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).