Post #11 Our Son is a Person

Post # 11  Our Son is a Person

I know we tend to pickle memories in a brine that renders them more rosy than blood-red.   Nonetheless my journal is a record of how I viewed my world at the time, a primary source with hopefully less cherry-picking than my mind might remember now.  Still, reading those journal pages 25 years later, it seems they might have been wrapped in pink cellophane, oh yes, the  ‘honeymoon period’.  And we were not alone, at least as far as we could tell from the one or two books we came across in those early years.  Well actually I only remember one book, written by a woman a year or two after adopting her ‘forever child’. The book was rosy from cover to cover.  We would have written the same and if Kisses from Katie[i] is anything to go by, people still are. Recently I heard the Avett Brothers on Jimmy Kimmel singing a song that asks,"How long is now?". The song, full of hope and happiness, answers with the word, "Forever".  It brought this time to mind, singing of the wonderful days in a lifetime. No grey clouds looming. We got a phone call one night from a fellow in the eastern US who was wondering if we too were experiencing serious acting out with our child, our response was “No, our child is a sweetheart.”  Offering words of sympathy, we shrugged and hung up, privately questioning his parenting skills. This post and the next several to come will offer vignettes of that good time from the perspective of getting to know our child to try to understand his perception of himself and our place in his life via the journal and other information I have garnered.  I hope to come to some understanding of how his perception was developed.  But let me first establish something that may seem obvious but at perhaps a less than conscious level is not always established. Yasik is person, not merely a set piece or accessory in the arrangement called family. This declaration is not as straight forward as it would usually be in a bio-family. The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life looks at the maxim, ‘The child is the father of the man’, with caveats noting that research cannot support that this thought is an absolute for all children given that the blessings and vagaries of life must also be factored in.[ii]  In the particular environment of the orphanage it has become expected that …the majority of institutionalized children miss a number of critical milestones in development…. In addition, adopted from abroad/post-institutionalized children have to go through a tremendous set of changes, beginning with leaving their home country, leaving the familiar surrounding of the orphanage…. and facing completely unfamiliar surroundings, learning a different language, and getting accustomed to a new culture, a new family, and a new school. However, a study … found that approximately one third of the families reported no significant problems; one third mentioned one to three kinds of problems, such as eating problems, medical problems, and stereotypical behavior problems; and years after the adoption roughly one third reported serious and sometimes worsening cognitive and behavioral/emotional problems such as physical, emotional, developmental and cognitive delays, self-stimulation and self-soothing behaviors, and extreme fears of separation and abandonment. A general theme is that the longer the child spends in an orphanage, the more severe the subsequent problem.[iii] But hey, you can hear that mumbled meme, ‘Data is Not Destiny’, right? Back to Google.  I was wondering how to approach understanding what the journal entries were telling me about who Yasik was showing himself to be in his first year as our son and how that might help to reveal his perception of himself and his new world.  I searched with the words that came to mind: personality traits, that sort of thing.  Google led me to philosophical sites of all things: the idea of personhood.[iv] It appears we as persons are physical and mental beings who develop networks of beliefs that impact how we calculate and think about our environment and social relationships, using reflection and language to make autonomous choices and engage in actions, with the right to be accountable for our choices. My journal entries allow me to work backwards from Yasik’s actions to uncover the person he was/is. But why examine such abstract philosophical and psychological concepts?  I had been considering sharing some bits from the journal that I later recognized were best kept private to the family. Yet I am also currently reading a book, the CHILD CATCHERS: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption[v] by Kathryn Joyce.  The book deals with a variety of movements that have led to bartering in orphans for their souls, for money, for prestige, or to fill some personal hole in their lives.  Christians rescuing heathen, governments looking for financial gain or political pawns, couples looking to place a family portrait on the mantle.  John Brooks in The Girl Behind the Door[vi] says, “We treated Casey as if she were our new pet”. Dave, when reading this post, observed much the same, saying we put as much effort into life with our pets as we do our children.  Are we seeing our child as a distinct and individual person or as another piece to finish a look we imagine completes our image of ourselves and our lifestyle? Does the personhood of the orphan factor in?  Perhaps we can hone an awareness of the orphan as a person in his or her or their own right by thinking very specifically about what makes each of them a person. Perhaps then we will recognize each child caught in the liminal (a word new to me but I like its eeriness) state of orphan as an individual whose personhood must be valued. Numbers-wise there was not much of the ‘physical being’ about Yasik: essentially 40 inches by 40 lbs.  But whatever little there was, it was packed into a well-proportioned body, capped with soft blond hair.    We had a cherry tree in the front yard with branches like big arms about four feet off the ground.  Dave tucked into the arms one evening to hide in a game of Hide and Seek but those 40 inches of bursting energy were just not up to the hunt. Dave sat right in front of Yasik in the cherry tree, but 20 inches short of the tree’s arms, he could not see Dave. Where it mattered, of course, and especially with the adjustment a pair of glasses made, Yasik could see just fine.  We watched a video with Yasik one evening about where kids come from. It made the observation that a woman has breasts, showing a cartoon woman with straight out breasts and nipples.  Later I said to Yasik, “See, I have breast too”.  He said, “No, your’s don’t stand up.”  He could see. Yasik could hear (he loved listening to music with earphones) which was later confirmed as hearing issues are usually checked as part of an assessment of learning difficulties; Yasik could smell (well we assume so for I have no concrete examples recorded); Yasik could taste (at first only familiar foods – which shows discrimination, right?); Yasik knew the message of touch (holding our hands and cuddling); and that sixth one, proprioception, appeared to be working just fine as his very effective fine and gross motor skills demonstrated despite Orphanage Risk Factors' mention that often institutionalized kids are clumsy.  From leaping around on the park dragon to hitting the T-ball to biking, he showed skill and prowess.  Even the over-sized baseball helmet merely got a nonchalant flick when it slipped into his face.  Of course, there was that one time just after Yasik got comfortable on his bike, we biked around the block. On Braid St. he biked into a telephone/ lamp post. He got a bit disgusted and said, “Tomorrow they have to move it over there” – meaning across the street. But clumsiness or awkwardness of movement have never been evident.  He knows where his arms and legs are and where they are headed – exactly where he wants them to go. And as for that one bug-a-boo, size, the material on Orphanage Risk Factors notes that institutionalized kids make size gains within months of adoption. I noted sometime after Christmas of that first year that “he keeps growing.   He wants to be measured a lot to check if he’s grown and usually he has – he is growing steadily but he is still the littlest kid in the school”.   Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents takes concern for size seriously, saying children can feel embarrassed about being short.  They may see it as mocking their drive for independence from being needy[vii].  Getting glasses centered his right eye but being little was an on-going concern. Notes from our short ‘getting to know Yasik’ meeting with orphanage staff say Yasik had dealt with rickets, poor nutrition and a lack of Vitamin D due to little exposure to a world beyond his crib. He also had an infant allergy or intolerance to sweets.  The staff assured us the rickets and allergy and their after effects were now gone, as is most often the case once diet and exercise needs are met. He did have a secret power though – when chicken pox banged at the door, the doctor thinks the resistance to infection spawned in the orphanage made him quite invincible to many childhood illnesses. Other than a mild diarrhea, he was free to play in the park for the week he was quarantined from school. His body was also well adjusted to the rhythms of life for he slept well, ate well, especially sausages, piroshkies and fruit in the early months. The fruit kept things humming so well that we would occasionally ban apples. Loving fruit, Yasik would have us check to see if his poop was firm enough to lift the apple ban. And the ‘mental being’?  A Google definition says it is about perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. I would like to add as a separate concept, the gift of curiosity we are given. For whatever emotional, psychological or neurological reason, Yasik says he has no memory of his life before the flight to Canada. Yet…..while we waited for our pre-dawn flight home in the Moscow airport, facing out into flat river valley, a harvest moon arose.  It was huge.  One evening, a few months into his first year with us, he and Dave were on the computer.  Dave was making supper and Yasik was playing on the computer. A large moon came up on the screen.  Yasik called Dave over and pointed to it, “Papa that is where Yasik is from”.  He explained that “They pulled the string” (like maybe a bus stop string?) and he came down on an airplane.  His memory system was doing what memories are to do – providing him with a narrative. He came from the moon. It is the only memory he shared other than recognizing the little kids pictured waving good bye to him from the orphanage front porch.  Sadly, or simply the by-product of embracing a new life, there came a day when he no longer wanted to look at their pictures before bed.  John Brooks talks of the same with his daughter, Casey.   John and his wife Erika had created a “scripted fantasy story” about Casey’s bio mom loving her but wanting her to have a better life and so the Brooks “went all the way to Poland to find” Casey. (I bet they dragged that word ‘all’ out).  But Casey showed little curiosity about her bio family or the orphanage, or Poland [viii].  And yes, more could be said re: the fantasy story and magical thinking as per the Child Catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption [ix]. We could not deny he had emotions either, from robust anger to sweeping happiness.  Angry that he must obey, laughing so freely when happy, yelling, “Yee Haw” while biking, excited and giggling playing Hide and Seek. He had us outside, having one of us hiding while he had the other counting and helping him hunt, but it was all his when the hunted one was spotted as he broke into a determined run to kick the can; he burst with pride at handling bumper cars with Kyle; he entered into T-ball games wholeheartedly – no standing on the sides, no matter who played. Yet come the evening, he slipped into cuddly mode. Yasik fell from a stand at his last T-ball game and he was leaning against the fence trying not to cry. Dave went over and picked him up from behind. He turned into Dave’s neck and cried his heart out. But again, all in the same day, he might punch your bum and leap on you. He would leap on my back while I was crouched at the fridge and get me in a strangle hold. Erik H. Erikson, student of life, according to Daniel Levinson[x], and person who never knew his bio father and never felt fully accepted by his step-father, designed a theory of human life rather like a train on a railway line with 8 stations along the way.  Yasik should have, at this point, passed the stop of Trust vs. Mistrust (infant) and Autonomy/Independence vs Shame and Doubt (toddler) and if all was going well, was in the stage of Initiative vs Guilt (pre-school).  Orphanage Risk Factors suggest that often children who begin life in an orphanage are emotionally delayed.  So, was the train of life carrying Yasik getting to each stop on time and leaving on time?  Can adoptive parents even tell this early in an adoption? Were we going to see Yasik trusting us as his parents? Is he confident enough to take up challenges?  Was he becoming more and more skillful and able to make decisions that show a growing control of his impulses?[xi] Maybe the mental being marker of intention will provide some answers. Dave’s birthday came along in March.  Yasik and I went shopping for a gift for him.  He got Dave a plastic foldable set of swords – for lots of sword fights with himself. On another day, Dave suggested Yasik pick flowers for me.  The next day Yasik was mad at Dave for a reprimand.   On the way to school I told Yasik that Dad did so because he loves him.  Yasik goes “Oh”, stopped and picked a buttercup, saying, “This is for my daddy”.  As an afterthought, he picked one for me so I picked one for him and again he said. “Ooh” – both ‘Ohs’ in awe. (I kept that little flower in the journal for many, many years). Any organism, if it is alive, demonstrates desire, so it can be no surprise that desire burbled in Yasik’s breast.   Right from the start we could tell he was into long-haired girls. We were visiting friends in Chilliwack whose only child was a beautiful, long-haired girl. Yasik fell in love with her, not reciprocated of course, for she was several years old than him, but she played with him and that was good enough. I have read here and there that curiosity is a special gift tucked into the bundle of personality traits of the lucky. I am not so sure; it seems to me that whether it is slipping into a shop to see an item you are dreaming of or questions you have about the connection between nature and nurture which leads you to Nobel prize honours, we likely each have some measure of curiosity.  Even our dog shows curiosity most days, sticking his nose in here and there on our walks.  Yasik too, has always poked his nose into things around him: how to drive the car, checking out what might be hidden in dense bush, even if it meant getting dirty to find out, figuring out how to help some fish get upstream. It is harder to pin point his experience of pain for he rarely seemed bothered by confrontations with pain. Much of what would have others cry out seemed to bounce off him. Or maybe his physical dexterity came to his aid, allowing to him slip past most potential accidents. Not to gloss over the Orphanage Risk Factors I have noted here and there, I might add that we did watch Yasik self-soothe by rocking on the couch while watching TV or listening to music and when in the car.  I’d also say there was some self-parenting when he could get a bit bossy, telling us to stop doing something that irritated him or becoming indignant when disciplined.  But he was not having obvious problems with impulse control other than making sure we knew his negative opinions as clearly as his positive opinions.  He did not come to us cowed by orphanage punishment though he would show initial hesitancy when encouraged to try new things like testing out the slide at the playground or learning to ride his bike. Nonetheless, there was no evidence of a ‘learned helplessness’ for with encouragement, he tried whatever challenge was offered.   Was he indiscriminately friendly? I don’t think so though it took little for him to be willing to make friends.  When visiting in the home of his buddy, the buddy's mom found him to be more cuddly than her son. But there was no going off with strangers or seeking a stranger's attention.  And if you watched him watching ‘Forrest, Forrest Gunk’ you could rest assured he was able to hold a concentration or focus. He was acting like a happy little boy. He seemed to have enough trust and independence to beetle on into anything. Perception it seems is the expression of the physical and genetic attributes as they entwine with the mental attributes which together lead to a way of regarding, understanding or interpreting something.  Or better yet, we as persons are physical and mental beings who develop networks of beliefs that impact how we calculate and think about our environment and social relationships, using reflection and language to make autonomous choices and engage in actions, with the right to be accountable for our choices. I think Belief, in a narrow definition (except in such specifics as religion perhaps) is imperceptibly different from perception so will check it off the list as essentially being dealt with as perception. I hope to discover Yasik’s attribute of perception as I work through the next few posts.  Other than that the bases are covered. So yeah, he is a person. To look at personality another way, I suggest you check out  'The Big-Five Personality Traits': openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism at this address,  https://www.verywellmind.com/the-big-five-personality-dimensions-2795422.   Researchers have found this set of traits to be “remarkably universal”, that “both nature and nurture play a role” and that the traits of the individual “tend to be relatively stable over the course of adulthood”, even factoring in “adverse life events” though “maturation may have an impact”.[xii]  I add this way to look at a person because of some questions I came across in Heartbreak: a personal and scientific journey by Florence Williams, 2022. She asks “So why are some of us more resilient in the face of something like a breakup? Do personality traits matter? Early life trauma? The short answer is yes and yes”.[xiii] Footnotes [i] Davis, Katie with Beth Clark   Kisses For Katie: a story of relentless love and redemption Gale Cengage Learning, 2011. [ii] Belsky, Jay et al  The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life  Harvard UP, June 2020, 40-54. [iii] Jankowska, Anna   The Transition of Adopted From Abroad/ Postinstitutionalized Children to Life in the United States   McGill University, 28 October, 2015. [iv] Camilleri, Adrian. “What are the Characteristics of Personhood?”  Philosphymthttps://philosophymt.com/what-are-the-characteristics-of-personhood/.  January 7, 2022. [v]Joyce, Kathryn.    the Child Catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption.   Public Affairs,2013, 67 [vi] Brooks, John   The Girl Behind The Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide.  Scribner, 2016. [vii]Gray, Deborah D.  Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Perspectives Press, Inc.,2002,  37-39. [viii] Brooks, John.   The Girl Behind The Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide.  Scribner, 2016, 55-56. [ix] Joyce, Kathryn    the Child Catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption.   Public Affairs, 2013, 75 - 127. [x] Levinson, Daniel J.  The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Harper & Row, 1979. [xi] Wade, Carol et al.  Psychology: custom edition for Thompson Rivers University.  Pearson, 2007. [xii] Cherry, Kendra   “What Are the Big 5 Personality Traits?”  Very well Mind   March 11,2023 https://www.verywellmind.com/the-big-five-personality-dimensions-2795422 [xiii] Williams, Florence.   Heartbreak: a personal and scientific journey.   W.W. Norton & Co.,2022, 51.

 

Post #10 Emigre to Immigrant

Post #10   Emigre to Immigrant

Taking Yasik through immigration, Dave was asked, “Is your wife landed?”  Dave assured him, “Yes, yes, she is just over there, waiting by the luggage".  The customs officer tried again, “No, is she landed?” And Dave proudly repeated, “Yes, we both went to get our son and she is waiting by the window.”  Did the officer’s training finally kick in?  He clarified, “No. Is she a citizen?” And we were back in Canada.  My parents, brother and his family, sister and her husband were there to pick us up and hustle our son into his new family, taking pictures, hugging and talking.  We felt so full at this moment, with love, family, satisfying occupations and interests, sufficient money coming in to keep the roof over our head and the bills paid.  We drove home to find my sister, Barb, had streamers, balloons, welcome signs, new toys, clothes, a car seat, and a big meal ready …...  Book after expert advice book on adoption cautions against overstimulating a new adoptee with people, parties and presents, just so you know. After eating we gave the wrapped toys to Yasik to open.  He picked up a gift but the wrapping stumped him.  Goggle told me only recently that generally Russian gift giving etiquette says that cheaper gifts are not expected to be wrapped in paper, only expensive ones. It is safe to say that any gift he may have received up to that point came unwrapped. For most of my twenties and thirties I lived in other cultures.  At work I often talked with our foreign-born students about their experiences and  the impact of culture shock on their hearts, minds and bodies.  I was not a stranger to culture shock.  Yet it did not occur to me or any of the other adults in the room, half of whom had dealt with as much culture shock as I, that Yasik, now in Canada for roughly three hours might be dealing with this phenomenon as well. It was merely cute that he needed his 3-year-old cousin, Kyle, to show him what to do with gift wrapping. Were Dave and I given any heads up about an international adoptee’s perspective on a new culture?  Not likely as our adoption prep seminars focused on adopting locally.  And remember, we had little time to prepare for an international adoption.  Does that hold up as an excuse?  Adoptors today appear to have much more information to prepare them.    Try a quick Google search for sites dealing with international adoptees and culture shock. You will find advice giving adoption sites and journals providing research of the issue. Yasik studiously set about practicing the gift unwrapping lesson Kyle offered. Any diffidence at being the center of attention in an unfamiliar social setting disappeared. The little gift-wrapping hiccup turned out so positively for him, he moved on to giving his new Aunt Rena Russian language lessons, laughing at her pronunciation.  Some of our family's first observations were that the orphanage must have taught him manners for he was polite. After the meal as everyone prepared to leave, Dave scooped Yasik up, thinking he might have fun helping Dave move our vehicle out of the way.  Yasik burst into tears.  Given the lack of sleep and jet lag it shouldn’t have been a surprise but I noted the outburst in the journal because the tears stopped as soon as Dave returned from the driveway.  This was one party he did not want to leave. Or could we dare to imagine it was an attachment hook we could put hopes on? My mom and dad gave Yasik a teddy bear almost as big as him.  Dave found him at 4:30 a.m. the next morning hugging and talking away to it.  Studies in Attachment began early in the twentieth century.  Dr. Rene Spitz a psychoanalyst studying hospitalized infants [observed that] these babies [abandoned infants who received little individual attention in group care] developed odd reactions to strangers, .… the usual behaviour was replaced by something that could vary from extreme friendliness to any human partner combined with anxious avoidance of inanimate objects to a generalized anxiety expressed in blood-curdling screams which could go on indefinitely” 1. But he liked his teddy…. Having only a few days left of ‘parental leave’, we slipped quickly into what most families in our neighbourhood seemed to do; we took him to the playground.  Other than a bit of experimenting with a play water pump on the periphery, he simply stood to the side holding our hands, watching other kids playing.  Getting him to actively engage took commandeering Kyle and climbing ourselves up the no-thrills slide the length of our own bodies. A visit to the doctor was next.  The Hague Convention requires countries, of which Russia is one, to provide a translated medical report but adoption handbooks warn that this could be incomplete or possibly even inaccurate 2.   Our pre-adoption medical report listed convergent strabismus (fixable), adenoids enlarged, dermatitis, speech delay (normal), short for age.  Our doctor agreed that other than being small for his age, a common side effect of orphanage life, he was quite healthy.  It was the doctor’s opinion that he may have built up a strong immunity by more exposure to bacteria and whatever else did not have to battle Purell.  And that seemed a good conclusion for he was never sick with any of the childhood plagues others battled with each year.  His motor skills were in line with his age as were his eating and sleeping habits. The one concern that is also fairly common but would involve specific correction, was convergent strabismus.  Initially it seemed surgery would be involved but glasses became enough. Odd, isn’t it?  Impervious to bacteria yet not getting enough nourishment to meet standard growth charts.  And it isn’t merely a matter of a lack of veggies and salmon as the experiment conducted by the German king, Frederick II, demonstrated in the 13th century when his curiosity about the development of language led to his forbidding care-givers in an orphanage to speak to or hold the infants in their care.  The babies all died. 'Toughened Attachment'. Born for Love gives Chapter Three to an examination of the repercussions of early life in an orphanage.  The focus in this chapter is a girl adopted from a Russian orphanage but some of the research behind her story is taken from studies of Romanian children who spent their early years in orphanages during the time and under the experiments of President Nicolae and Deputy Prime Minister Elena Ceausescu. One of the charges for which they were ‘summarily executed’ as the saying goes, was the claim of their ‘research’ “that children will develop just fine without individualized attention and affection” (53). The 25-year study at SFU on the Romanian orphans provided a paper which says this under a heading titled Physical Growth: While the malnutrition of institutionalized children contributes to their growth deficiency, another contributing factor may be the poor quality of interaction and stimulation offered by the low caretaker-to-child ratio in these institutions.  This type of growth deficit, known as psycho-social dwarfism, can be very serious.  However, upon removal from stressful or neglectful conditions, children suffering from psycho-social dwarfism tend to make tremendous gains in both height and weight…. Nevertheless, at three years postadoption, length of institutionalization was correlated with physical size, and of those children who had spent eight months or more in an orphanage, 31% remained below the 10th percentile in height…. 3. I found current definition and study on psycho-social dwarfism, now called psycho-social short stature, at Front. Endocrinol., 07 October 2020 Sec. Pediatric Endocrinology https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2020.5961443. The article above is no longer coming up but googling 'Psycho Social Dwarfism' (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6741153/) or going to the Orphanage Risk Factors page will provide other articles. These articles and others in this search make the point that lack of nurture in infancy and early childhood compromise physical growth.  This can be mitigated once a child is placed in nurturing care.  At our first post–adoption interview it was noted that Yasik “appears to need much cuddling” but that over the course of the three years of post-adoption interviews he went from 39.5 inches to 47 inches.  Okay, so still not the class giraffe but also not the only one in the front row of the class photo. The ‘Heads Up’ suggested by most adoption authorities or anyone really who might see themselves as authorities on adoption is on a separate page, Orphanage Risk Factors.  That list includes the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) checklist.  Yasik’s ACE score was likely 6 or 7 when he came to us although the ACE was not published until 1998. Yasik had definitely experienced physical and emotional neglect, likely physical and emotional abuse, and had definitely been exposed to domestic violence and household substance abuse. And those shoes Yasik wanted to put on the moment he awoke in Moscow. We bought him new runners and tried to make the shoes disappear for they were already cramping his toes.  That evening we got the shoes off him and set them by the door. He wailed.  He seemed to have the idea that taking off his shoes meant bed time, probably an orphanage routine. The wailing stopped when no one headed him off to bed. Taking his shoes off at the door like a good Canadian became a new routine he comfortably settled into.  Like a proud mother, I also note in the journal that he was happy to help with household chores.  And like a proud mother who believed in education I have noted that in those first few days we have taught him A and B. Yasik had now moved from émigré to immigrant in less than a week.  He had moved from an orphanage setting to a residential home, no one but him in a large bedroom.  Routines had been dismantled and recreated; cultural changes had been made with absolutely no orientation; no one speaks the only language he knows other than about 10 words to cover the necessities of life; he is interacting with two strangers whom he has been told are his mama and poppa; little of the food is familiar other than macaroni and sausages, and what about jet lag? All this newness at every hand and he was handling it entirely alone. Yasik was being given more stuff to call his than he had ever had access to.   Remember he left the orphanage with nothing. This stuff apparently comes with having a mama and poppa of your own. I have read here and there that for children in institutional care, the hope of having parents is the Holy Grail. We don’t know how much Yasik understood of his situation as a ‘social orphan’, for about those years, Yasik continues to say he remembers nothing before the jet ride to Canada. Did stress or even trauma from the first four years shrink his hippocampus, or put him in a dissociative state in order to cope with the lack of consistent nurture? 4.  Is it not possible to think that becoming a member of a family in a strange new world has added a further level of stress, however delightful the stress, to a young and still developing mind.  Stress, which separation from a caregiver and accustomed living conditions, abusive or otherwise, now heaped with the transition to an entirely new life may stymie memory.  These two strangers are what he perhaps came to understand he was to hope for.  All of these strangers’ attention is solely on him and any desire he manages to communicate, but everything is new and mostly impossible to explain when these two strangers have neither language or culture awareness to reach out to him.  Attaching in Adoption (149) cautions: “The comfort and competence that children feel in their own culture is lost as they enter a new surrounding”. What was that doing to this young heart, mind and body? Google presented research into the effects of trauma on early childhood development as well as articles written by therapists.  One article offered a good balance by suggesting while a child sometimes dissociates from memories of trauma, it is just as possible and much more common that, as emotions which re-enforce memories are still developing in a young brain, the memories are not retained 5. As the first post-adoption report notes, initially Yasik "appeared reluctant to let [his parents] out of his sight". Yet Yasik was quickly overcoming shyness around others.  One relationship that particularly warmed our hearts was with Tony who himself was raised in Canada’s early adoption and foster system, one that was very difficult for him (SeeA Canadian Story of Adoption in the 1930s’, Becoming Family). Tony showed Yasik his bee hives and he went home with a jar of fresh honey. We also found a night time routine that worked for us: play, watch a video, bathe, read a bit 6, kiss a lot to which Born for Love (135) says, “Like an addict with a tolerance, it takes a higher “dose” to get the same effect”. Yasik initiated the kisses as easily as we did, taking our faces in his hands or blowing a kiss at us and beaming. We did put together a photo album of the orphanage and the kids there.  He looked at it often in the early days.  I would end the evening with a little prayer to ‘Dear God’ with him and he was out.  We were not inclined to incorporate church-going into our life style but I wanted Yasik to have some awareness of a god. Praying was what I did and passed on to him.
Daily Routine at Ashley Down Orphanage 06:00 Rise, finish washing and dressing, older children helping the younger 07:00 Girls knitting, boys reading 08:00 Breakfast 08:30 Morning service` 09:00 School (some older children first help to make beds etc. to 09:30) 12:30 Playtime 13:00 Dinner 14:00 School 16:00 Playtime 17:30 Evening service 18:00 Tea 18:30 "useful work" - girls "at their needle", boys in the garden 20:00 Younger children to bed 21:00 Older children to bedhttps://www.mullers.org/downloads/Teachers%20resources/Daily%20routine%20at%20Ashley%20Down%20Orphanage%20Poster.pdfhttps://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=367933023629309
Institutions dress themselves in routines, but was the one at Yasik’s orphanage as airtight as the George Muller Orphanages begun in the middle of the 1800s and reaching into the middle of the 20th century? Human Rights articles acknowledge that Russian orphanages do offer education as well as meeting the physical need of the children.   Nonetheless, a study of two St. Petersburg orphanages reported a 2 care-giver to 4 child ratio. Staff at these orphanages worked 40-hour weeks.  Routine is implied, even if possibly weighted in favour of staff over children 7.  Update: I am currently doing some 'gentle art of Swedish death cleansing'.  In cleaning out the 'important papers' box, I came across some notes that appear to be notes I took in the one meeting we had with staff before Yasik became ours. His schedule may have been: 7:30 up, wash, dress, exercise -it says he likes to swim in the pool; 8 to 8:30 breakfast, then lessons- that it says in the notes that he likes to do the following suggests these activities were offered: to draw or work with clay modelling, construct houses, play with cars, learns poems by heart, likes having stories read to him, walks, entertainment; 12:00 dinner; 1:30 to 3:10  toilet and nap; 3:30 snacks of cookies, buns, yogurt, fruit; 4:30 to 6:00 walk; 7:00 supper, games, cartoons, toilet; 8:30 bed. One note says he pees the bed sometimes - heavy sleeper or limited toileting options? Not so different from how George Muller managed the lives of the children in his care. And not so different from the way responsible parents manage the lives of their children.   There is no 'Breaking News' to the place of routine particularly in the early days transitioning from an orphanage environment to a family home.  Google will offer advise like STICK TO A ROUTINE Children crave structure and routines. It helps give them a sense of control and allows them to develop trust. Having set bedtime rituals for a younger child, or a weekly family movie night for an older child, are great ways to establish a connection. Routines establish a solid foundation to grow from. In turn, your child will bond with you more easily!  8 The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook (85-86) quotes a researcher: Routines and rituals help children create expectations about the predictability of their external environment.  Young children rely on their primary caregiver to help them organize their experiences and to guide them in exploration and mastery of new skills through practice and repetition.  Children who have experienced complex trauma frequently have lived in an environment void of structure and routines.  They form a perception that the world is an unpredictable and dangerous place, and their capacity for developing competencies though self-exploration and mastery become inhibited by fear.  One of the key principles for restoring a sense of safety for a child is implementing predictable daily routines that establish safety, help children organize experience, and to develop mastery. Here an index finger might stab the air: as noted above, we were (or I was) managing to tuck in some educational moments, working with Yasik on the alphabet. Well, we had bought this cute little easel to hold big paper.  Really ?!? This was his first week with us and kindergarten had not yet become a consideration. So OK, begin to establish routines as soon as needed, but the whole perfect-parent-molding-the-perfect-child plan might need to be spaced out a bitThe first post-adoption report put our early days with Yasik in social workese,"[Yasik] likes to have structure". The journal has reminded me that we also had another 10-day wait period before Yasik was truly, truly, truly our son.  The journal records that four days after we returned to Canada was the end of the ‘wait period’, perhaps part of the wait period begun in Russia.  But that was not the end of uncertainty. Yasik became our son in 1997 but not until September 2000, having completed 5 interviews, at a cost for the interviews with a social worker and the cost for translation to Russian, were we assured there would be no more post-placement interviews.  The BC Adoption Act and Financial Administration Act: Adoption Regulation, last amended March 30,2022, appears to request only one report.  Our first interview/report in November 1997 concluded with this statement: "I recommend that this placement continue to proceed.  It appears to be an excellent match and all are enjoying forming a new family together".   What if it had not been recommended to proceed three months after Yasik came into our lives?  Little caveat here: actually release from yearly interviews came after Dave wrote to the adoption agency that we thought we had made sufficiently plain that Russia need no longer worry about Yasik’s rearing.  The BC adoption agency wrote back to say that the number of post-adoption reports came at the request of Russia which has experienced a few 'rehoming's or returning the adoptee to Russia. Added to the interviews, in this two-week parental leave, we began to get Yasik’s Canadian paper work together when we ran into one of the hiccups I had noticed at work particularly with Sri Lankan students.  At the top of his landing papers, the government had written Yasik’s name using the Cyrillic alphabet.  At the bottom of the paper his name was written in the letters we call the right ones.    The government was going to use the letters at the top on his citizenship card and his care card.  The person on the other end of the telephone would not budge, telling us that it would require a change by an office in Victoria and would cost $225.00.  Immigrants with limited financial resources and hesitancy to make waves regularly found themselves with names that were too long for computers to cope with for they included the tribal name as well, the part of their name these prospective new Canadians did not use even in their former countries.  But we were people much more secure in our rights as Canadians.  Dave called Victoria and told them quite firmly that there was no sense to using the Cyrillic alphabet in Canada.  The preferred spelling at the bottom of the page was as clearly written as the Cyrillic.  The voice on the other end of the phone acquiesced. I have not discovered if this remains a problem for the newly arrived. The journal goes on to admit that both Dave and I did have an ‘adjustment’ moment wondering if we could really do this, even did we want to!?!  Yes, it warrants an exclamation mark accompanied by a question mark.  Note though it was a ‘feeling’, not anything we acted on for the next line goes on to reassure that the feeling petered out.  Yasik had the resolution “weighted unfairly in his favour”.  He beamed at us and it was game overBruce Perry tells us our brain reward system sinks us. What could prompt parents to give up sleep, sex, friends, personal time, and virtually every other pleasure in life to meet the demands of a small, often irritatingly noisy, incontinent, needy being?  The secret is that caring for children is, in many ways, indescribably pleasurable.  Our brains reward us for interacting with our children, especially infants: their scent, the cooing sounds they make when they are calm, their smooth skin, and especially, their faces are designed to fill us with joy.  What we call “cuteness” is actually an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure that parents will care for their children, that babies will get their needs met, and parents will take on this seemingly thankless task with pleasure…. In the case of responsive parenting, pleasure and human interactions become inextricably woven together.  This interconnection, the association of pleasure with human interaction, this is the important neurobiological “glue” that bonds and create healthy relationships 9. And now it was the first week of September, 1997, the September week that Mother Theresa died, and even more absorbing for the globe, Princess Diana died. Over a decade later, we would share another eventful week with the royal family. School for Dave and me was days away.  We tucked in some picnics with family and Yasik’s first dental appointment.  He seemed to take lying in the dental chair in stride but he looked to me so defenseless that I found the experience more emotional that I had expected.  He did not have the language needed to understand what was happening or to express his thoughts about what was happening.  Heart strings were pulled and then snapped back a bit. There were two disconcerting pieces to this otherwise week of honeymoon.  I noticed at the park how quickly other children noticed how small Yasik was, his inability to speak English and that he had one lazy eye.  With this, and too readily for Dave, Yasik would at times hit or try to bite at me in unacceptable excitement.  Where did the biting and hitting come from?  Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate in Hold On To Your Kids lead me to wonder if this was a learned behaviour in the orphanage environment where children would of necessity be more peer-oriented than parent-oriented in learning social behaviours. Attaching in Adoption (81-2) says, “Children who lived with busy orphanage workers or with depressed or drug-affected birth parents learned to get louder, more persistent, more irritating, or more charming, to get basic needs met”.  Attaching in Adoption (24): “The rule of thumb is that, when first placed, children will relate to new parents in much the same way that they related to former parents or orphanage workers”. It does bring to mind Lord of The Flies. Or it came from the trauma of the first four years.  “The aggression and impulsivity that the fight or flight response provokes can … appear as defiance or opposition, when in fact it is the remnants of a response to some prior traumatic situation ….10.  Our minds default to choices based on associations to memories. This is important because all of our previously stored experience has laid down the neural networks, the memory “template", that we now use to make sense out of any new incoming information. These templates are formed throughout the brain at many different levels, and because information comes in first to the lower, more primitive areas, many are not even accessible to conscious awareness …. This happens because our brain’s stress response systems carry information about potential threats and are primed to respond to them as quickly as possible, which often means before the cortex can consider what action to take …. What this also means is that early experience will necessarily have a far greater impact than later ones.  The brain tries to make sense of the world by looking for patterns.  When it links coherent, consistently connected patterns together again, it tags them as “normal” or “expected” and stops paying conscious attention 11. Or was this anti-social behaviour a child’s way to express the separation/the strangeness of all the newness jumping up in front of him like goofy characters on a subterranean canal ride at a theme park, an inappropriate response but perhaps the only one he knew. Or as Attaching in Adoption (173) offers, maybe hitting or biting were simply overload reactions to not having enough language to cope. And about Yasik’s inappropriate response when things upset him?  At first when he hit out, kicked, spit, slapped or punched, we held him down, put him in bed and even spanked him once.  He would cry but then calm down and all would be fine again for our little newcomer with little language living in a world still very strange to him.  By the end of the first week, we hit on the ‘novel’ idea to put a chair in a corner and have him sit there to cool down.  Again, Born for Love (135) reminds parents, when your attachment is still insecure then  … social punishments like a “Time-Out” [can be] less effective.  Being less loved – or having repeated early experience of loss … can also make loving itself harder and less satisfying.  Like an addict with a tolerance, it takes a higher “dose” to get the same effect…. neglected children or those with other attachment disruptions are much harder to soothe or to teach…. each little dose of affection has a smaller, less lasting effect…. Were we just plain lucky that one or two opportunities to explore a time out and a nod toward the chair led Yasik to cool it? The Adoptive Parents Handbook (78) suggests that instead of ‘Time out’, parents have ‘Time In’ where a calm adult rather than putting the child away alone, removes a child from a situation but sits with the child, talking a bit about the problem perhaps but moving to re-directing.  This is not about the adult seeking revenge to calm him or herself. Bruce Perry learned from a woman he called Mama P. the need for calming a child who chronologically should be more self – regulating but because of a disruptive or traumatic early life experience, needed cuddling rather than punishment, even if this seemed to be rewarding the misbehavior.  Perry came to understand that Mama P.’s cuddling worked because she was now nurturing a child’s development in areas neglected earlier, in hopes that the little person would then be able to catch up on the stimulation missed earlier. Perry explains: These systems respond to rhythm and touch: the brain stem’s regulatory centers control heartbeat, the rise and fall of neurochemicals and hormones in the cycle of day and night, the beat of one’s walk and other patterns that must maintain a rhythmic order to function properly.  Physical affection is needed to spur some of the region’s chemical activity. 12 As I mentioned in Entry #9, John Brooks reflected on his and his wife’s first night with their daughter. They were tired after all the detail of the day of adoption and wanted some rest.  Their infant daughter was upset, trying to rock herself to sleep in this strange bed in a strange room with two strangers.  Brooks looks back at the night: “… we should have taken her into bed with us, held her and soothed her.  If it were possible, we should have held her for our whole first month together without putting her down.  Maybe we would have had a different result.  What she needed then was lots of human touch13. Attaching in Adoption (231) says “If children throw tantrums, hold them close…. to … comfort them”.  Bear in mind talking about hugging as comfort is NOT talking about what is called Attachment Therapy, Holding Therapy or Re-Birthing Therapy which is ignorant at best but essentially abusive. A child is held down and forced to make eye contact with the idea that fear of attachment will be reset.  The most such ‘therapists' can hope for with this would be an obedience based on fear.  Such treatment still surfaces in 2022 as “breaking down a child’s defenses” with a diagnosis of R.A.D. or autism particularly 14. A quick google marks the therapy as controversial and even banned in some regions. The other explanation often provided was the Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  Adoptive parents are warned against jumping on this bandwagon to quickly as it is now considered by many researchers to be rarer than first thought.  Initially, as adoptors sought to understand their adopted children who were not acting particularly perfectly, RAD was a handy blanket explanation. For us having to deal with a couple of tantrums would have made rushing to a diagnosis of RAD ridiculous.  As Dr. Perry’s Mama P. would see it, Yasik was still an emotional baby and needed to be treated as such to allow catch up for those areas of his psyche still underdeveloped 15. Or as Attaching in Adoption (275) explains:  Children who have experienced deprivation early in life tend to have brains that do not regulate emotions well.  They over-react and under-react in a way that is adaptive to their old environment.  When they are nurturing, comforting, and positively stimulating, parents give children experiences that form a new perceptual map.  For as a mother adopting from China found It had been so cold in the winter that the babies had quilts tied across their lined up cribs so that they stayed warm.  They were only picked up on a schedule, due to the demands of so many babies and the difficulty of keeping the quilts in place…. [the] anxiety and frustration [which] were supposed to have beginning development in ages three through six months [continued long after, not having been cared for at the appropriate developmental stage] (273). Our two-week parental leave never really accessed my union’s allowed three days.  We had the last two weeks of August and then it was time for school.  Luckily I guess, that particular year I had evening classes so the first days of September gave me a schedule that allowed me to be at home with Yasik in the morning.  Dave dropped some of his course load, taking only morning classes three days a week.  Yasik’s needs were directing his art education. I stuffed Yasik into his car seat and worked against afternoon homeward bound traffic to Emily Carr University, picking Dave up. He took the driver’s seat and headed further into Vancouver to my school after which Dave and Yasik caught the bus home while I taught.  Two weeks into the school year with this schedule and we furrowed our brows. Perhaps we ought to just see about a possible kindergarten for Yasik. We called the school to make an appointment, and Yasik was a new kindergarten student by the end of the day. The journal says “And childhood is over – the staff at the community school down the street urge starting kindergarten as best for him for socializing, school prep, and ESL (the Kindergarten teacher spoke some Russian).  And he has been watching the kids at the park – we feel he is ready”.  We would be keeping our promise to the Russian judge for this was not (God forbid) abandoning him to day care. And what do the experts say about that: “The key problem is the lack of consideration we give attachment in making our child-care arrangements.  Perhaps the most obvious task of attachment is to keep the child close16.  The title, Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers, lays out Gordon Neufeld’s focus on parents’ need to ensure strong orientation first to themselves as the child’s parent before encouraging a peer orientation.  Being raised in an orphanage, Yasik would be regarded as more peer-oriented in his choices than parent or responsible adult oriented. Adopting Older Children (67) bluntly states: “As a new adoptive parent you should take time off from work after your child comes home. You will need time to get to know your child and your constant presence in the early days of her placement may help her adjust better…. In all cases, building trust is a process that cannot be rushed”. Attaching in Adoption (22): sometimes the building of attachment takes much more time than anticipated because children are younger emotionally than their chronological age.  When children are adopted at an older age, parents need ample time for bonding activities. A social dilemma already exists about the balance of career versus adequate time for infant attachment.  When older children are adopted, there is even less appreciation for the generous amount of time needed for parents and children to form attachment. For us more specifically, the ‘social dilemma' seems to have come down to bowing to the dollar over the hopes of the heart strings much the same as when we chose to adopt Yasik for we had to find a way to pay off the adoption debt and the mortgage and Dave’s education, and the life we promised to provide this child, but we did also believe we would be meeting Yasik’s language needs and the social needs we understood a child of his chronological age needed.  And once again we were working with our lack of awareness of the emotional impact of his past. Bruce Perry says, “But it’s important to know that young children are extraordinarily susceptible to the spiraling consequences of the choices we - later they – make, for good and for ill17. Adopting Older Children shrugs a bit (222), “You also need to give yourself permission to not be a perfect person or a perfect parent.  Sometimes you will just be a “good enough’ parent and that’s okay”. We chose to send him to kindergarten. Endnotes for Post 10
  1. Mercer, Jean.  Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development.  Praeger, 2006, 33-34.
  2. Bosco-Ruggiero, Stephanie,MA, Gloria Russo WassellMs, LMHC, and Victor Groza, PhD.  Adopting Older Children:a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press, 2014, 162.
  3. Le Mare, Lucy, PhD, and Karyn Audet, MA. "A longitudinal study of the physical growth and health of postinstitutionalized Romanian adoptees"  Paediatrics & Child Health,Volume 11, Issue 2, February 2006, 85–9.      https://academic.oup.com/pch/article/11/2/85/2648239
  4. Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 66-70, 255.
  5. https://www.healthline.com/health/why-cant-i-remember-my-childhood
  6. Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 312.
  7. Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children. Developmental Psychology, Volume #9, 2016.
  8. https://www.adoptionchoices.org/bonding-with-your-adopted-child/
  9. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook.  Basic Books, 2017,90-91.
  10. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook.  Basic Books, 2017,  52.     #11 is not noted here and I am tired of dealing with the footnotes. It is another Perry and Szalavitz whose work I obviously value.
  11. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook.  Basic Books, 2017, 26.
  12. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook.  Basic Books, 2017, 152, 153.
  13. Brooks, John. The Girl Behind The Door: a father's quest to understand his daughter's suicide.  Scribner,2016, 183.
  14. Tantrum, Barbara Cummins. The Adoptive Parent’s Handbook:a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child. North Atlantic Books, 2020, 61.
  15. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook.  Basic Books, 2017,101-102.
  16. Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D.  Hold On To Your Kids:why parents need to matter more than peers.  Vintage Canada, 2005, 33 & 65.
  17. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook.  Basic Books, 2017, 132.
 

Post #9 Parenting as Tourists

Post #9   Parenting as Tourists

At first Yasik sat quietly in Dave’s arms. Dave 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. 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.  Soon he lost enough shyness to playfully hit me; quickly we moved to overly rambunctious.  Added to that, at one point on the trip, Alexi stopped for a cigarette break and Yasik needed to pee.  With our 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. 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 staff at the orphanage told us not to feed him for he would vomit yet Alexi and Tatiana gave him 3 bananas and a candy.  Dave worried that in mere hours we were undoing all the orphanage niceness and order. 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. 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, and I started laughing and left.   Later we turned it off and 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 (182)?  Maybe.  There must be some of that for every parent, biological or adoptive, in the honeymoon period, is there not?  So why not enjoy the happy surprises that come with this new venture?  I say that because those days were a honeymoon for us, but 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 which 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 (183). It also strikes me here how much I mention him 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.  Not wanting to offend can lead to questionable actions. 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. 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. 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, 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.  Another stamp of certainty that Yasik was now our son. About two days in we could already see or were groomed by our own upbringings to see that 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 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. Bouncing, giggling, chattering in Russian and making sure he had those shoes on, Yasik started our day.  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 awhile, 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 we were 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.  An article in Harper's Magazine, October 2013, titled "Cold War Kids" is about the ranch in Montana for adoptees who have difficulty adjusting in their adoptive families.  The article points to the need for accountability and self-reliance that comes with doing chores. As the ranch owner, Joyce Sterkel, sees it, "' These kids have not had a good upbringing, .... They've never really seen people work."'  I am not sure how she came to this conclusion but it is likely institutions run more smoothly for staff if kids are kept out of the chore loop. 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.  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 (June 2, 2015) 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 to a "busy touring schedule" Wikipedia says. Yet, I wonder if there are any set of siblings who don’t try some level of hoarding with toys not clearly designated. 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 for our next leg of the trip in Frankfurt, 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. 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 a host of 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 all Dave’s mother’s children, 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 he 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 I mentioned I was soon leaving the group home where I worked.  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 mad dash 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 third year of study and part-time employment when we flew off to Russia. And me?  The other day 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 an issue arose that needed a Biblical response, 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, my self, 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 into what would have ensured solid doors were held open for us, but they would have resisted little of our inclinations, other than what was ‘evidently’ evil.  Mini skirts made Dad squirm; drugs freaked him out. Moving into our twenties these struggles got sorted.  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.  I only then began to shake free of the compliant, insecure, hunch-shouldered stand-to-the-side-rather-than-engage manner I have already mentioned in relationship to becoming Yasik’s mother.  Even if I worried that God was holding a flaming lightening bolt over me, I had had enough.  I returned to Canada and enrolled in SFU 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 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 offered a summary of the average adoptors: 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 and I'll tell you who you are" is enough info.  

Post #8 Court Proceedings

Post #8   Court Proceedings

Of course, fireworks were exploding, but not in celebration of a birthing bathed in mothering hormones.  It was becoming a family by adoption, exploding with happiness hormones.   I end Entry #7 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. Stray threads caught and carried by a little bird to build a nest must be a joy to find.  Stray threads may be what adopters find to build their nests.  But just as nature’s provision of twigs and grass, stray threads can do just fine in nest building. 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….” 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’” (Fostering Changes: myth, meaning and magic bullets in attachment theory 5).  Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development by 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” (2,3). 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 would be 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 (The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog 268)? 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, 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 us realize what a large operation one adoption is. 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.  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-white adoptee, nicely encapsulated in the title alone (https://doi.org/10.1177/030857591203600309). After a stroll along side 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. 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 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”. 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 Entry #3? 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 adoptors.  In his teens, Yasik he let me know he didn’t buy that story.  Only two years ago 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.  We adopted Yasik in August 1997.  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 involved in his/her upbringing and maintenance, for over six months”. At least this verifies that the adoption was legal, small comfort, but that is as good as the surrender of parental rights were in his case.  Yasik, that young judge proclaimed, was our son from now on. As I mentioned above, we found out two years ago why 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, given to the adoptive parents of Yasik’s sister at her adoption: 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. 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, that he was found alone in bed un-cared for, suggests he had to the point that social services got involved, 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. Without loving interaction with a caregiver, a child turns to unguided self-soothing that may become the child's way even into adulthood (Good Chemistry:the science of connection from soul to psychedelics, Harper Collins Publishers, 2020, 122-124). 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. The book,  Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies by Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden (60,61) speaks 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". The book, I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country (2) by Elena Kostyuchenko 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.   Yasik was born in 1992 and entered the orphanage about two years later. Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies (40) also reminds adoptors that when the world at large slaps us adoptors 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." 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, we didn’t really talk these things for 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 through out 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.  We were about to step from bystanders to parents. OK, let’s see how we do. 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.  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?  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 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.  We still have them in a memory basket, 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, 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 in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, 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.  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 versus 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 (41) asks about the impact no opportunity to mourn the lost life has on the adoptee. In fact, you the reader can not 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. Yet, as good ole’ Arnie says, “We’ll be baaaack…” for as adopting older children (140) reminds adoptors in the centre of the book, “adoption is a process and not an event”.  Stating the obvious of course but a centering  reminder all the same.  

Post #7 Bonding/Attachment

Post #7   Bonding/Attachment

I left the last entry hugging and kissing a child after knowing him three hours, aware 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.  And 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. 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’, drawing a distinct line 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.  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 a 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 (6), 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 on pages 70 to 75 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”.  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 (82), 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.  But there is 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 (Harper Collins  Publishers). On page 120 she writes: "Yes, oxytocin works on father; however, these benefits don't extend to fathers who don't get involved." 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”? (128) by Gail Steinberg & Beth Hall for they write, 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. Offering a tempered rebuttal, on page 75 of Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development, Mercer adds this: “Adoptive mothers…ordinarily experience bonding…if [their children] … have been adopted early in their lives.” And with that seven-word caveat, Dave and I presumably were pushed outside the realm of the word bonding”.   But Yasik looked me directly in the eyes and smiled.  Connection of some sort was made and emotions were exploding like a fireworks display within.  

Post # 6 Orphanage Risks

Post #6   Orphanage Risks

I regularly ask myself why I am writing in such detail about a ten-day adoption process from as faraway as the '90s.  The adoption process in Russia and many other countries has improved.  John Brooks (The Girl Behind the Door 204) 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. So 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 Entry#3, crises around the world are leaving daily numbers of orphans. How will they be cared for? Back to the journal where we are still in this tiny receiving room meeting Yasik.  I know most parents meet their 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.  Thicker Than Blood by Marion Crook, tucks in a healthy bit on page 65 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 Entry #3, were mostly met with blank stares and dodges back into safer territory, translator or no translator, it seemed to me. 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 later another kid was left behind because the staff were focused on taking pictures of Yasik.  But maybe a sales pitch is given to all adoptors.  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. 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? (https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/your-father-s-diet-before-you-were-born-could-have-affected-your-health-a-new-study-suggests-1.6927409) 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 adoptors 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, adoptors 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 adoptors will be dealing with.  This will hopefully keep their expectations more grounded.  There is now much information for adoptors to draw on as they begin the adoption process. 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 who smiled and treated us with genuine friendliness – likely responding to Yasik’s charm.  This little shopping trip included taking Yasik to a passport office for a picture before returning him to the orphanage. I was 47 in ’97 and had dreamed of being a mother to an adoptee for more than half my life, yet until that afternoon I merely stood to the side looking on at mothering.  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.  In Thicker Than Blood (70,71), Marion Crook 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”.   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 adoptor parents for I am unlikely the only new adoptor who has felt "a fear that at any moment you might be exposed as a fraud"(https://theeverymom.com/imposter-syndrome-as-a-mom-how-to-overcome-it/. 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 he peeked 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?) Our first day with our child-to-be before he became legally our child less than 24 hours later.  

Post #5 We Meet Our Soon-to-be Son

Post #5   We Meet Our Soon-to-be Son

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; I think Dave was left with no option but to stand. The doctor sat on the other one. 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.  A woman brought Yasik to the door. 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 facilitators 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 interact with the profound. 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 can be said it seems the process, perhaps because of tensions like in that moment, still not understood, led 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 adoptors 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. However, just as international adoptions were about to expand in the '90s and criticism of adoption would, of course, follow, Elizabeth Bartholet's Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting steps into the debate with the observation 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 (152), as would have been the case after the collapse of the Soviet Union (The Sunday Times, 28 December 1997, (20). With this insert: Google sites in 2021 suggest it may currently not be possible for Canadians to adopt a child from Russia.  See the Government of Canada site:  https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/important-notice-regarding-adoptions-russia.html.  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: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-november-2-2017-1.4382427/how-russian-law-affects-canadians-trying-to-adopt-orphans-1.4382469. 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 (24 news, January 14, 2013 and Harper's Magazine, October 2013). Adopting less than 10 years before these changes, some of the good of the adoptee, and some to suit the political moves of a dictator, we were in a room with a disembodied translator trying to manage our emotions.  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, right.  Yasik liked the plane Dave gave him, grabbed it and held on.  It was happening so quickly of course.  My next memory is of him in Dave’s arms and me seeing, not him, but Dave’s face for Yasik was turned into his shoulder.  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" in a compilation called Somebody's Child: stories about adoption (Torchwood, 2011, 37-42),written by an adopting mother about her uncertainty of her right to be her adopted child's mother. -As she watched her about-to-be son being born she writes: "I can feel it in my bones. I know I will not let this child go". Yet when it is time for the birth mother to relinquish the child to her, she is fearful, even as she and her husband drive away from the hospital with their new born son, that someone may 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".  Just over a year later the writer gives birth to a girl and says this: "my children are two equal sides of my beating heart -- seamless, without division". 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 (https://imperialbiosciencereview.com/2021/02/19/love-a-cocktail-of-chemicals/).  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. 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?   In both her books, Betty Jean Lifton comes down quite hard on the adopters' narrative of 'The Chosen Baby', the story adoptors 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.  None of this willy-nilly result of a happy night of lusty sex stirring up a random mix of sperm with an available egg.  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? Here I provide another voice to address Betty Jean Lifton.  Elizabeth Bartholet, in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting 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" (167).   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 provided 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.(174-5). 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 advocates.  The adopted child has not only one set of undisputed parents, but two or more.  In Thicker Than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world, Marion Crook caught my attention immediately for she starts out by saying, “We work hard at finding ways to support membership in their first family while firmly establishing them in our adoptive family” (27). I think the more we understand our child is a child 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.  Elizabeth Bartholet ends a chapter on "Adoption and Stigma" in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting with "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" (186).  

Post #4 How a Child May End Up in an Orphanage

Post #4   How a Child May End Up in an Orphanage

Google tells us that orphanages were phased out by the 1930s in Canada. Google also showed me that 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 (http://adoptionknowhow.com/russia/orphanages/).  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 [sic] 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’ plus ‘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?  Chapter Three (45-71) of Born For Love written by Maia Szalavitz and Dr. Bruce Perry offers 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.  Most children relegated/directed to orphanages will be diagnosed/deemed to have developmental delays mentally, physically, emotionally and socially. OK, but do adoptors 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 we have sidestepped developmental problems. 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". But then, in a Human Rights Watch paper, 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 by Steve Silberman I could not help but see parallels between the labeling of disability in Russian orphanages with Silberman's chapter on the disabled in Hitler's Germany, "What Sister Viktorine Knew"(82 - 139).  It is a nightmarish chapter. 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, even though the salary levels remain very low and do not attract specially trained personnel: A pedagogue in a baby house who works here, for the Ministry of Health, will get a 20 percent higher salary than from another ministry. Yet what should we be talking about if the salary of a doctor is only $100 a month? Of course, all these places with "problematic kids" get higher pay because we have to deal with all the kids…. The name on the byline is Kathleen Hunt, who I assume was the reporter. The chapter is "The “Gilded Cage” of the Dom Rebenka: infancy to four years”, ( p.116 ) taken from Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanage (1998) written by Human Rights Watch. These kids will enter adulthood, work their ways through life with a host of papers labelling them mentally defective like a life long 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? With no verification to the contrary, we assume that Yasik was sent to 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.  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.  We were taken via the straightest route to a receiving room. Inside we passed 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 so perhaps it was a "Type 8 " home. We were taken to the head person’s office, a sweet looking, grandmotherly woman who was a doctor.  There was another woman at a desk who never once looked up at us, at least when I noticed.  That is focus or loyalty to work or something.  Was she now immune to these emotional tableaus about to unfold once again, or ?  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.    

Post #3 The Adoption Procedure in ’90s Russia

Post #3   The Adoption Procedure in '90s Russia

After playing tourist for a couple of days in Moscow, we were taken 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 were taken to a variety of offices before heading to the orphanage. In each office, we were left to wait while our facilitator conducted the business required in each office.  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 stopped at 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 suggested we use this short drive to write down questions we might have for the orphanage staff but that turned out to be a bit useless.  When I pulled out my questions later, translator or no translator, I got blank but respectful stares.  I would have loved to know why.    Subtext: careful control of the flow of information? While I was naively writing down some questions, the translator, 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 what a nightmare language learning can be so just wanted to throw up -- I was going to one of the truly important moments of my life and being pushed on the way there into doing something which has given me some of the most stressful experiences of my life.  I get it, if books written to guide people through the adoption process are merely suggesting adoptors primed to prove how perfect they will be as parents learn a few tourist-level phrases, but some of these 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 a few minutes. I thank Yasik for learning English so quickly. The amazing expectations of those few minutes did not end there.  The translator 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 at the time. Somewhere I cannot currently validate, I was either told or read parents left their children at a state-run orphanage or what was also called a boarding school (often a more literal label than the boarding school as private school) while they attended to commitments like education or work away from home.  One source I did manage to secure is Russian Babies, Russian Babes: Economic and Demographic Implications of International Adoption and International Trafficking for Russia written by J.R. McKinney.  She 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 measured against desired results of producing the ideal Soviet citizen led to backtracking to the tradition of the family-raised child.  The children being raised by the state were generally weaker intellectually, physically and socially than family-raised children. Moving away from the Soviet aspiration to the tried and true was likely done with as little fanfare as possible, leaving Russian society with a stronger acceptance of placing a child in state care 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 only recently has research begun to look at the impact of the father on prenatal and infant development?  J.R. McKinney in Lone mothers in Russia: Soviet and Post-Soviet policy (now an article appearing to need access) notes in Post-Soviet Russia, 70% of Russian children lived in households where needs exceeded income.  The article points to the demographic called ‘Lone Mothers’ as very specifically mothers who never married and therefore could look to no one else for support of any kind. Added to the difficulties Russian parents faced in those years was the negative attitude in Russian society toward domestic adoption, seemingly still prevalent but actively countered for Russians were concerned about the population drain, even though, again at that time, Russia was open to the money foreign adoptions brought to the country. These 'on the one hand' but then 'on the other hand' considerations demand that we understand we cannot simply assume a child in state care arrived there because someone else was willfully negligent or no longer living. 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.  Numbers from 70% to 90% are offered to account for 'social orphans' in the state system at the time.  Yasik was a 'social orphan'.  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. While I walk our dog, Brodie, on the Log Train trail I listen to books. Listening to From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle, 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 a housing situation that sounds fairly institutional but is clean and provides 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."' This young kid thought that his parents dropped him off at the Children's Aid Society because he wanted Cheerios and they had none.  He saw it as his fault that he was now an orphan.  Jesse Thistle thought that his parents too were gone from his life because he had "asked for food too often". Kids were questioned, checked over for infections and parasites and some afterwards "never came back.  That was the scariest. It was like they had been eaten by monsters. No one knew what happened to them, but the older kids said they were the lucky ones because someone wanted them.  I didn't understand that; our mom and dad wanted us, why didn't theirs want them, too?" A few weeks later a foster home that would take all three of them was found.  They were told they were lucky.  They were "cleaned up" ... and ... "packed up"(39-42). So 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 the state took away Yasik's biological parents' rights.  Yasik was not boarding at the orphanage while his parents were working away from home.  He was in process of becoming available for adoption though the actual court decision came a year later.  Yet because at the time of our adoption, Dave and I were given no assurances that the parents had either relinquished or had their rights removed, 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 many, many other countries. And Russia’s response is not to turn a blind eye, being faced with shorter life expectancy and distaste for the idea that Russians are being taken from Mother Russia. 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” (Transaction Costs: Prosecuting child trafficking for illegal adoption in Russia Lauren A. McCarthy- this article now needs access). One 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 out weighed the cost of raising that child in his or her social setting.  Does this constitute “regardless of whether it was done for exploitative purpose” with the phrase ‘or not’ left unsaid? LUMOS and other organizations like Human Rights Watch make the contention that orphanages can be big business.  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 before we read the copy of the court decision. In balance to the generally negative perspective the West has toward the care provided by Russian orphanages I would insert this research article (see Orphanage Risk Factors): Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 9(3), 103-112). Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children ( Muhamedrahimov R.J., Arintcina I.A., Solodunova M. Y., Anikina V. O., Vasilyeva M. J., Chernego D. I., Tsvetkova L. A., Grigorenko E. L. (2016).  Two orphanages in St.Petersburg were studied, making it evident that not all orphanages were damaging to children in their care.  Although 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 here 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 given the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances.  The care-givers at the first orphanage were working on changes that show these Russian people were as aware as Dr. Bruce Perry who writes, Now, of course, we know that an infant's early attachment to a small number of consistent caregivers is critical to emotional health and even to physical development....While we don't know whether there is a fixed "sensitive period" for the development of normal attachment the way there appears to be for language and sight, research does suggest that ...[when] children are not allowed the change to develop permanent relationships with one or two primary caregivers during their first three years of life, [they will] have lasting effects on people' ability to relate normally and affectionately to each other.  Children who don't get consistent, physical affection or the chance to build loving bonds simply don't receive the patterned, repetitive stimulation necessary to properly build the systems in the brain that connect reward, pleasure, and human-to-human interactions (The Boy who Was Raised as a Dog 90, 92, 93). And 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, with a squeegied up face, I might admit that I don't remember doing that sort of due diligence personally. Yet here is an article showing these concerns remain: Former WA Rep. Matt Shea, accused of domestic terrorism, working to secure adoptions for Ukrainian children in Poland   March 16, 2022 at 6:00 am Updated March 16, 2022 at 7:55 am   By David Gutman Seattle Times staff reporter Summary Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea' group, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, is not registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services or with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity. Now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine because there will be uncertainty around the situation of the children's parents. Even if the children are in orphanages, they may be there as 'social orphans'. "'The United Nations High Commission on Refugees and UNICEF put out a joint statement calling for temporary and foster care for children but saying “Adoption should not occur during or immediately after emergencies.”' So yes concern re: adoption remains viable.  Marion Crook in Thicker Than Blood says this about the urge to adopt based on the need to 'save the children': In the early 2000s, evangelical groups began to advocate for a Christian mission to rescue orphans by adoption.  They cited scripture to support the notion that Christians were called to bring orphans into their homes as a way of both advancing the role of Christianity in the work and ensuring their own salvation....  Some adoptive parents were grateful for the addition to their family and truly had wanted to adopt.  Others paraded their mixed-race children as proof of their Christian faith.... If God willed that a family must adopt, then any obstacles to that adoption -- laws, agency oversight, the best interests of the adoptee, and consideration for birth parents -- were against God's will .... the underlying philosophy of the Orphan Crisis Movement...(53). Yasik didn’t become available for adoption until just before we applied, presumably because the court case was by then being considered.  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. Jessica O'Dwyer  in Mamalita: an adoption memoir writes more extensively about the issue of bribery in adoption in Chapter 16, "The Fix". Nonetheless,  whiff of a money grab aside, it may well be some Russian families were interested for the UN publication Child Adoption: Trends and Policies (https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/policy/child-adoption.pdf) provides a graph showing 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. Yasik was moved to the orphanage before his second birthday the translator told us. We were given to understand the orphanage did not know when he was taken to the hospital. For many years I told Yasik and myself that a small window was opened onto the care Yasik’s mother had 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.  The response of a young girl in the book, You Should Be Grateful: stories of race, identity, and transracial adoption (Angela Tucker, Beacon Press, 2022, 41) (the title alone is telling) was hardly grateful when she was told that she was placed for adoption because "her  birth mom loved her so much". This 12 year-old girl "notes with sincerity", "'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.  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 because of Yasik's father's brutal abuse.  I will add here another thought.  In Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventure in parenting, Jennifer Traig  tucks in this note when discussing crawling and walking: "You have to reach a certain brain mass before you can [walk]"(116).  Given his parents lack of care, we can assume that Yasik's development was delayed.  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.  

Post #2 Name and Identity

Post #2   Name and Identity

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.  Recently I read Out Of Line: growing up soviet by Tina Grimberg (Tundra Books, 2007, 6) who 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. In respect to impressions we picked up somehow in the pre-adoption phase, we felt Yaroslav should be included in his name.  We cannot say that we did so in full-hearted desire to respect his culture.  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 adoptors. This 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, and 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. 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.  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 (268) written by Betty Jean Lifton, 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? 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 a 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. 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, packing around enhanced boys.  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.  And on to Moscow. 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, to see little men dressed in what we did not know were the traditional dress of Georgians declaring their proud determination to emphasize their independence from Russia, Papakha, not Cossak, hats and Choka coats.  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.