In the News

US Mother Sends Russian Adopted Boy Back

There's so much to talk about in terms of this latest story surrounding the adopted Russian boy sent back to Russia by his adoptive mother, too much to talk about, really. For me, this is one of those times when I have to work really hard to step back and try and separate my instinctive, gut emotional reactions from a more rational, objective point of view.

Fear of being 'sent back' was never something that I felt personally, but I know other adoptees have said they felt or were explicitly told about. I think that whether that fear was real or imagined before, it is definitely and unfortunately very real now. Even one case of an adoptive parent sending a child back is too many, because gives form to something I think most adoptees have thought about at one time or another, even if only at the most superficial level. We as adoptees know that for one reason or another we were separated, taken, or given away from/by our birth parents, so we know that it is possible for such bonds to be broken. Like I said, I never, ever felt that fear growing up, but I think my first gut reaction to this case was not so much shock that it could happen at all, as much as dismay that it did actually happen in reality and not just in some screwed up imagination/dream world.

In this case, the adoptive mother's and grandmother's actions were wrong on so many levels that I could go on for pages and pages about them. Beyond the inherently dangerous (though not explicitly illegal) act of putting a young child on a plane and hiring a total stranger to pick him up at the other end, there's the glaringly obvious issue of this woman thinking of adoptive motherhood as some sort of trial run that she could simply terminate if it didn't suit her liking. Adoption is no less valid of a way of forming a family, and if prospective adoptive parents are not prepared, at the VERY LEAST, to accept an adopted child at the same level as a biological child, then they should never be allowed anywhere near adoption.

Obviously the agencies, institutions, and various parties involved in this case share the blame as well. Whoever overlooked/didn't pay attention to/neglected to mention the signs of attachment problems and/or other issues in this boy set this whole situation up in the first place. It doesn't excuse the mother's and grandmother's actions, but it does highlight the fact that adoption is a process involving multiple people and parties, and it is not just a simple, cut-and-dry solution to institutionalized care. The details are still quite murky in terms of who told who (or didn't tell) what facts, and we'll probably never know everything because everyone is going to point the finger of blame somewhere else.

As all of this is going on, though, I hope it doesn't go completely unsaid the fact that many (most) adoptive parents do their best in all sorts of circumstances and do NOT treat their children as warehouse goods that can be returned if damaged. Many adoption agencies do everything they can, given cultural differences and government bureaucracies, to educate parents and prepare them to deal with any issues that may arise. There are 'good guys' and 'bad guys' everywhere, and it would be unfair to villify one whole group of people within adoption based solely on this case.

"So what was it like growing up adopted?"

A few weeks ago, my sister (both biological and adoptive, a story for another time) called from California where she’s doing her master’s degree and told me about how she went out to dinner with a friend and two friends of that friend. She had never met these two friends of the friend before, and apparently, when they heard she was adopted, the first question out of one of their mouths was, “So what was it like growing up adopted?”

It amazes me how many times she and/or I have been asked that question and/or told, “Oh, I know someone like that.” From near-strangers, no less.

To be honest, I’m sure some of it has to do with honest to goodness ignorance. Adoption is way more on the radar than it used to be, but for some people, it’s still a foreign concept.

A lot of it, though, seems to grow out of this perception of adoptees as inherently odd, damaged, and/or troubled. And I can point the finger of blame towards a lot of places, the most obvious being the media. Movies about disturbed orphans wreaking havoc on their adoptive families or articles in the paper that point out this sociopath or that murderer is adopted. It’s intensely hypocritical if you think about it, because those same media outlets that don’t think twice about reinforcing the stereotypes of adoptees as damaged goods go all out to portray adoption as a lifesaving force when something like the earthquake in Haiti happens.

But to be perfectly blunt, I feel like I need to point some of the blame at adoptees themselves (ourselves). While I agree that being adopted adds an extra layer of development into the already-complex quagmire of trying to figure out where we all fit into the world, I don’t agree that it makes us that much more troubled or uncertain than the average person. At the extreme end of the spectrum, I think some people use it as an excuse to shift blame away from themselves, to avoid having to take responsibility for their actions. But even towards the middle of the curve, I feel like there is a tendency, at least recently, for adoptees to assume that role as the victim and to accept the idea that they’ve been traumatized and will spend their entire lives grieving for a birth family that they may never have known.

I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by stepping into that victim role, by buying into the belief that we are inherently troubled and need help just because we’re adopted. Yes, being adopted brings with it a set of emotions that can be difficult to articulate and difficult to deal with as we grow up, but then does anyone have it really easy growing up?

For those who were adopted at an older age, it is a very different story. Children who have memories of their birth families and/or their birth countries will grieve, because they have lost.

But for those of us who were adopted as infants, I don’t believe we’ve been traumatized. I do not believe it. We deal with things like racism and not fitting in and wondering about our birth families, but a Black child born to Black parents deals with racism, the girl in the wheelchair doesn’t fit in either, and the boy whose father walked out on the family when he was two years old wonders about him all the time.

It’s important that adoption be recognized as an imperfect process, as one that retains echoes of colonialism and tacitly condones things like the preference for boys over girls in China or the denial of benefits to children of single mothers in Korea. It’s important that people acknowledge adoptees’ experiences as real and valid and perhaps even as testaments to the imperfection of the system.

But I think it’s also important that the trials and troubles not be overstated, neither by adoption professionals and adoptive parents, nor adoptees themselves. If all the institution and the media hear is how troubled and damaged and unstable we are, how can we blame them when they turn around and portray us as such?