Parenting an Adopted Child reminds us “that children’s lives do not begin the day they are adopted. Regardless of the type of adoption, children have biological relatives and genetic histories of their own”[i].
When seeking to know an adoptee’s mindset it is likely in the best interests of adopters to acquaint themselves with anything available of the child’s origins. Though when the child is not yet 5 years old and from an unstable home in a country with bigger concerns than the life of one social orphan, there may be little information offered.
That doesn’t mean I can’t sift the bits available to better understand the dynamics of family via adoption.
Yasik was plucked out of a historical setting designed over centuries. With all this time, Russia had also run the gamut from monarchy to authoritarian government. Unfortunately, all that time did not lead to ideas for a healthier economy.
This is not about trying to compare Russian history with Canadian history, Russian politics with Canadian politics, Russian economy with Canadian economy.
It is nonetheless worth examining for some of the history, politics and economy would be written in his genes. Some of the history, politics and economy would be impacting those genes via the nurture he received as it came through to him in the tiny world offered by his orphanage in the 1990s.
Historical setting
History is the narrative of human experience in time and place. We have, as I have mentioned often, only a bare history of Yasik’s life in Russia, things adopters are now heartily encouraged to check out. Yasik was born in Rybinsk, a city within the Slavic region, Yaroslavl Oblast. Had we checked, we would have found that Yaroslavl Oblast is part of the ‘Golden Ring’ with a history that began as the birthplace of Russian statehood and developed into a craft and trade center. It is also the region where Peter the Great built a flotilla that became the foundation of the Russian navy. (Wikipedia). Dating back to the westward movement of Germanic tribes in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Slavs acquired their name and identity either because for centuries they were an enslaved people or because the word ‘Slavic’ comes from ‘slovo’ which means ‘word’ or ‘speech’ and identified Slavs as a people who spoke the same language. Either way, as I have said before, Yasik is steeped in a long Slavic story and there is every reason to appreciate and honour his history.
Marion Crook understood this about her adopted children. When one child pulled off a “stupid prank’, someone saw it as what must be expected of an adoptee. Crook shot back that both the child’s bio-parents and adoptive parents “…are thoroughly ashamed of him at the moment!” How dare he imply my son’s heritage was inferior!”[ii].
Yeah But, No But. I will add a comment from Born For Love which is focusing on the conditions in Russia as they impact children raised in orphanages there. Examining the period of Russian history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Richard Hellie, a professor of history, ties that period of darkness to the present day as having “replicated itself as each generation continued to traumatize the next and build brains for reaction, not thought[GV1] ”[iii]. Just as Jewish history has marked Jews with a tendency to anxiety, Russian history has marked Russians with a sense of fatalism; suffering uplifting. Offering us some cultural preparation for our trip to Russia, our adoption facilitator shrugged while warning us against smiling in public for “We [Russians] have unsolvable problems”. Is ‘grin and bear it’ embedded in Yasik’s pysche?
.
Yasik was carried through immigration to a country not yet two centuries old with a history that has rarely failed to put high school students to sleep. A country with a history played out on a landscape somewhat smaller than Russia’s but contested over much more recently.
It is the landscape that would most impact Yasik’s new experience of history: picnics by the lake, hikes up the mountain, and long commutes to everywhere unlike the country side around Yaroslavl which was more central- Alberta-like. And the commutes themselves expressed a different history. There were the universals for a child: school, hockey rinks and soccer fields to be seen everywhere but there would be no very old monasteries and towers standing solemnly between.
Political setting
Those old Kremlins, monasteries and towers were the first icons along that gamut Russian governments have run from monarchies to the Soviet regime. As we witnessed during our short stay, the Soviet period shunned the ornate icons, preferring “gray concrete boxes” messaging a political ideology showcasing efficiency and standardization.
Then the Soviet regime came undone. Could the next icon have been a tank?
Yasik was unlikely following the news when Yeltsin ordered tanks to bomb the parliament, constitution be damned, leaving Russia fragile. The agenda he was pushing was an attempt to move from authoritarian to more democratic agendas, but it turns out showing up with tanks is not quite enough to change political agendas overnight. It all takes money and that was in short supply.
This had both a negative and positive (depending on your point of view) ‘trickle-down effect’ on Yasik’s orphanage life. America came to Russia’s aid offering money and business connections with the West. So while Yasik’s bio-family were destitute, and orphanages had limited budgets, Russia was very open to international adoption.
The reader is left to decide. Are international adoptions in aid of a struggling country a viable option or the kidnap of Mother Russia’s future?
Meanwhile, whether Yasik knew a quasi-democracy from a constitutional democracy or not, he now moved to Canada which, for a mere 130 years at the time of Yasik’s arrival, had stuck with a constitution based on democracy.
Dave and I would be his guides into a good democratic Canadian mindset. When Yasik was yet well below the voting age, we would take him with us to get up close and personal with his right to vote for candidates offering the Canadian version of a choice from left to right. We wanted him to see we were not squandering our democratic right to vote. However, … we did not always do our homework beforehand, so what the heck, we would let Yasik choose for us.
Economic setting
However Yeltsin understood democracy, he too may not have done all his homework. At about the time Yasik was born, in the 1990s, Russia’s economic classification was (the now abandoned term, Second World) or Transition Economy with Lower-Middle class incomes. On the advice of Western economists, he instituted ‘shock therapy’, sudden and radical transition to free-market policies, flipping on the switch for a wild roller coaster ride. This may be why Yasik’s parents, while working at a factory, were being paid in food and china they were free to peddle, why poverty was evident everywhere. Russia’s reputation as a poor country became such a given assumption in the pool of common knowledge that even Jennifer Traig, in her book on hypochondria, Well Enough Alone, uses Russia as an example of somewhere you might expect to find people with bad teeth. She is writing of her own gray-coloured tooth, and wonders how the tooth turned on her. “I’d known other people with discolored teeth, but they’d always had a story. They’d fallen face-first into a tree, or grown up in Russia”.[iv]
Considering that Yasik was given over to us with not one item he might have called his own, we can assume that he was living below the poverty line. His parents had left him nothing; the orphanage would not let him take anything.
But did that necessarily mean that Yasik had a sense of deprivation in the orphanage? Perhaps with nothing to compare and three squares a day, he was unconcerned about his economic state. Yet as we packed for the return trip to Canada, we found he had been hiding his toys, a kind of hoarding common among institutionalized children.
When we landed in Vancouver we may have been at the airport for almost an hour. The drive to our home in new Westminster may have take about an hour. Sitting down with family for a meal may have taken an hour. So maybe three hours after landing in Canada, Yasik was showered with more gifts than, we assume, he had been given in his first four years. He was now in (the now abandoned term, a First World) or Developed Nation.
Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four reminds adopters: “Remember your child has gone through many losses; the loss of their biological family, the loss of caretakers and friends, the loss of culture, foods, familiar smells, sights etc. They are sometimes overwhelmed when they come to their new family and home…”[v]
How does a child with too small shoes comprehend shoes that fit, clothes of his own, and toys, lots of toys of his own?
Overwhelmed Yasik may have been, but as Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist, reminds his readers in Stumbling On Happiness, moving farther up the money scale doesn’t make a lot of happiness difference. Coming out of desperate poverty does.[vi] Perhaps Yasik saw a child’s reason for shifting his mindset from an adaptation to his economic situation in Russia to happy adaptation to his new economy.
Yasik defined his economic state this way: he said he got all he wanted one Christmas and then wished we were rich so he could get everything he wanted. What was that about I thought at the time.
And yeah, yeah, I know, all the adoption guides say don’t swamp him with stuff.
[i]Lancaster, Kathy, PhD. Parenting an Adopted Child, 2nd ed. Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 2009, 37.
[ii] Crook, Marion. Thicker than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 131.
[iii] Szalavitz, Maia & Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Born For Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 119.
[iv] Traig, Jennifer. Well Enough Alone: a cultural history of my hypochondria. Riverhead Books, 2008, 163.
[v] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press,2014, 65.
[vi] Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on HAPPINESS. Vintage Canada,2006, 239.
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