getting up close and personal with the human beings we were attempting to rescue from the grasp of hell, that shook my understanding of such a mission. These were good people I could no longer see a loving God condemn to hell. Even if I worried that God was holding a flaming lightning bolt over me, I had had enough.
I returned to Canada and enrolled in Simon Fraser University along with my brother and one sister. We each found jobs caring for the challenged and settled into completing our studies until two years before Dave and I married. In those two years, although I continued working in a group home, I also began teaching in adult education in Vancouver. I lucked out, finding a career I had only dreamed of in the days when I was certain God would not hear of me leaving what I had believed He considered the highest calling.
I was about to return to a full-time position as a high school English teacher when we flew off to Russia.
Ahhh ….. and a Canadian government site for prospective adopters offers a summary of the average adopters: over 30, generally financially stable and with no parenting experience. Sounds like we were pretty normal and ready to go.
But maybe the African proverb “Tell me who you love and I’ll tell you who you are” is enough info.
Unsurprising I suppose. Leaving Yaroslavl for Moscow, Yasik’s maiden voyage in his new family, he sat quietly in Dave’s arms at first. I sat quietly as well but Dave knew where my quiet was coming from. He bent to my ear to encourage me not to be shy while he and Yasik played это и то — This and That. Must have seemed odd to the two in front that I was holding back. I did not yet quite know how to open the door to motherhood.
I may not have been the first uncertain parent the orphanage staff had ushered into parenting for a large number of we adopters are parents who have yet to actually parent. Likely aware of this, the staff sent Dave and I off with a warning against feeding Yasik while driving for he would vomit. No fear on that score. It had yet to occur to me that food should always be on the list of standby items for a kid. The driver, Alexi who may have been a father, and the translator, Tatiana, must have brushed off the no food warning for before the trip was over, they had given him 3 bananas and a candy. Tatiana later played a hand slapping game with him and he warmed, losing his shyness, and surprising us by laughing out loud, talking and teasing. In a bit, we were too.
Quickly we moved to overly rambunctious. Soon Yasik lost enough shyness to playfully hit me. Oh God, barely an hour into parenting and we’d lost control of our child. Added to that, at one point on the trip, Alexi stopped for a cigarette break and Yasik needed to pee. With Dave’s help. Pants pulled up, we climbed back into the van and Yasik yelled to the driver to get going again. The driver shrugged, laughed and returned to the van and off we went again. Dave’s shoulders refused to shrug. He worried that in mere hours we were undoing all the orphanage niceness and order. But hey, Yasik never settled to sleep and we were learning more Russian than we planned – don’t get excited, we are talking more than 2 or 3 words.
The drive back to Moscow, as return trips often seem to do, passed much more quickly, pulling out all the sweet memory stops: a beautiful prairie sunset and a harvest moon. We got back to the apartment and Yasik ate only an apple and had some water, all the while talking and poking around, exploring the little apartment. We showered him, got him pee-ed and into bed in a room adjacent to ours after covering the bed sheet with a ripped-open plastic bag. Parenting instincts were perhaps kicking in.
We read to him but that was pointless for every few minutes Dave was flipping through the dictionary for words we couldn’t figure out how to pronounce right anyway. Yasik just looked at us. The barrier was bigger than we thought I wrote in the journal.
I gave him a flashlight with low batteries. It began to waver so Dave put a new battery in and Yasik was off and playing shadow animals and faces and NOT slowing down. He said something to Dave and Dave said, “Nyet”. We left. Moments later we thought we heard him cry and both leapt up. He had us on a marionette string. I went through the living room and into his room to turn the flashlight off and only succeeded in showing him how to turn it on, which he did. So what do you do? Rather than going all strict parent, I started laughing and had to duck out. Later we pulled it together into parent mode, going back onto the battlefield to turn the flashlight off. I stayed and held his hand. When I checked on him in the middle of the night, he appeared to sleep well.
6:30 am and Dave couldn’t wait so brought him in with us.
Dave’s expression of waking to our first day with our son:
And I knew that we were not alone
when I put my arms around your waist
My heart, I felt would burst
As we kissed
In that cold room in Moscow
I felt we were more than two
And as the tears fall now
Running down my face
I hear his voice
and I can feel your
Body so close to mine
In that cold room in Moscow
And I love you.
We had breakfast only after he got his shoes on, with his PJs. Was he, as John Brooks suggests in The Girl Behind the Door, our new pet?[i] Maybe. Surely there is some of that for every parent, biological or adoptive, in the honeymoon period. So why not enjoy the happy surprises that come with this new venture? I say that because those days were a honeymoon for us. I also recognize that Brooks is making the point that in doing so we may have been detrimentally oblivious to other, less obvious, needs our child had. Brooks goes on to say that later on their first night with their baby, they wanted to sleep so parked the infant in front of a TV, likely was not her orphanage night time routine. They might have more deeply met their child’s needs by simply holding her until she fell asleep.
It also strikes me here how much I mention Yasik talking when later we will deal with questions of the use of language for communication.
Larissa, the landlady, was inundating us with food. When we couldn’t eat it all (the bread was amazing) I threw it down the toilet, the only way no one would know we didn’t eat it because the garbage would be gone through, likely causing a situation unsettling for the landlady. Not wanting to offend can lead to questionable actions. An essential paradox. She did see some food in the garbage one day and left a note asking us to let her know if it was too much. Turns out the simple solution for our culture would have also worked in her culture. So, we did tell her and that was the end of the wonderful bread.
We spent the days waiting for the adoption process to be completed mostly playing tourist. On the Metro, people gave up their seats to me and even to Dave when he was holding Yasik. One woman gave Yasik a 2-inch-long chocolate and he popped the whole thing in his mouth. She thought that was fine and went on to tell us that she had 7 children.
On our first full day as parents, we visited both of the largest art galleries – the Tretyakov and the Pushkin- and were quite simply blown away. The Pushkin had 5 soul-satisfying Van Goghs.
All of this demanded over 4 hours of walking with a 4-and-a-half-year-old boy who had known us only a day or two. The paintings didn’t do much for him but the big pieces of sculpture caught his attention, and being 4 1/2, he managed to put us in apology mode with security more than once. Next stop: MacDonald’s, where probably for the first (and last) time, Yasik was more interested in feeding the chips to the pigeons than tasting the wonders of a kid’s pack himself. And this will sound obviously naive, but Yasik took us by surprise with his speed at darting away from us to chase a pigeon and try, like Dave, to get them to feed out of his hand. We quickly began to tighten our grip on his tiny hand.
True to tourist protocol, we ended this fairly long day with Red Square pictures. When we returned to the apartment Yasik conked out and slept about 12 hours though to this point the only solid meal he had was at breakfast.
Completing Documentation
We were picked up early the following day by the driver, Alexis, Tatiana, the facilitator and a new translator, Anna. Anna was young, well-educated and full of hope for the future of Russia. She had moved from Yaroslavl for the prospects Moscow offered, to become what they referred to at the time as the ‘new Russians’. She was a sharp contrast to the translator who helped us in Yaroslavl, someone with the same education, yet who wanted to emigrate, seeing little hope for a better future in Russia.
We were taken to the Canadian embassy for Yasik’s visa. Here because of whatever contacts or methods Tatiana had at her disposal, she and Dave moved directly to the front of the line in a crowded office. It reminded me of other times I have experienced preferential treatment as a foreigner. Yet, tidily enough, it yielded another stamp of certainty that Yasik was now our son.
Establishing Parental Roles
About two days in we could already see or were groomed by our own upbringings to see that either Yasik had led us or we had led Yasik to assign us roles. Very quickly Yasik took ‘Nyet’ well from Dave and played with him; he cuddled up to me. I wrote in the journal two days into our family experience, “So I’ll nurture, Dave will lead – whether we want to argue roles or not or try to bend the roles or whatever – they are still there; by instinct he or we have placed us so his life is complete and secure”. Yes, it is not a Duggar family message of a wife with Nancy Reagan’s smile pasted on her face and obedient, modestly dressed children under the stern but wise and responsible husband’s umbrella, but for traditional or psychological makeup, cultural, societal, whatever, it is what it is.
Looming Threats?
Bouncing, giggling, chattering in Russian and making sure he had those shoes on, Yasik started each of these days. One of those last days in Moscow, in the midst of these happy little family moments, Larissa came over for the rent, bearing gifts of food and a book of Pushkin for Yasik. While we settled the payment, she talked with Yasik in Russian. Yasik, who moments before had been giggling, broke into fairly hysterical sobs. We were shocked for a moment and then I picked him up and took him into the bedroom. He continued to cry for quite a while, hanging on to me. He quieted and said, “Poppa”, so I took him to where Dave was giving the rent money to the landlady. She talked to him again, and again he started to cry. Dave took him and I ushered the landlady out. Had she suggested to him that as an adoptee he was a lucky little fellow who better not screw up for then he would be sent back to the orphanage, losing his mama and poppa?
When I joined Dave and Yasik in the bedroom again, Yasik began to quiet, though we too were by now emotionally swamped. To divert him, we walked to a nearby park. Yasik didn’t try the swings but then I don’t remember seeing a playground at the orphanage so perhaps he was not about to attempt the unfamiliar. Instead, he chased the birds and when some Russian kids approached, he and Dave played ball with them and flew the paper airplanes we had brought. We left the planes with the kids and they responded with a polite thank you. When Yasik piped up with ‘Ka Kas’ we took off for the apartment.
The landlady stopped by once more with an art book and candies and this time Yasik warmed to her but we never received an explanation for the outburst. We were only left with an awareness that for Yasik this was a much more emotional time than we had comprehended.
Yasik also managed to give us a further scare one afternoon by hanging over the little balcony before we caught him. That night my body tightened with the memory of a time a child in my care was almost blown off the roof of an old church in the Philippines. Dave, too, already asleep, began to twitch and heave short, panicky breathing. He’d had a night mare of falling while trying to catch Yasik who was about to fall. We were rushing head long into parental fears.
One or two more days playing tourist, and though we didn’t realize at the time, enjoying the larger portion of our maternal/parental leave, we were coming to know our son as bouncy and curious about everything that had a switch or button or handle. Turning on light switches remained a fascination for several days.
As we packed to return to Canada, we were surprised to find a couple of Yasik’s new toys missing, none which had been taken out of the apartment. We found the toys stuffed behind the old piano in the living room. This was our introduction to what I have since read over and over again as a side effect of orphanage living, the habit of hoarding or simply claiming something and knowing the only way to hold on to it would be to hide it from the other kids. Here’s an odd bit on the problem with ‘hoarding’: a Scottish contestant on America’s Got Talent [ii] gave a performance as a ‘regurgitation artist’. He had learned to swallow things to hide them from other kids at the orphanage. Apparently it has led him to a “busy touring schedule” Wikipedia says. Still, to be fair, I wonder if there are any set of siblings, bio or adopted, who don’t try some level of hoarding with toys not clearly designated.
Footnotes
[i] Brooks, John The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide Scribner, 2016, 182, 183
[ii] ‘Regurgitation artist’ America’s Got Talent June 2, 2015
Of course, fireworks were exploding. Just not in celebration of a birthing bathed in mothering hormones. It was becoming a family by adoption, exploding with happiness hormones.
I end Bonding/Attachment suggesting that while writers I have read may use the words ‘bonding’ and ‘attachment’ somewhat interchangeably, I may as well stick with the one that sounds like a boat anchor rather than fireworks and happiness. Clunky or not, ‘attachment’ is the broad term that covers becoming a family whether via a birthing or by adoption. And both modes of becoming family can be celebrations. Bits of twigs, moss, plant fluff, lichen and spider silk caught and carried by a little hummingbird to build a nest must be a joy to find. Children no longer in the care of biological parents may be a joy to find for adopters’ nest building.
Ok, Attachment it is
Attachment as a concept is most often associated with John Bowlby. His findings focus on a “child’s tendency ‘to seek proximity to and contact with a specific figure’ when afraid, sick, or tired….”[i]an inborn desire to seek closeness to protective adults. That takes care of what the child sees attachment to be.
And adults? What does the term mean for them? “’More broadly speaking, attachment may be defined as ‘lasting psychological connectedness between human beings’”. Jean Mercer settles on defining attachment as “emotional ties” and “beliefs and ways of thinking about relationships” to form an “internal working model of emotion and social relationships”[ii].
We had signed a file full of documents and in less than 24 hours would stand before a judge and upon the drop of her gavel, we would be a family. Yasik had been told after we left that first afternoon that he now had a mama and papa. What meaning did he attach to those words?
That evening he gave away the toys we brought for him. In celebration or because he had been nurtured in the orphanage setting to share? Had Yasik already been learning empathic social relationships in a place not usually known to encourage healthy social relationships? Was the orphanage actually a caring, vibrant social network, a good environment for the nurturing of empathy and attachment?[iii]
Attachment: preparation
After that sweet little smile through the banister, we returned to the hotel to have supper with Alexi, the driver, Tanya the facilitator and the translator, Elvira, realizing that while they were shy about speaking English and therefore appeared to ignore us, they were actually very kind, thoughtful and helpful. Putting all the parts of completing an adoption: the paperwork, arranging our flights, housing and Moscow interpreters, as well as organizing the court appearance, made one adoption a large operation.
At the meal Elvira gave us a heads up that Dave would be expected to give a little speech about how we felt about this opportunity to adopt Yasik and to request that our paper work be expedited. We also learned we would likely be in Moscow longer than we had initially understood to complete Yasik’s paper work. More time to play tourist and shed dollars, but perhaps also to help ease Yasik into family.
Attachment: appearance and interests
The three sharing this meal with us also noted that Yasik looked a fair bit like Dave and shared his interests in vehicles, music and art. Nice. I was later assured Yasik had eyes the same colour as mine. It is worth wondering about: this interest we have in family looking like us or fitting the proverbial ‘like father, like son’. I have wondered about the need to find resemblance to family as a kind of reassurance of our personal identity. Yet it took only a picture emailed to us of Yasik’s biological siblings to determine they were indeed his siblings. For those who do not share similarities with their adoptive families this is often a primary issue in their search for personal identity. “As Swedish as Anybody Else’ or ‘Swedish, but Also Something Else’?” speaks to this issue for the non-causasian adoptee, nicely encapsulated in the title.[iv]
Attachment: the honeymoon begins
After a stroll alongside the Volga, we went to bed. Well, actually after Dave prepared what he understood he was expected to say in court. That done, we flopped onto our separate single beds, maybe a bit high and free to daydream. Yasik was almost ours and he was more than we had hoped for. The journal also notes that we each took a Sudafed tablet. Did the Sudafed stimulate that daydreamy feeling? Or was this a peek at what the early days of attachment/honeymoon period feels like? A kind of falling in love.
Attachment: the legalities
Adoption day was a beautiful early fall day, August 19, 1997. We were driven directly to the court for the region of Yaroslavl. The marble steps up to the court were worn to uneven dips. A very old building. Dave was still muttering the phrases he needed to say; Elvira, the translator, was building up to a nervousness I wondered at but did not understand. This may have been a building that spoke power to Elvira but it lacked the power to gain a fearful respect from naïve tourists. We would more likely have picked up Elvira’s vibe had it been a Canadian court. A traffic jam had delayed proceedings, the prosecutor looked bored, most in the room were women. When the judge was heralded and appeared, she was hardly more substantial than the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Still… she managed to feed Elvira’s fears and spook Dave and I somewhat when Elvira relayed to us that the she had been admonished to tell the truth or be prosecuted.
Dave was called first. He was asked how long we had been married, what our jobs were, after which he recited his memorized speech to request an early dispatch of paperwork. The judge smiled at his earnest tension. I stood next to give my name and affirm I was a Canadian. I sat back down and Dave was asked to rise again. “If you both work,” the judge asked, “how do you plan to care for Yasik?” Dave told her we had a plan to reorganize his classes and that between our schedules, Yasik would never be left alone. And other than one afternoon when we left him at the after-school care which did not please him, he was always with one or the other of us, or with extended family or friends. Although I am sure the question is part of the suggested adoption interview questions, there is a bit of irony in this young judge’s question. It was being asked by someone whose cultural attitude to adoption leans toward dropping off children at an orphanage while parents deal with other life stresses, a trend particularly encouraged in the Soviet period.
Dave sat down and I was asked to pop up again. The judge asked what we thought of Yasik. I choked and only managed to respond with “Wonderful”. Elvira misted over and Dave caught a smile on the judge’s face. There may be vitriol at the highest political levels over adoptions but person to person, however much suspicion has been whispered in our ears, we found Russian people are as human as any Canadian — a little ‘duh’ here. Too often, unquestioningly we do drink the Kool-Aid because somewhere in our psyche we have the impression that Russians are not too be trusted nor respected as we might our own good people, something to be further tested by current political tensions.
The judge turned from us, giving the floor to the prosecution and defense who each offered their conclusion that all appeared in order to them. Writing this now I wonder who procured the defense. I remember no discussion about the need for a lawyer, again a nod to the detail involved in a single adoption. The judge rose just as he or she would do in a Canadian court, telling all that she would consider her decision and left for a few minutes. My journal says that Tanya was passing out chocolates and flowers while we waited on the judge’s deliberations. The judge returned and declared that we were Yasik’s parents. The first seal on our adoption. Tanya and Elvira hugged and kissed us, wishing us “Good Luck”.
Attachment: assumes some detachments
There were still details, details, details. One detail that was given absolutely no thought by either Dave or I in our naïve happiness concerned the question of the legal status of parental rights belonging to Yasik’s bio parents. No one denied that Yasik’s bio parents were still among the living. Yasik was in the orphanage under the designation ‘social orphan’, someone who has at least one living bio parent. Had his bio parents actually given up their rights as I wonder in The Adoption Procedure in 90s Russia?
We were told, at the time, that Yasik’s mom didn’t come back to the hospital after a visit or two so the government took over guardianship. For many years I tried to assure Yasik that her visits suggested she did care for him and placed him in government care because it was best for him, a narrative that works for adopters. In his teens, Yasik he let me know he didn’t buy that story. Only after connecting with Yasik’s bio sister in 2020 did we learn that Yasik’s bio mother, Gurina, went to the hospital to try to get social services money for Yasik which she was denied so she quit on him.
August 19, 1997 we only knew that Gurina ‘moved around a lot’. Our legal standing in adoption was based solely on the Family Code of the Russian Federation, signed by Boris Yelstsin in 1995. All that applied to Yasik was one line, the final point in Article 130 of the Family Code, “for reason recognized by a court as not live with the child and shirk duties involvedin his/her upbringing and maintenance, for over six months”.
At least this verifies that the adoption was legal. Small comfort, for it was affirmed by what is actually quite tenuous: he had not been in his bio parents care for ‘over six months’. In his case it was now 3 years since he had been in his bio parents’ care. On that final point in Article 130, Yasik, that young judge proclaimed, was our son from now on. On that line alone, a child’s life was irrevocably changed, an attachment secured, an attachment dissolved.
Recently Dave and Yasik, now an adult, were talking about his adoption. He understands that at the time he was four years old and in government care. He knows his bio-parents had left him in care, yet he said, “I wish I’d had a chance to have a say in the adoption.” I don’t yet know what input he might have wanted in the proceedings, but I sensed his lack of control over his own life. Yes, in a real sense that is the nature of becoming part of any family, but there is a difference between being born into a family and having adults in a court proceeding making the choice for the child. Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and alliesspeaks to this: “It can be alarming knowing that we have little to no control over our lives. After all, from the moment of relinquishment, others have been “playing God”, making decisions over which family we’re placed in, and determining our futures in ways that differ from those who aren’t adopted”[v].
Attachment: based on court findings
The conditions of Article 130 were laid out in a paper shared with us by Yasik’s bio sister and her family. Gurina 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. A year after we adopted Yasik, the Gurins made an attempt to gain access to money for her children’s care through the court. Following is a summary of a copy of the actual court documents of this couple’s complaint before the court:
March 11, 1998 re: the case brought by Gurina L V (age 28) and Gurin NG (age 36) for depriving them of parental rights and exacting alimony for the children’s maintenance.
The court findings:
Gurina is a single mother of the two older children. She married and has two children with Gurin. At the time of this court hearing the girl born in 1991 was still living with the Gurins. The other three had been placed in care. The report says, “The son Yaroslav was adopted without his parents’ consent due to Article 130 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation.” The response to the Gurins’ complaint was to detail “the parent’s neglect their children, do not care for their lives, do not support them”. Yasik had been taken to the town hospital “due to social reasons”. The Gurins “have deprived themselves of the parental rights”. “The son Gurin Yaroslav was adopted without the parents’ consent as they [Gurins] refused to take him home from the hospital”. Yet Gurina continued to ask for financial support after which she said she would care for her children. Their argument was lack of money though a court investigation found that the Gurins worked at a factory which paid them in food and china to sell for money. To sell the china they needed to travel past the care homes three of their children were in. Not once did they stop to check in on their children.
I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country speaks to why the Gurins may have been working at a factory which paid them in food and china to sell for money.
In the 1990s, during the era of privatization and economic reforms, enterprises stopped paying employees their salaries, systematically, on a massive scale. In 1996, 49.3 percent of workers in Central Russia weren’t paid – elsewhere, this number went up to 69 percent. At the same time, there was catastrophic inflation. Just in 1992, prices increased by a factor of twenty-six[vi]. Yasik was born in 1992 and entered the orphanage about two years later.
A sister of Gurina’s testified to the Gurins lack of care for their children. Because the couple could give “no good reason’ for their lack of care the court hearing recommended that the parents be deprived of their parental rights and be ordered to hand over a portion of their wages to the children’s care until the children came of age…. According to articles 69, 81, 84 of the Family Code of Russia, articles 191 – 197 HAS DECIDED: satisfy the claim by the Education and Youth Affairs Department. Deprive Gurina LV of the parental rights to [both her and their] minor children…. the children should be placed under the care of Guardianship and Care body”. The Gurins were given the option to appeal in 10 days.
In the short time that Yasik was in the care of his parents, he was found alone in bed un-cared for to the point that social services got involved. It is safe to assume Yasik experienced little of what Julie Holland, MD, brings forward as the way to building resilience in a child: being engaged in loving response to the child’s physical and emotional needs and desires[vii]. More on this in coming posts.
Unattachment: the costs
Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies also reminds adopters that when the world at large slaps us on the back, telling us how amazing we are for adopting a little waif, we need 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.”[viii]
We must, therefore, temper judgement of Gurina’s asking for financial support to care for Yasik as a condition for taking him home; she may have been in the same difficulty many Russians were in at the time, a mother overwhelmed. Everywhere in the world there are stories of mothers relinquishing their children when they cannot support them. In Russia, however, putting a child in care during a time of difficulty is not regarded with quite the degree of negativity that it carries in many other cultures.
As we exited the court house after our hearing, a radio interviewer waiting outside approached us to ask, via Elvira, what we thought of our experience, what we planned to do and why had we chosen to adopt in Russia. She asked us if Yasik would know about Russia. Since reading about how to help a transnational adoption go more smoothly for the child and about the Magnitsky Law and the Canadian counterpart, Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, the question about retaining ties to Russia carries more weight. At the time we probably responded with only vague assurances and little understanding of our new child’s need for support as he began to discard one concept of himself, his language and culture, to build a new one.
We drove with our team or should I say darted about ‘as the crow flies’ on dirt back roads to stand by as Tanya saw to the signing out of Yasik’s life in Russia: the passport office, adoption center, and …? Sometimes we were asked for our signature, more often Dave’s, because it was written on everything that ‘the boy is traveling with his father’.
Between stops and while waiting for business to be completed, we talked with Elvira; her English was very strong. We compared teaching experiences, the biggest difference being that she was not merely the teacher but also her classroom’s maintenance person. She fixed her own roof. At noon we returned to the hotel for lunch. We talked Perestroika and President Yeltsin’s attempted coup, the dissolution of the USSR, the gulag and the New Russia. No, of course we didn’t. Dave and I could only listen and become increasingly aware of how little we knew of the world our son had been part of for almost 5 years, five potent years as far as his own development was concerned. How Russian was/is he? And how deeply will all these components that make him Yasik impact all that he is and will be throughout his life?
There were more destinations after lunch for even more signatures and paper wrap–ups. Sort of wish I now knew what all these stops were for. Finally, around 6 pm Alexis and Tanya were done and returned for us.
The orphanage was down a back drive off an alley, fenced in and fronted by unkempt flower beds. Inside though everything was tidy and warm, if institutional. We were not invited to view any rooms. We do not know where Yasik slept. Did he share a bed? Was he in an army barracks-like room of cots? This would have been helpful as we had a bedroom waiting at home just for him. It is notable to me that when Julia inspected our home before giving the OK for us to proceed with adoption, the one concern she had was if the bedroom we had prepared for Yasik was big enough. It was the master bedroom in our 1950s era suburban home. The document we presented as an application to adopt Yasik started with his full Russian name and birth date, and then records both Dave and my full names, and affirms that our birth dates have not changed. Next, we promised to provide semi-annual reports on Yasik for a three-year period. Then we declared that we own a three-bedroom home and promised “Our child will be living in Love and Care. His room will be: 5 meters x 4 meters”. The dimensions are underlined. This we declared before the City of Vancouver and had witnessed by a notary. It seemed, at the time, an over-the-top expectation. How would Yasik handle waking in the night completely alone in a very big room? He once told us that at the orphanage he slept in a big room with lots of beds and lots of kids. What was the reasoning behind this expectation? It wasn’t long after we returned home that he would wake in the night to crawl into our bed.
Again, Yasik was brought into the doctor’s office, this time carrying what little remained of the gifts we had given him at our first meeting the day before. The rather expensive drawing book Dave had given him was now filled with scribbles, the crayon set bedraggled. Dave wanting the best for his son and this new little son happily accepting. We dressed Yasik in the new clothes we had brought for him. I think they mostly fit. He liked the shoes we purchased the day before, very proper, sensible little things.
I might put the word NOTHING in caps to stress that Yasik took not one personal item from his first five years of life with him as he left to become a little Canadian in the Vincent family. John Brooks in his memoir of his and his wife’s adoption memoir, The Girl Behind the Door[ix], wonders if it might not have been a comfort to their newly adopted baby had they thought to ask for some item the baby had to comfort herself.
Yasik was shy and quiet during this initiation. And then came the good-byes. The doctor kissed and hugged us. I would love to have the opportunity to talk with her now. A pretty young nurse had tears in her eyes. Had she been a staff member who had a special relationship with Yasik? Bruce Perry, along with other more recent writers, points to research that acknowledges a childhood in the care of more than one caregiver does not have to be disastrous to a child’s emotional development but does assert that the number of caregivers needs to be small, and above all, consistent.[x] From the time Yasik was taken to the hospital at around the age of one, how many caregivers did he encounter with shift changes in the hospital? Would there have been the remotest validity in asking whether or not the option for ‘baby-led or demand breast or bottle feeding’ had been part of the care-giving he had experienced, among other considerations that contrast nurturing a baby in an institution to a family home? How many were part of his daily experience for the approximately two years he lived in the orphanage? What was the impact of the severing of these relationships?
Yasik had two big, crystal-clear tears holding on the edge of his eyes but he was smiling all the same. Dave and I came into the adoption with months of preparation. Yasik was expected to un-attach from all he knew as family and willingly embrace a whole new attachment within a 24-hour span. Lost & Found[xi] asks about the impact no opportunity to mourn the lost life has on the adoptee. In fact, you the reader cannot help but note that everything written thus far is about Yasik joining our dream, nothing about this process from his perspective, leaving behind a biological family with a mama and papa, a brother and two sisters, and then those he engaged with in the hospital and those he had human bonds with in the orphanage.
About five children, one being the little Down’s Syndrome girl Yasik had big brothered, were on the front porch to see him off, calling “Das Vadanya”. Wasn’t it the protagonist in Cider House Rules who watched child after child leave the orphanage, each time wondering why not him this time? Did any of these children left behind wonder if they too had a waiting mama or papa coming for them?
We climbed into the back of our get-away van. Alexi had sad music playing on the car radio. Just a little over 24 hours from a couple to a family. We were about to step from bystanders to parents.
Yet, as good ole’ Arnie says, “We’ll be baaaack…” for as adopting older children reminds adopters, “adoption is a process and not an event”[xii]. Stating the obvious, of course, but a centering reminder all the same.
Footnotes
[i] Delaney, Richard J. Fostering Changes: myth, meaning and magic bullets in attachment theoryOklahoma City, 2006,5
[ii] Mercer, Jean Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development Praeger Publishers, 2006, 2,3
[iii] Perry, Bruce D. , Maia Szalavitz The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook – what traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing Basic Books, 2017, 268
[iv] Lind, Judith “As Swedish as Anybody Else’ or ‘Swedish, but Also Something Else’?: discourses on transnational adoptee identities in Sweden” Adoption & Fostering, Volume 36, Issue 3-4, 2012 (https://doi.org/10.1177/030857591203600309).
[v] Easterly, Sara, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori HoldenAdoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies Rowman, 2023, 60, 61
[vi] Kostyuchenko, Elena I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country Vintage, 2024, 2
[vii] Holland, Julie Good Chemistry: the science of connection from soul to psychedelics, Harper Collins Publishers, 2020, 122-124.
[viii] Easterly, Sara, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori HoldenAdoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies Rowman, 2023, 40
[ix] Brooks, John The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide Scribner, 2016
[x] Perry, Bruce D., Maia Szalavitz The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook – what traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing Basic Books, 2017
[xi] Lifton, Betty Jean Lost & Found: the adoption experience Harper Perennial, 1988, 41
[xii] Bosco-Ruggiero, Stephanie, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LMHC, and Victor Groza, PhD adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four New Horizon Press, 2014, 140
We left the last entry hugging and kissing a child after knowing him three hours, barely comprehending that tomorrow he would be our child. Whether the words ‘bonding’ or ‘attachment’ were in wide use at the time, or whether the pre-adoption seminars at the time used these words, I do not remember. Scanning my journal again, I don’t see the words on any of the pages I am now writing from (I later found we had been given information). Yet as we left, Yasik peeked through the banister to smile and wave. We floated away into the evening on a happy cloud. I remember Dave and I going for a walk along the Volga in the evening still wrapped in this happy cloud. The journal says we felt Yasik was so much more than we could ever have hoped for.
‘Bonding’ or ‘Attachment’?
This is why I ask: do people ‘bond’ or ‘attach’ in three hours? ‘Bonding’ is the word most people use rather than ‘attachment’ to describe the feeling they have as they fall in love with their children. Few would be surprised at my use of it as well. However, and yes here comes a big ‘But’, asking this question I have begun to discover stuff that may exclude Dave and me from the circle encompassing those who fit the scientific definition of the word. And whether it sounds like fluffy semantic nonsense or not, I want to respect the work of science because I want an explanation built on empirically accessed information to know if my understanding is as concrete as possible. To choose to use the word simply because of a feeling is not a stable explanation.
Thus far my readings no longer allow me to use the word ‘bonding’. A distinct line is drawn between it and ‘attachment’ which is where researchers want to go to explain those feelings, even though ‘attachment’ has a more clinical sound than the more passionate ‘bonding’ to explain the feelings Dave and I were sure were ours, and were just as certain cemented a love within us.
Definitions
So what is ‘bonding’? Why am I directed to use the word ‘attachment’ rather than ‘bonding’? Are the feelings we had that day merely the squirt of emotion needed to encourage the growth of attachment? Were they really sufficient to leave us with sense of commitment to Yasik as our son that has refused to wane right to the present? We have never questioned Yasik took his rightful place in our hearts then and there and has never been ousted.
With a question like this, I looked at several different articles to parse out a distinction between these two words. A variety of sources from work by John Bowlby and on into more current study suggests that ‘bonding’ is a parent’s positive and protective feelings for a child, beginning in the womb. So far, other than the infant aspect, we can be included in the behaviour and irreversible shift in our emotional lives.
But ‘bonding’, suggests Jean Mercer in Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development[i], became a bit of a loosy-goosy term, referring to whatever sweet emotional moment one person shared with usually another person, animal, or even, thing. The science world was forced to abandon it, though it was supposed to be a word specific to what began to develop in utero via hormone changes and the head start the biological mother gets while her child is in the womb. Yet Mercer returns to the word as a needed identifier, including fathers and parents of adopted infants who have no hormonal changes, nonetheless, “show bonding to the same degree as biological mothers”[ii]. Not even the belief about breast-feeding being essential to bonding holds weight for Mercer. She relegates that idea to persistent myth. In Thinking Critically About CHILD DEVELOPMENT: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings[iii], Jean Mercer talks about research looking at levels of oxytocin when asking if adoptive mothers bond with their adoptee. The research found mothers who produced more oxytocin when cuddling with their children showed more delight in their children but then concludes it is not easy to measure how bonding or loving occurs for it is still not clear how important early contact is. Nonetheless, Mercer allows no denial here that ‘bonding’ can be acknowledged for adoptive mothers (and fathers?) of infants. Julie Holland, MD, wrote Good Chemistry: the science of connection from soul to psychedelics in 2020. She wants adopters to know that “Yes, oxytocin works on fathers; however, these benefits don’t extend to fathers who don’t get involved.“[iv]
There is, however, denial in Inside Transracial Adoption: strength-based, culture-sensitizing parenting strategies for inter-country or domestic adoptive families that don’t “Match”?
By strict definition, adoptive parents can’t bond with their children. Bonding is a one-way process that begins in the birth mother during pregnancy and continues through the first few days of life. It is her instinctive desire to protect her baby.[v]
Offering a tempered rebuttal, Jean Mercer adds this: “Adoptive mothers…ordinarily experience bonding…if [their children] … have been adopted early in their lives.”[vi] And with that seven-word caveat, Dave and I presumably were pushed outside the realm of the word “bonding”.
Somewhere inside I shrug: Yasik looked me directly in the eyes and smiled. Connection of some sort was made and emotions were exploding like a fireworks display within.
[i] Mercer, Jean Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development Praeger Publishers, 2006, 6
[iii] Mercer, Jean, Stephen A. Hupp, Jeremy Jewell Thinking Critically About CHILD DEVELOPMENT: examining myths & misunderstandings age Publications Inc., 2019, 82
[iv] Holland, Julie, MD Good Chemistry: the science of connection from soul to psychedelics Harper Collins Publishers, 2020, 120
[v] Steinberg, Gail & Beth Hall Inside Transracial Adoption: strength-based, culture-sensitizing parenting strategies for inter-country or domestic adoptive families that don’t “Match”? 2nd ed. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013, 128
[vi] Mercer, Jean Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development, Praeger Publishers, 2006, 75
I regularly ask myself why I am writing in such detail about a ten-day adoption process from as far away as the ’90s. The adoption process in Russia and many other countries has improved. John Brooks, in his memoir of his and his wife’s adoption experience[i], notes this as well about Poland’s treatment of orphans, “transitioning from institutional orphanages to foster homes“. A shout out to organizations like LUMOS cannot go amiss here.
Relevancy?
Why rake over long dead coals? I keep saying it is for personal insight. Is it relevant to a wider audience? Out of curiosity I googled current (at the time I wrote this post) adoption processes to see if any remain that process in a manner similar to our process and found the site, International Adoption.org, which points to several countries that continue to process adoptions almost as quickly and at roughly the same cost as our process in the 90s: Malawi, South Korea and India among the list. There is still some relevancy, beyond the personal, to my pursuit. And now, as noted in the post, The Adoption Procedure in ‘90s Russia, crises around the world are leaving daily numbers of orphans. How will they be cared for?
Bonding?
Back to the journal where we are still in this tiny receiving room meeting Yasik. I know most parents meet their birth child in the midst of hovering professionals; adoptive parents experience no more privacy. Nurses or doulas may be bending over a new mother learning to breast feed. In the case of adoptive parents, orphanage staff are hovering around as these new parents are taking in their introduction to their about-to-be child. Taking him from Dave’s arms, I held him too. But I could see he was becoming overwhelmed and then he cried. My first real mommy moment and I scared the kid. Good start.
Marion Crook, in Thicker Than Blood[ii] tucks in a healthy bit to ease a new parent’s fear of bonding/attachment — sometimes it happens instantly, sometimes it takes a while, but either way it is going to happen she affirms. However, … toward the end of the same page she does temporize with “Bonding can occur despite …”. I who may have been in thrall to the wonder of my emotions for this child surrendered Yasik wordlessly to the sweet-faced doctor he knew was his protector, to someone who had far more well-honed mothering instincts. She took Yasik from me and folded him into her lap. Now all the women were crying, maybe even the one who never looked up from her work. Dave though appeared thrilled, beaming face and expanding chest.
Yasik consoled, we moved from this room to the doctor’s office and she elaborated on information we had earlier been given by the translator about Yasik’s time for the first two years in the hospital. I am using the word ‘elaborated’ loosely. The questions I was encouraged to note as we drove to the orphanage, as I mentioned in The Adoption Procedure in ‘90s Russia, were mostly met with blank stares and dodges back into safer territory, translator or no translator, it seemed to me. Yet when I think back on what we gleaned in that first meeting, the sum message was positive. They were telling us Yasik was their little assistant with the younger children. I guess in an older brotherly sort of way. He helped a two-year-old Down’s syndrome girl learn to walk. They said he was their favourite; watching him, we nodded happily. On a kindergarten outing a few months after returning to Canada another kid was left behind because the staff were focused on taking pictures of Yasik. But maybe a sales pitch is given to all adopters. Who knows? We had no trouble believing it. They also said he was an intelligent, beautiful and loving person. We just kept saying ahh … ahh … ahh.
Informed?
Here’s a heads-up: I hope that parents are now more informed. The Origins of You, by Vienna Pharaon, looks at William Wordsworth’s observation: the child is the father of the man. Learning as much as possible about this child about to become your child may be helpful in guiding the child into adulthood. We would have been well served if this orphanage had been prepared to provide more of the kind of awareness now available through research and experience. Case-in-point: the father’s contribution to the make-up of a child to be born to a couple has been given research attention in recent years, research that suggests the father too needs be more responsible to provide healthy sperm, even to being aware of his diet in the months leading up to the conception and birth of the child. What kind of diet did Yasik’s father have in the months before Yasik’s birth, this father who was being paid in ceramic dishes for his work at the factory and who had issues around alcohol? [iii]
There is now much information for adopters to draw on as they begin the adoption process. What can you find out about the parents’ lives? What can you find out about the way the orphanage is managed? How much hugging has your potential adoptee been offered? These questions are not suggested to dissuade adopters from adopting but rather to help them be better prepared to ignite the child’s potential. As the excerpts and articles in Orphanage Risk Factors present and perhaps nearly every adoption book I have read reiterates, adopters are well-advised to be as prepared as current information offers both about the adoptee’s needs arising from the child’s pre-orphanage life and life in the orphanage and about the adoption process the adopters will be dealing with. This will hopefully keep their expectations more grounded.
Yasik did not walk until he was moved to the orphanage. Some of the orphanages in Russia have what is termed ‘lying down’ rooms. Was Yasik in a ‘lying down’ ward in the hospital? In other words, did he not walk because he was not given opportunities to get out of bed to walk? Was he left to lie in bed for much of the time he spent in the hospital? Did he have rickets because of the lack of proper diet and exposure to sunshine while he stayed in the hospital? Or did he come into the hospital with rickets due to the lack of care he received from his biological parents? No appropriate judgment can be made. And concerns about rickets? Childhood rickets do not have lifetime impact if treatment catches the problem before disabling deformities develop (lots of downer ‘D’ words there which did not come to pass for Yasik). To be fair, I actually could not at the time have fathomed asking why he had rickets or why he could not walk until the age of two. My questions were more mundane: “What does he like to eat?” Not mundane enough though. I received no answer to that one either. And maybe it was pointless from their perspective to waste time answering that sort of question, given they may have assumed if we could come all this way to adopt a child, we would be providing a different diet than orphanage fare. (I say this, aware of a potential stereotyping profile and the gossip monger’s love of scratching around in the dirt). At any rate, Yasik took over responsibility for teaching us his likes and dislikes the moment the van left the orphanage the next day.
The negatives brushed over, the conversation skipped on to positive notes. Perhaps even allowing us to know about the rickets and slow start to walking was to suggest that though the parents and/or hospital provided poor care we could be assured the orphanage rescued Yasik and gave him the vitamin D he needed to deal with rickets and the stimuli to encourage him to walk. And we have never doubted that his bones and coordination were not hampered by the lack of care previous to his move to the orphanage. As I write this, I have to conclude this sweet looking doctor was doing what she had likely done over and over, focusing on the positives unless it was necessary for the future of the child to bring up the negative. Yasik learned to walk. Notching the positives up, the doctor went on to say Yasik had musical interests and liked to draw and within a split second, Dave whipped out his ever-present sketch book and crayons. He drew a circle on the page and Yasik got right into it, drawing lines to connect the circle. Then he carefully returned the crayons to their right place.
We saw no males in our brief time in the orphanage but I didn’t question why when Yasik needed to go to the toilet, he chose Dave to take him, a male he knew only as a hugger, circle-drawer and gift-giver. He said to Dave, “Kakas” (I doubt I need to offer translation), and taking Dave’s hand, led him to the toilet. Dave helped him do his job and pull up, Yasik stopping first to point out his deposit.
Before this one opportunity to learn about the first four years of Yasik’s life was brought to a close, we measured his feet and took him with us in the van to buy a pair of shoes and get his passport picture taken. Can you imagine that? This four-year-old child had barely known us for one hour, yet my notes say he went with no hesitation, allowing Dave to carry him out to the van in the company of four strangers: Dave, me, the driver and the translator. In the van, he held my hand, and as Dave talked to him, he started to talk back with shy little words. When we arrived at the store, all shyness slammed to a halt as Yasik and Dave spied a motorcycle. Yasik squealed out the Russian word for motorcycle, мотоцикл, as something that sounded like ‘matikli’ to us. We have three pictures of the thing; it could have been a fly caught in a scraggly bush to me but to the two of them, it was awe-inspiring.
The store we went to was a set piece for an early twentieth century western movie, the shoes were a little boy’s oxfords from the middle of the century but the clerk was the first retail person we met who broke an apparently Russian custom of wearing a somber face, smiling and treating us with genuine friendliness – likely responding to Yasik’s charm. Faded pink runners dumped in favour of new black ones, little shoes I later tucked into a memory box like so many mothers reluctant to give up the first set of booties and we moved on to the passport office.
Imposter Mother?
I was 47 in ’97 and had dreamed of being a mother to an adoptee for more than half my life. That was lots of time to develop either a sense that like any other job I had handled to that point, hopefully I would learn sufficient competence, or as in my case, a deep insecurity about how to do it right. Yet until that afternoon I merely stood to the side looking on at mothering. Marion Crook[iv] writes, “…[M]otherhood wasn’t a professional job or a test for which you got a grade. It was a living situation that changed constantly, and I was expected to simply do as well as possible”. She concludes when she came to terms with how her mothering was going to play out that she was “happier with myself when I accepted that I wouldn’t be perfect”. Still working on that acceptance myself. So far, I had managed to make Yasik cry when I first held him and when we needed to make Yasik a bit more presentable for his passport picture, I was at a loss taming his hair. Three other women in the passport office, more maternal than I perhaps, jumped in to help me out or at least to comb his hair in what looked right to them as Russian mothers of the 90s.
I tripped over a new label recently though apparently it has been identified since the late 70s: ‘Imposter Mother Syndrome’: feeling you really aren’t the best mother for the child who is yours. It could be massaged to include adopter parents for I am unlikely the only new adopter who has felt “a fear that at any moment you might be exposed as a fraud“[v].
Returning Yasik to the orphanage, we hugged and kissed him – was it a natural or expected response? He followed us out of the room and then the journal says, “I was last to leave and when I turned back for one more look, he was peeking through the banister to smile and wave. The image I was left with at the end of the day – a happy smile”.
In the evening, writing in the journal, I concluded, “He was beautiful in every way. His ears are big! He looks directly and openly, and intelligently and he has such a sweet smile”. (And now as I read this, I wonder what the big deal was with noting – both by the staff and myself- that he showed intelligence. I mean he was cute as a bug’s ear and certainly seemed happy and comfortable with us. What more was needed?)
Footnotes
[i] Brooks, John The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide Scribner, 2016, 204
[ii] Crook, Marion Thicker Than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 65
There were two small couches in a corner of the receiving room, across from the woman at the desk. I sat on the one by the door; the doctor sat on the other one. I think Dave was left with no option but to stand. The translator too was in the room but must have operated simply as a disembodied voice to me for while I can remember exactly where the doctor, Dave and I were, I only know that the translator said stuff to us, but from where I do not remember. And the woman sitting at the desk was still concentrating on her work, not looking up. Not even in that moment The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows[i] calls “ecstatic shock” when another woman came to the office door holding Yasik by the hand.
I turned, and not a foot from me stood a little boy, looking a bit pale and scruffy. Then for some reason the woman whisked him back out. A sneak preview?
Dave said out loud, but probably to himself – “That’s it?” It says in my journal our translator cooled his enthusiasm; “He’s not yours yet.” Why did she say that? We had been following her all day, asking few questions, and getting few answers, as much because we had little idea what to ask as the facilitator’s reluctance or inability to provide answers. We had only a bare outline of the process. Now each of us in that tiny room was part of a profound emotional moment. This disembodied translator handled it with a tamp down. Cautioning us that there is more to the process than just, “Here is your son, you can take him now”? Looking at this journal note today, I can only say, I think she may have been trying to maintain some control as her role demanded, unable to sense all the role’s expectations in this very human exchange. It is one of those things I notice flit across my mind in the years since when I have been a player in other moments of tense emotion. The awkward, the mundane, the irrelevant all interacting with the profound.
Protocol
OK so we needed a warning not to grab the kid and run. There were protocols yet to complete. Relax. He will be yours entirely in barely 24 more hours. We tucked our necks back in and mutely nodded, “Oh, OK.” And in truth, we wrapped the adoption all up in under two weeks, a plus for our budget and emotions in the moment. We do not fully know what it was doing to the caregivers, the facilitators, the child. And it might be said the process, perhaps because of tensions like in that moment, still not understood, may have played a role in the decades since to reflection, which in turn, led to a process for foreign adoptions showing more regard for the child, possibly for the bio-parents as well, than the adopters and the facilitators. Now, even if foreigners do get to adopt from Russia, I have read they come for a ‘meet and greet’ of three weeks and then return at a later date to remain again for weeks before the child is theirs and can return with them to their home country, at a cost double our expenses.
At this point I add an insert. Google sites in 2021 suggest it may currently not be possible for Canadians to adopt a child from Russia[ii]. In 2012 the U.S.A. passed the Magnitsky Act in response to the imprisonment and death of a whistle blower in Russia. By 2017 Canada had passed a similar act, Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (quite specific) which Putin warned was participation in “very nonconstructive political games”. Nice touch, but couched in anti-same sex righteousness.[iii]
Not all Russian accepted the government explanation of the stop on American/Canadian adoptions. ‘Tens of thousands ‘ protested in a ‘March Against Scoundrels’, calling President Vladimir Putin a ‘child-killer’ for the trumped-up ban, using orphans as pawns who would be the ones to suffer.[iv]
However, in the 90s international adoptions were trending not only as a path to easier family-making than domestic adoptions in the western world but as a path to some sense of altruism if need be. Elizabeth Bartholet[v], in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting, written in 1994,argues that one thing international adoptions do is make it harder for the countries with a burden of parent-less children to hide their lack of care or options for domestic adoptions as would have been the case after the collapse of the Soviet Union.[vi] The number of articles I have come across focusing on conditions in Russian and Romanian orphanages certainly back the argument.
And so we found ourselves in 1997 in a room with a disembodied translator trying to manage our emotions, accepting adoption protocols, some for the good of the adoptee, and some to suit the political moves of a dictator. Whatever our translator was saying to us, her message was floating on by somewhere just above us. In our hearts, where for us in those 20 minutes, reality was grounded, Yasik became our son. Dave said later Yasik became his son the moment he picked him up and that has never changed.
Yasik has since August 18, 1997 always been his son. I am certain of this because a few minutes later Yasik was again brought in. He was led to stand in the middle of us – the doctor, the translator and Dave and I. We just stared at him at first which must have set him on edge a bit. He stood there with fine, sandy blond hair, hazel eyes, scratches on his nose, a band-aid on a finger, dressed in pink leotards, a faded pink sweat shirt and a pair of little girl’s leather shoes too small for him. And a bit of a smudge under his eyes. Yasik had just woken up. Dave went to him with a gift, and I held back, starting to cry – my default response to emotional moments. Yasik liked the plane Dave gave him, grabbed it and held on. My next memory is of him in Dave’s arms with Yasik turned into Dave’s shoulder, and me seeing, not him, but Dave’s face. Dave’s face sealed the deal for me. Just like that I saw stamped on his face his love for his son of two or three minutes. Yasik had become his son. And my heart received our son then as well. Later Dave told me he had never felt anything like what came over him in that first moment holding Yasik. This is our becoming a family moment, however unconnected it might be to blood.
There is a story, “These foreign places we call home”[vii] written by an adopting mother about her uncertainty of her right to be her adopted child’s mother. She wrote that as she watched her about-to-be son being born: “I can feel it in my bones. I know I will not let this child go”. Yet when it was time for the birth mother to relinquish the child to her, she was fearful. Even as she and her husband drove away from the hospital with their new born son, her wonder at having her child in her arms was being pierced by thoughts that someone would stop them, demanding she return the child. And then she says: “I did not give birth to my son, Jack, but it does not change the way I love him”.
When we returned to the hotel later, I recorded the day. I marveled at the immediate and complete arrival of such a love, but I did not doubt it. For a while, just as euphoria floods the brain when we fall in love, we were apparently awash in oxytocin, because …adoptive parents also form lifelong attachments to children. Some evidence suggests that the presence of an infant releases oxytocin in adults, “persuading” its caretakers to love it. Oxytocin therefore might help to assure that parents and others will engage with and care for infants, to stabilize loving relationships.[viii]
For myself and my husband, Yasik was our child that day. We loved him; ergo, he was our son. A Russian woman had given birth to this child. He had been taken from her home to a hospital and then to an orphanage. He stood in the middle of the room parent-less and we had come to Russia to claim him.
Defining adoptive family
But what does it mean to say, “Wow, he is our son.”? Because we fell in love with him and would the next day hear a gavel affirm our legal parentage? Was that really all there was to it: love and claim? In both her books, Betty Jean Lifton comes down quite hard on the adopters’ narrative of ‘The Chosen Baby’, the story adopters construct to tell the adoptee he or she is the lucky little devil given by God or carefully searched for and found by his or her new parents. The search-and-choosing-of-the-‘right’-child-for-a-couple story works for the new parents but is seldom ultimately satisfying to a child, especially when the new parents are uncomfortable recognizing the identity given to this child from the bio parents. Actually, with time the ‘Chosen Baby’ story is likely not all that deeply satisfying to the new parents either.
What about the mother who gave birth to him? The father? Or those who cared for him in the hospital and at the orphanage for several years? Who we are, the love we feel and offer, the environment we provide does not allow us to assume we are the totality of our child’s attachment or whatever it is that comes wrapped in the concept of the adoptee’s family narrative.
The little blond boy, the third part of the triangle that was this new family, what was happening within him? We, in those 20 or so minutes, believed we were bonded or the other word ‘attached’ to the little fellow. But the neuro-transmitters flooding our brain with love … or oxytocin or vasopressin or dopamine or serotonin, were they flooding his in the same way or degree?
Just a few years ago, Yasik, now an adult, did say that though he understands the logistics involved, he did wish at times he might have had a say in the adoption. Some part of me argues that, well… bio-kids don’t get a say either unless they made a deal with God before they came to earth.
Here I provide Bartholet’s voice to address Lifton. She[ix] suggests the narrative of the importance of blood over legal attachment is soaked in myth and biased language. Opening adoption records and searching for the adoptee’s family of origin is the stuff of stories, movies and news pieces. “But who are her real parents?” or “How wonderful that you have rescued this little one from a difficult life by taking her into your home”. It is assumed that “[Some] aberrational and perhaps altruistic motive must be involved”. Bartholet does not disparage this movement but does note how it can ‘throw shade’ on a family made by adoption. Later in the book Bartholet provides empirical studies to show that adoption for the most part works well, shocking news articles aside, certainly better than alternatives such as leaving children in places with inadequate parenting options.
We understand we are not the norm: we have to redefine ‘family’ to accommodate all the people assembled into the adoptive configuration as Marion Crook[x] advocates. The adopted child has not only one set of undisputed parents, but two or more. “We work hard at finding ways to support membership in their first family while firmly establishing them in our adoptive family”.
I think the more we understand our child is a person whose hero’s or heroine’s journey must always straddle two families, the more we ease the child’s burden, and likely our own. Accepting this reality, we massage the definition and then go on to the wonders of being family. Bartholet[xi] ends a chapter on “Adoption and Stigma” “Adoption creates a family that in important ways is not “nuclear”. It creates a family that is connected to another family, the birth family, and often to different cultures and to different racial, ethnic and national groups as well. Adoptive families might teach us something about the value for families of connection with the larger community“. Begona Gomez Urzaiz[xii] in writing in The Abandoners: on mothers and monsters about Ingrid Bergman and her familial relationships used the word “reconstituted” families: Evidence that children and their parents can choose how to love one another, too, just as couples do.
Footnotes
[i] Koenig, John The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Simon & Schuster,2021, 102
[ii]Government of Canada site: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/important-notice-regarding-adoptions-russia.html.
This assurance in from Google. Though I personally remember visiting an orphanage in 1970s Alberta, orphanages were phased out in Canada decades ago. These institutions have been replaced by foster and group homes. In Russia orphanages are very much still to be found. For the city and region/oblast of Yaroslavl with a population of a million plus in the 1990s, I found a fairly current online list of 26 orphanages. The site is copyright from 2006 but as of 2024 is not available.
Labels
Many were simply called Baby House No.— which is a “state residential institution for orphans and children without parental care, age 4 and under”. But others got specific. There were a couple of Music and Artistic Education Baby houses. Then there were a couple of Social and Rehabilitation Center for Minors orphanages. One was for children 3 to 18. There were a couple of Sanatory Orphanages for Tuberculosis Children. Others were for hard-of-hearing or deaf children. One was labelled Agrarian Special Orphanage. Other orphanages were labelled according the word ‘Type’.
There is no explanation for the ones labelled ‘of the Type 7’ but those labelled ‘of the Type 8’ come with this piece, ‘for Mentally Defective Children’. Ten of the 26 orphanages in Yaroslavl carried the ‘of type 8’ with the ‘for Mentally Defective Children’ designation. If, as several articles I have found suggest, a high percentage of children in Russian orphanages are considered, at birth, or after time in an orphanage setting, to be ‘mentally defective’, what does the label refer to?
Designations
Most children relegated/directed to orphanages will be diagnosed/deemed to have developmental delays mentally, physically, emotionally and socially for reasons both viable and/or convenient.
Several articles and policy papers (see Orphanage Risk Factors) talk of the attitude among more traditional Russian doctors that a baby with a birth ‘defect’ is going to be a problem for the mother so she is advised to turn her baby over to the state just after birth and sometimes without even seeing or holding the newborn. A Human Rights Watch paper noted, “Many parents face pressure from healthcare workers to relinquish children with disabilities to state care, including at birth. Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which medical staff claimed, falsely, that children with certain types of disabilities had no potential to develop intellectually or emotionally and would pose a burden with which parents will be unable to cope”. Maybe this is true, for Will Englund wrote a piece in the Washington Post called “Russia’s orphans: government takes custody of children when parents can’t cope”. His report on the issue of children in Russian orphanages:
The children are almost certain to have at least one disability. The disabilities can be congenital or related to alcohol consumption by the mother during pregnancy — or they have arisen because of the loss of emotional contact that comes with life in a state orphanage. “Every month in an institutional setting has a physical impact on the brain,” said Chuck Johnson, head of the National Council for Adoption, in an interview in Alexandria. “Every child will come with some developmental delays”.
OK, but do adopters note this when starting a family unless consciously deciding to adopt a ‘special needs’ child? Parents cannot shut down at least a little bit of magical thinking. How many times have parents wondered at the evident genius in their child, all the while wondering how it was possible for “he or she certainly didn’t get it from me?” So maybe there is a way to hope that the disability label doesn’t actually apply to our child. And when adopting in countries such as Russia that magical thinking teases out slivers of hope that may sidestep developmental problems.
But then, in another Human Rights Watchpaper,
The experts reported that Russian psychological norms are based on very strict criteria. Apart from these norms, however, factors that in the West are considered as being simple medical risks, will, in Russia, be labelled as illnesses:
*Babies born to alcoholic parents or whose mothers suffered depression during pregnancy will be labelled encephalopathic and remain so until they come of age.
*Orphans will be classed as being mentally deficient.
*Children with a single physical malformation (a harelip or speech defect…) become subnormal in the eyes of Russian doctors.
Human Rights Watch also found that these early diagnostic practices interfere with a child’s right to full development and in certain cases, to life itself. Moreover, abundant information gathered in Russia indicated several crucial incentives behind ‘over-diagnosing’ that suggest violations of basic medical ethics.
According to a former charity worker who distributed assistance to impoverished baby houses and has traveled widely in Russia since 1991, one legacy of the Soviet medical bureaucracy encourages hospital staff to avoid any risk of sanctions for errors detected under their care.
For example, she recalled the case of a child she knew well who had a medical chart with a catalogue of conditions including oligophrenia and encephalopathy.
A doctor told me that they have to cover their butts. They could lose their job, so they write many diagnoses. And you know the penal system here. It’s a “better safe than sorry” system.
A second factor that encourages exaggerated diagnoses is the Russian law which, until recently, prohibited international adoption of “healthy” children. “The doctors in the system wanted the kids adopted, so they’d say that this child has a tumor and then “wink” at you”.
Reading NeuroTribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity[i], I could not help but see parallels between the labeling of disability in Russian orphanages with the nightmarish treatment of the disabled in Hitler’s Germany,
Finally, a widely cited incentive for over-diagnosing is the extra financial subsidy and salary increment that the state grants to institutions that care for children with disabilities. The entitlement to these subsidies was confirmed by children’s rights activists as well as by staff of state institutions.
One volunteer who worked in a Moscow baby house for a year and a half recalled to Human Rights Watch,
Once, in a rare honest moment with the acting director, she told me, “We are considered as a medical facility because more than half our children are considered to have medical defects”. So they could finagle more money for the place.
Another baby house director told Human Rights Watch, however, that the subsidy does represent the greater burden shouldered by the staff in dealing with disabled children[ii].
These kids will enter adulthood, work their ways through life with a host of papers labelling them mentally defective like a lifelong albatross around their necks. And we come back to the question, aside from globally respected diagnoses, what do the labels really mean? And even with an appropriate diagnosis, what concrete prognosis does the label offer?
Expectations
Maia Szalavitz and Dr. Bruce Perry[iii] offer a general picture of what to expect when a child spends his or her early childhood in an orphanage, for reasons generational, prenatal, environmental. There are always exceptions and progress is always being made but what I have read from a variety of sources would corroborate this chapter. I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country[iv] , published in 2023, weaves stories through the book of “internats’, institutions for the mentally disabled, describing conditions like the orphanages housing children given the same designations.
With no verification to the contrary, we assume that Yasik remained in a baby house though he had turned four because, I think it was Julia who told us, Yasik was held at a home he was aging out of for the powers that were felt he was still adoptable. The largest number of children adopted out is from the baby houses. I guess there is no surprise there – it seems to me, we humans deeply believe in the wonder of having a baby as the picture-perfect way to establish a family and we just as deeply believe that we have the best chance of molding the little bitty baby into our likeness if the little bit comes to us ‘tabula rasa’. This belief system resists challenges to other options in ways that may be well below our conscious level of dealing with our lives.
In any case, when I look at what paper work we have, the orphanage name is Yaroslavl Orphanage. There is no such plain name on the listing I found so this was merely a sufficient name for the paperwork. We do not know what ‘Type’ it was. We do know there wasn’t enough land surrounding the building for it to be an ‘Agrarian Special’ orphanage; with ‘scruffy grass and bare spots, not far from lots of other buildings’, it was hardly worthy of the stimulation a playground should offer children, let alone allowing for even a garden. It put me in mind of how Tony describes the playground at his orphanage in 1930s Saskatchewan (A Canadian story of Adoption from the 1930s, Becoming Family).
Inside, the orphanage looked quite small from what we could see in our very limited guided tour. Staff led us via the straightest route to a receiving room. We did pass through a play room with a child-size piano which he must have played, so ….. maybe this was a ‘Music and Artistic’ Baby house. Yet, from the picture we have of the children assembled to wave good-bye to Yasik when we came to collect him into our family, there is at least one child with the markers for Down’s Syndrome. Perhaps it was a “Type 8 ” home.
davevincent.com
We were taken to the head person’s office, a sweet looking, grandmotherly doctor. There was another woman at a desk who never once looked up at us, at least when I noticed. Was she now immune to these emotional tableaus about to unfold once again. Yes, hindsight could suggest a wide range of possibilities; in the journal I was simply struck by her disinterest but so caught up in the emotions I was enjoying that I could not ask questions. Maybe she had a stiff neck.
Have I answered the question specific to Yasik? How did he arrive at this orphanage?
Yasik was moved to the orphanage before his second birthday. We were given to understand the orphanage did not know when he was taken to the hospital. When we connected with Yasik’s sister and adoptive mother later, we found out that in his first year of life, in the care of his bio-parents, he was found by the social services alone in bed un-cared for and then taken to a hospital where he remained for about a year. There appears to have been little loving response to his physical and emotional needs and desires.
For many years I told Yasik and myself that Yasik’s mother cared for him, for as the translator told us, his mother came to visit him at the hospital a number of times. At the time I told Yasik that this signified her love for him but that she may have felt it was in his best interest that he be put in an orphanage. This is a line likely used maybe a tad too often when trying to help a child understand why he or she was adopted. When this line, because “her birth mom loved her so much”, was offered to one young girl to explain being given up for adoption, the young girl[v] was not as grateful as her adoptive parents hoped. “‘I was placed for adoption when I was a baby. My parents never even met my birth mom,” … “so how do they know that she loved me?“‘
Connecting with Yasik’s older sister also disabused me of that sentimental notion. Yasik’s bio mother apparently came only to see if she could get a hold of the money the state provided for Yasik’s care. Even at the time, the translator’s mention that Yasik had rickets in those first two years should have ignited some reflection either on the care his mother gave him or the care and attention he got during his time at the hospital. He had rickets and he could not walk until the orphanage took over his care. Now we have to assume that his parents were responsible for his rickets. I will add here another thought. “You have to reach a certain brain mass before you can [walk]“[vi]. Given his parents’ lack of care, we can assume that Yasik’s development was delayed.
Did she not care? Did she feel too cowed by authority and her own inability to care for him? What about the father’s responsibility? The six-year-old brother did not want to return to the home from school one day because of Yasik’s father’s brutal abuse.
Yasik caught up physically in the orphanage to the extent that when our doctor gave him a medical just after we brought him to Canada, he surmised Yasik had built up a strong immune system in the orphanage and he was then meeting the developmental markers for his age. We adopted a child who simply weathered every illness common to kids with barely a sneeze. Even when it was his turn to get chicken pox, he and his little buddies spent their ‘sick’ week playing in the park across from their school.
Lest it sounds like I see only the negative perspective I cannot ignore that there is always another perspective. In balance to the generally negative perspective the West has toward the care provided by Russian orphanages, I would insert a study of two orphanages in St. Petersburg[vii]. This study makes it evident that not all orphanages were damaging to children in their care. Because we are ultimately talking about human beings with as much love as any the world around, it should be a given and unnecessary to say again that there are in Russia, as anywhere, people working in orphanages who actively seek to do their best for the children in their care despite the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances.
Footnotes
[i] Silberman, Steve NeuroTribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 82-139
[ii] Hunt, Kathleen “The “Gilded Cage” of the Dom Rebenka: infancy to four years”, Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian OrphanageHuman Rights Watch. 1998, 116
[iii] Perry, Bruce MD., Ph.D. and Maia Szalavitz Born for Love: why empathy is essential — and endangered Mariner Books, 2011, 45-71
[iv] Kostyuchenko, Elena I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country Random House, 2023
[v] Tucker, Angela You Should Be Grateful: stories of race, identity, and transracial adoptionPenguin Random House Canada, 2023
[vi] Traig, Jennifer Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventure in parenting, Harper Collins, 2020, 116.
[vii] Muhamedrahimov R.J., Arintcina I.A., Solodunova M. Y., Anikina V. O., Vasilyeva M. J., Chernego D. I., Tsvetkova L. A., Grigorenko E. L. “Psychology in Russia: State of the Art”, 9(3), 103-112. Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children, 2016.
After playing tourist for a couple of days in Moscow, we were driven about 250 km. north-east of Moscow to the city of Yaroslavl. It appeared more attractive than Moscow and full of the look of things ancient – over 1000 years old. Yasik has very old blood in his veins.
Although we had been driving for several hours, we stopped at a variety of offices before heading to the orphanage. In each office, we were left to wait while our facilitator conducted the business required. Our only contribution was to offer the gifts we had brought from Canada to whomever was handling the issue at hand, basically the removal of Yasik from the files of Russia. Otherwise, we sat to the side while each transaction took place. In one office where we waited in the outer office on wooden benches while the interpreter talked to the staff in an inner office, we watched an inch worm work its way across the floor. Dave tried to help the little thing and it freaked in terror.
Once we had visited several registries to begin the process of removing Yasik’s Russian footprint, our driver turned the van in the direction of the orphanage for our introduction to our son-to-be. Perhaps knowing her time with us was limited, the interpreter, Elvira, suggested we use this short drive to write down questions we might have for the orphanage staff. That turned out to be a bit useless. When I pulled out my questions later, I got blank but respectful stares. I would have loved to know why. We wanted a child—but did not fully understand the system that made that possible.
While I was naively writing down some questions, Elvira, a school teacher possibly conversant in several different languages, came up with an even better way to use five or ten minutes. She began to teach us some phrases she thought would be helpful in communicating with Yasik. Monolingual Dave started mimicking her without hesitation. I have worked in a couple of foreign languages and know how demanding language learning can be. I wanted to throw up. I was minutes from one of the best moments of my life. I doubt I could have found the focus had she suggested learning some parenting words in English, let alone to memorize words in Russian. If books written to guide people through the adoption process are merely suggesting adopters, already highly primed to prove how perfect they will be as parents, learn a few tourist-level phrases before travelling to the designated country, I get it. But some adoption guide books sound like they are suggesting adopters learn their child-to-be’s language by ordering an app from Amazon. Do they have any idea what that means? It is doubtful though even they would dare to suggest language learning be all wrapped in those few minutes before adoptive parents meet their child. I thank Yasik for learning English so quickly.
And here I go again. It is now 2026 and I am reading Sara Nović’s book, Mother Tongue[i]. Just yesterday I added a piece you’ll see below from her book, and now in my one-last-read before putting the post out there, I know I have to add another of the points made in her book. She speaks to parents of deaf children who are unable to communicate with their children via ASL signing leaving the child to grow up in a world without the attachment dialogue with parents develops. Yes, Yasik learned English quickly and stats suggest most transnational adoptees do so quickly, but what precious attachment opportunities are lost in that time in-between.
‘Social Orphans’
The amazing expectations of those few minutes did not end there. Elvira also managed to tuck in some information about Yasik’s history. Yasik’s mother visited him in the hospital where he lived for the first two years but “she moved around a lot”, whatever that meant. I did not question the comment at the time. Did Elvira expect a show of concern or some awareness of that oblique FYI? Now I wonder if my blasé reaction was because my mind was pre-set to an assumption against this mother’s care of her children. I have since learned much more about how many Russians saw adoption. I have read parents left their children at a state-run orphanage or what was also called a boarding school while they attended to commitments like education or work away from home. One source[ii] I did manage to secure writes of how the Soviets in the early years of their regime decided the raising of children would best be done by the state. In time the costs to the state led to backtracking, rather like the loop of the 150 years preceding the Soviet period.[iii]Nonetheless leaving a child in state care remained a more acceptable option than would have been true in other cultures. If Yasik’s mother “moved around a lot” then state care may have been an obvious choice not only for someone struggling with drugs or alcohol but perhaps someone struggling with other pressures of poverty. Yasik was, after all, born in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I have no journal entries referring to the role of the father in Yasik’s life because it appears no one told us anything about him. Was this because they knew little about him at that point or was his parenting too shameful to talk about? In post-Soviet Russia, 70% of Russian children lived in households where needs exceeded income.[iv] These children were so commonly raised by never-married, single mothers that the mothers were a labelled demographic, ‘Lone Mothers’. (When we later learned of Yasik’s sister, we also were sent papers that showed Yasik did have a bio-father present in his first year of life.)
A mother who moved around a lot and a father who was not considered worth consideration left Yasik in need of state care, but under the designation, ‘social orphan’. Things changed dramatically a few years later as adoption got dragged into Russian-American politics, but this was the environment in which we were adopting. Children who had either been dropped off or placed in care were designated ‘social orphans’ when they had living biological parents who had the right to return for their children. We cannot simply assume a child in state care arrived there because someone else was willfully negligent or no longer living. Adoption was not on the table if Russians had just dropped kids off at the boarding school-cum-orphanage while other issues are being worked out. Numbers from 70% to 90% are offered to account for ‘social orphans’ in the state system at the time. Yasik was a ‘social orphan’.
While I walk our dog, Brodie, on the Log Train trail I listen to books. Listening to From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle[v], about when he and his brothers were taken from their addicted father by Children’s Aid Society, I am struck by some similarities with the time he spent there in early childhood. As the brothers settle into fairly institutional care, clean and providing regular meals, the oldest brother explains to other kids residing there that their “‘dad was away and that we’d be going home as soon as the police found him. “I used to think that, too,” one kid said. “But we’re orphans now – don’t cha know?” I didn’t know what that meant”‘. A few weeks later a foster home that would take all three Thistle siblings was found. They were told they were lucky. Wouldn’t this too be a Canadian version of ‘social orphan’ with a family somewhere, government intervention and children confused and frightened.
However, as we later found out, while Yasik would have been labelled a ‘social orphan’ with living family, a copy of the court papers given to Yasik’s sister and adoptive family show that about the time we began to look for child, the state took away Yasik’s biological parents’ rights. Yasik was no longer boarding at the orphanage while his parents were working away from home. He was in process of becoming available for adoption, presumably because the court case was by then being considered.
Illegal adoptions, exploitation and The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption
However, at the time of our adoption, Dave and I were given no assurances that the parents had either relinquished or had their rights removed. So it was that when I came across articles of illegal adoptions a few years later, I did worry. I read that a number of Russian adoptions involved illegally obtained children, lacking parental surrender. I googled this issue and found articles that say, yes, Russia is as haunted by trafficking in children as are many other countries. Russia’s response is not to turn a blind eye.
Even though domestic adoptions are not highly sought after, there is distaste for the idea that Russians are being taken from Mother Russia. But above all, we are ultimately talking about human beings with as much love as any the world around, despite the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances. In fact, “In 2008, an amendment to the Russian law on human trafficking re-established that the activity of buying and/or selling a person constituted trafficking regardless of whether it was done for an exploitative purpose.”[vi]
Another article stretched the spectrum of ‘exploitation’ suggested by the word ‘regardless’. This article questioned the money laid out by people from wealthier countries in the quest of adopting a child even for the most wonderful of reasons, family making. This money alone likely outweighed the cost of raising that child in his or her social setting. Does this constitute “regardless of whether it was done for exploitative purpose”?
LUMOS and other organizations like Human Rights Watch make the contention that orphanages can be big business. Whether fronted as a zealous, even sincere, ‘high calling’ to rescue a needy child, adoption too can be big business.[vii] Either way the desire to help solve a problem can sometimes be turned by others into something hurtful to society. It is an aspect of adoption I only wanted to turn away from as too sickening to contemplate. An essential paradox?
Perhaps, but it is important to me to add to this post mention of two books that have come out since I originally wrote this post. One is A Flower Traveled In My Blood: the incredible true story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children[viii]. It is a part of the story of adoption than cannot be ignored. The other is the book I add reference to above, Mother Tongue: a memoir,[ix] which I chose to read because of the adoption story embedded in an overall message concerning disability. Several of the chapters speak directly to the side of adoption that does not get included in the ‘honeymoon’ period memoirs. The chapters, ‘You Before Me’ and ‘Mother Tongue’ target the adoption debate but each chapter in this book is worth spending time weighing for its excellent consideration of an essential paradox. On one page the reader encounters a single word sentence, “Except” turning the reader from the urgency for adoptions, to, at the very least, questionable aspects of particularly the adoptions of ‘social orphans’. Six pages on a paragraph begins with “But still…”.
And so it was that Yasik became eligible for adoption at the age of 4 in a society that did not easily embrace domestic adoptions and a government enticed by the money attached to foreign adoptions. These ‘on the one hand’ but then ‘on the other hand’ considerations demand that we recognize, despite the possibility of a better financial return for a child’s care through international adoption in this society can always be found people with heart. 75% of adoptions were domestic in the early 2000s, and somewhere I cannot locate at this writing, I saw the same breakdown for the year 1997. As noted above, Russians, for all the writing about their antipathy to domestic adoption because they do not want a child not of family blood, did process far more domestic adoptions than international at that time.[x]
Which leaves us with one more conflict between a simple family-making desire and the taint of exploitation. Yasik came close to being included in these stats and another wrinkle in our adoption process. A short time before we left for Russia, we were given the heads up that a Russian family or two were considering adopting Yasik and that another packet of money would secure our position in first place. We laid the money down immediately. This is not a unique aspect of international adoption.[xi]
It remains to be said, thankfully, in our particular adoption, whether we were on our game or not, our adoption agency was doing due diligence. They were adhering to The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption which came into force in Canada on April 1, 1997. As the Fact Sheet handout given to us says, “The convention is an international law created to prevent abuses from occurring in intercountry adoptions“. The Fact Sheet does go on to say, “The adoptive family is responsible to ensure that the child they plan to adopt is legally free for adoption and that all legal requirements of both countries have been met, including adoption consents, validity of adoption order and immigration requirements”. Ooh, I might admit that I don’t remember doing that sort of due diligence personally.
Footnotes
[i] Nović, Sara Mother Tongue: a memoir Random House, 2026, 23, 24
[iii] Ransel, David L. Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in RussiaPrinceton U.P., 1990
[iv] McKinney, J.R. “Lone mothers in Russia: Soviet and Post-Soviet policy”(now an article needing access)
[v] Thistle, Jesse From the Ashes: my story of being Métis, homeless, and finding my way Simon, 2019, 39-42
[vi] McCarthy, Lauren A. “Transaction Costs: Prosecuting child trafficking for illegal adoption in Russia” (this article now needs access).
[vii] Gutman, David “Former WA Rep. Matt Shea, accused of domestic terrorism, working to secure adoptions for Ukrainian children in Poland” Seattle Times March 16, 2022 (it appears this article is no longer available)
Crook, Marion Thicker than Blood: Adoptive Parenting in the Modern World Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 53
Wellington, Rebecca Who is a Worthy Mother?: an intimate history of adoption University of Oklahoma Press, 2024
[viii] Gilliland, Haley Cohen A Flower Traveled In My Blood: the incredible true story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children Avid Reader Press, 2025
[ix] Nović, Sara Mother Tongue: a memoir Random House, 2026
[x] UN publication Child Adoption: Trends and Policies https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/policy/child-adoption.pdf
[xi] O’Dwyer, Jessica Mamalita: an adoption memoir. Seal Press, 2010, (bribery in adoption in Chapter 16, “The Fix”)
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
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 Isabel Allende imagines in OfLove and Shadows (140) 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.”
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 (215 & 216), 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 Drifterswhen the character Brit says, “[people] ought to inspect their dreams. And know them for what they are.” So 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.
