I Saved My Daughter Twice
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt make it look easy. They adopt kids from all corners of the world and the media broadcasts images of perfect Kodak moments. They’d have you believing families bond and blend instantaneously.
They don’t. Not always. Not in my experience, or in the experience of many others. Sometimes the road to loving your adopted daughter is long and twisted and scary. You know something is wrong – but is it her? Is it you? You drown in shame and confusion, hiding your feelings from the world. It can’t possibly be that you’ve gone to the other end of the world to get this baby and you’re not bonded after a month, six months, two years.
I knew something wasn’t right early on. We adopted Julia from a Siberian orphanage in Febuary 2003. She didn’t clutch to me or gaze in my eye. She never rested her head on my shoulder or relaxed into a warm embrace. She didn’t respond if I sang or read to her. It was like she was there, but wasn’t.
For a while, weeks, maybe months, I sank deeper and deeper into depression, thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a mother?
Julia was a little more responsive with my husband, but only somewhat. For the first 10 months, I suffered guilt, shame and sadness. After traveling 10,000 miles, twice, to bring home this child, I was unwilling to let anyone know how I really felt. Then the revelations began. I hired a day-time nanny in early 2004. Anna was 21, experienced and energetic. She’d come with a glowing review from the mother of her last charges. When she mentioned Julia was having trouble warming up to her, a ding went off in my head. Why? Why isn’t Julia connecting to this lovely young lady who took her daily to the park, to playdates, to “mommy-and-me” classes. I thought for sure that Anna might be able to give her what I couldn’t.
A year later, I enrolled Julia in pre-school, and saw more of the same: A child who was not bonding with teachers or other children. She was as much an enigma to others as she was to us. Everyone agreed she was gregarious, vivacious, friendly and outgoing. Yet at the same time, she was aloof, hard to figure out. When I picked her up at the end of the day, she was always by herself, sometimes sitting under a desk. Worried, I mentioned her odd behavior to her pediatrician. That was the first time I’d heard of “Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).” The doctor, who worked with foreign adoptees, explained RAD was common among institutionalized children. The early break from birth mothers causes trauma that makes it difficult for the child to trust or attach to another adult. This, he explained, is why Julia recoils when she is held. Why she doesn’t have a favorite teddy. Why she won’t make eye contact.
I wasn’t ready to hear this. I told myself we just need more time. I stored the doctor’s explanation in the back of my mind but pieces of it drifted out now when I watched Julia fight naps or wander away from me constantly. Finally, when she was four, I was ready to face her demons, our demons. It was during a nursery school recital that I broke down and sobbed because I realized how lonely and displaced and isolated my daughter was. Julia was unable to sing along with the group. Her disruptive behavior forced a teacher to take her off the stage and leave the room. This may not sound like the most unusual event for a young child – but put in context, I understood right then and there, I needed to intervene.
My husband and I banded together to read everything we could on the syndrome. We made a dogged effort and a conscious commitment to help our daughter and make ourselves into a family. It was our daily work. We learned that parenting a child who has trouble bonding requires counter-intuitive parenting instincts – some that disturbed and surprised family and friends. People could not understand that we’d respond to Julia’s fussing with a passive poker face rather than indulge her. We’d laugh during her tantrums until she abandoned them, and moved on as though they’d never happened. They didn’t understand that Julia wasn’t willing to give hugs and we didn’t ask her to do so. With the help of research and case studies, we had a tool box. Some advice was invaluable, some failed. Some techniques worked for a while. We were living inside a laboratory. I knew how lucky I was to have a partner like Ricky because so many marriages and homes are ravaged by the challenge of adopting difficult children.
Over time, there was more engagement with Julia. It wasn’t necessarily loving and warm at first but it was moving in the right direction. We were drawing her out. She became more capable of showing anger rather than indifference. As her verbal skills developed, we had the advantage of being able to explain to her that we loved her and would never leave her. That we understood how scary it was for her to be loved by an adult and that she was safe.
Progress took time – and the work of staying bonded with a wounded child is a life-time endeavor. That’s okay though because Julia has stepped out of the danger zone. She’s taken off her helmet and armor. She has let me become her mother. And I honor that trust by remembering, each and every day, how she struggles with subconscious demons and how mighty her battle is and will always be.
From Radio Europe and as part of the series of successful Russian adoptions
About the Author
Comments (17):
Leave a Reply
Adoption Voices Magazine Badges
show me less content in the footer
show me more content in the footer
February 26, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Please understand that the baby has no trouble at all attaching to the real mom. the real mom was pricked at and coerced, lied to, nagged at and tortured to be able to sell a child. they are told the buying family has taken tons of classes and is the absolute best thing to happen to the baby. the child is not the one at fault in this horrible situation. you wanted to buy someone else’s baby, and that mother’s heart has broken for every minute the rest of her life. she would not think the child has rds or any other trouble because she would devote her entire being to this child. You are a parent 100 percent of the time and this child and mother suffered because you didn’t think this relationship through.
February 26, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Wow, thanks for sharing your story and for being brave enough to talk about the difficulties that often arise from international adoptions. I don’t know who Dee is but I do know that she is grossly misinformed as to the issue of reactive attachment disorder. RAD is a condition that develops over time as a result of neglect and/or abuse by a parent or care giver. A baby is genetically wired to bond to any person that is willing to take good care of him/her… That is why adoption works so well. Unfortunately, so many children from Russia have been institutionalized leaving their care to workers who have been unable or unwilling to provide the love and support needed to establish healthy attachments. If your child came to you with symptoms of RAD then that means that the biological parent was unwilling or unable to bond with her. It is not your fault , as Dee suggests, that your daughter suffers from RAD. It is the tragic result of countries such as Russia who place so little value on their own people’s well being. You didn’t “buy” a child you worked your “you know what off” to be granted the right to adopt a child who was more than likely destined to a life of poverty and abuse. That is honorable and I applaud you and your husband.
Lastly, love conquers all, so keep the faith and enjoy the new life you and your daughter have been given through the gift of adoption.
February 27, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Great then that geeky kid with the greasy hair and slide rule who said he loves you is prefect for because he has the one requirement, he loves you. Glad you will be happy with him.
February 27, 2013 at 1:48 pm
I am sorry but the truth is those agencies want the money. they don’t care that the child is deeply loved by their mother. They want the sale. The mother is told about this wonderful life her child will have and is never told that the child may languish in an institution. the mother is told that buyers take tons of classes and are heavily screened and can provide more love, money and schooling to her child and that if she truly loves her child she will surrender. she is told that the buying parents will tell her child that she deeply loved her child but couldn’t keep (because of this insane agency pressure) and she allows herself to be soul murdered thinking her child has benefited. the thought that a child was saved by giving an agency money is not true. it facilitates the propaganda. she was helped to show her anger against a system that created the reason to be angry. if there was a right to take a child, then that child would have a right to know their background. since the takings are doused in lies, the need for long distance takings and secrecy and lies.
February 28, 2013 at 8:59 am
Tina, thank you for your honesty and sharing how scary an attachment disorder can be for a family. With appropriate intervention, as early as possible, children do heal from their past hurts and loss.
February 28, 2013 at 10:11 am
Thanks, Carol. I agree with both your statements. Attachment disorder is scary, especially if you have not been prepared for this. But with enough understanding, love and intervention, I believe it’s possible in some cases to rescue a child from the brink. That said, I understand there are exceptions to this, sadly.
February 28, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Thanks for sharing the long difficult struggle, Tina. No child should be a ghost; isolated in their own brain, unable to touch and feel the outside world.
March 1, 2013 at 7:14 am
So true, Barbara. So true. I think parents of these children need to stay especially tuned in because these children, though they appear tough, are so vulnerable.
March 1, 2013 at 7:30 am
Thanks Tina for sharing! So happy that your family has found healing!
Valerie, VERY well said! I would like to add this:
Dee, you are obviously a very hurt and bitter individual. You are also ignorant
of the reality of many of the children’s situations in Russia. My daughter’s
birthmother was a heroin addict, alcoholic, HIV and Hepatitis C positive and in
and out of jail. She did not provide for HER daughter’s basic needs; HER child
was frequently found in a filthy state, she was left for HOURS completely alone
in a stroller outside of Russian apartment buildings while her birth mother got
a fix, had sex or whatever, therefore, the authorities removed my child from her
birth mother because other family members feared for my daughters life. Is this
the kind of ‘loving’ mother that you would want my child to live with??!!!
Fortunately, by the grace of God and the fact that she spent the last year
before joining our family at a wonderful, loving orphanage, she was able to
attach wonderfully to us and us to her. If she would have had a problem, it
would have been her birth mother’s fault, NOT ours.
And the fact that you would personally attack Tina and her daughter with your
spiteful and your worse-than-childish comments, only confirms that you are one
very disturbed individual. May God bless you and HEAL you!
March 1, 2013 at 10:32 am
Dee’s no different from the others who shriek that Kirill Kuzmin (now Kristopher Shatto) be sent to his “grieving first mother” in Russia after his brother Maxim was “killed” by his adopter (the investigation is still underway. If Mrs. Shatto in fact did kill Max, I’m pretty sure the death penalty is still widely used in Texas).
Only problem is, Yulia Kuzmina went to Moscow to do the tabloid TV circuit, explaining how she’d rehabilitated her life. Then was promptly thrown off the train with her boyfriend for drunk and disorderly conduct. You have to be RIP FRICKIN’ ROARING BLASTED to be accused of being drunk in a Russian public place. Yep, let’s send poor little Kristopher back. Why the hell not?
I truly hate even giving people like Dee the time of day, because they want the conversation to be about THEM, not about the children with RAD, or FAS, or Post Institutional Austism, or the children who age-out and commit suicide, or….They want desperately to believe that with just a teeny bit of help, these orginal mothers could’ve kept their kids. BS. I was raised (not reared, raised) by my birthmother, only mother. She humiliated us, told us what ungrateful pieces of **** we were, beat us, tried to drown me….then had the audacity to try to take credit for my sisters’ and my successes because, well, she “must’ve done something right”. She went through every bit of our family’s life savings trying to get her sober. Thank God she drank herself to death before age 50. I hope she’s rotting in hell. Is it any wonder I didn’t want to perpetuate my family’s genes?
Tina (and Marie, and all of you) THANK YOU for trying to make the world better for one little child.
March 1, 2013 at 10:52 am
Tina,
I enjoyed your story. It’s honest. Those of us who have been through similar situations with our own children applaud you. My son’s birth mother wasn’t coerced into giving him up. She gave birth to him in a hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia and left the hospital. He was placed in an orphanage where he was visited by a maternal aunt and grandmother but no one was willing to take him home, though they were asked continually to do so.
So, we ADOPTED him and took him home. He is our son and we certainly didn’t buy him from anyone!
Dee’s comments are no more true for you than they are for me. Ignore them and get on with raising your lovely daughter.
March 1, 2013 at 11:20 am
Thanks for your encouraging words. I’m not bothered by Dee’s comments because they’re so far off the mark. But I’m so glad they bring people like you and I together because it’s nice to know that there are so many of us who’ve walked/are walking a similar road.
March 1, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Sandra, we’re a St P family too. Our youngest came from baby home #1 in Jan 2010
March 4, 2013 at 2:21 pm
Just to stick up for Dee a little bit… She is indeed off the mark as far as this particular case goes and I don’t think she understands that RAD is not about a baby failing to attach under normal conditions–yes, a baby will attach to its birthmother under healthy normal conditions–but RAD is about a baby being neglected in an institution and thus learning that attachment is dangerous. Even Julia’s first mother, coming back on the scene 9 months later, would have experienced what you experienced, because of those months of neglect.
Dee’s concerns probably speak more appropriately to domestic, healthy newborn infant adoption in the United States where indeed much money is made by persuading otherwise good-enough mothers that they are not as good as prospective adoptive parents. The coercion in this area of the adoption market cannot be denied, as it is well-documented and easy to find with about 20 seconds of googling.
But the situation in Russian orphanages is very different from the one in U.S. domesticate healthy infant adoptions. The Russian system no doubt has problems of its own, and no doubt some folks have found ways to enrich themselves personally through it, but Dee’s specific critique is not really applicable.
Dee’s empathy for the pain of first mothers is probably on the mark enough, however. While we may never know much of anything about many institutionalized children’s first mothers, it is not crazy to assume that many–the majority in all probability–of those mothers grieve for their lost children, even if they were abusive, neglectful or victims of addiction. They are still human and regret and grief can sit side-by-side with what we might reasonably judge to be parental incompetence.
A little compassion for the sorrow of our adoptive children’s first mothers costs us nothing and in the long run can help our children heal from their own very real losses.
March 4, 2013 at 2:35 pm
Shannon
I have never been unsympathetic to the Julia’s birth mother’s plight. In the book I’m writing, I often muse over whether she thinks about Julia on the day of her birth, etc. If there’s criticism at all, it’s at the system. I really think there is something systemically wrong because so many adoptive Russian parents share similar experiences.
March 4, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Agree that something is wrong with the system, but I wonder how much responsibility adoptive parents are willing to own for their part in that system. The title of your article is ‘I saved my daughter twice’. Do you see yourself as your daughter’s rescuer/hero? As much as parenting does require heroism (often unnoticed by others), I think adoption is much more complicated than “adoptive parent rescues child.” Maybe you know that, but the language in the article doesn’t represent that. It seems to reinforce that stereotype that adoptive parents are the heroes of the adoption story.
March 5, 2013 at 5:27 am
Tina,
Thanks for sharing your story honestly. It is inaccurate and hurtful to declare either “adoption is wrong” or “adoption is heroic.” Every family, every parent-child experience, and every adoption is unique.