We are the Truth

Well, today has been set aside for the Russian adoption community to blog about their adoptions.  This is, of course, in response to the situation in the news with the Tennessee adoptive family that put their disturbed child on a plane and sent him back to Russia. 

So, I am blogging about my son, Joshua, and his adoption.
(I have randomly placed some cute pics of Josh through this post...they don't have anything to do with the text.)

I have to say, this isn't a happy story. 

It is truthful...but, I don't think it would qualify as happy.

I went to Russia in 2003, to adopt a particular child.  A little boy who was almost 4  years old when I finally met him.  His name was Atanov, Evgeni Vladimirovich.  We had spent two years working up to this adoption...we educated ourselves into "analysis paralysis" until we finally found a program we felt comfortable with, an accredited agency we felt comfortable with and finally a child we felt comfortable with.  We had been looking at his photos and a short videotape and medical/developmental information for nearly a year.  We had had it reviewed by IA doctors and a specialist in FAS facial features and we were absolutely ecstatic about this boy.  Though we originally set out to adopt another Asian child, we found this little guy and felt he was "the one!"  He looked a great deal like our bio daughters.  We had such high hopes for him.  These hopes were utterly dashed when I got to the Children's Home in Ussurisk and saw him for the first time.  Though his medical/developmental info and the video made of him were almost two years old and I had prepared myself to find him changed, I was shocked.  If those old measurements were accurate, he had not grown at all since his 2nd birthday.  He only said 2 words in my hearing...and one of them was "da".  He could not blow a bubble or drink from a sippy cup or hold a crayon or...whatever.  His head measured 5 cm smaller than his chest...he was "off the charts" tiny for his age.  His belly was distended (kwashiorkor? or parasites?)  His skin was rough and papery.  His fingers were all smashed and the nails infected.  Where was the cute toddler playing in the toy room at the Baby House?  What on earth had they done to this child?  I could not imagine.  But, having spent several years researching Russian adoptions, I knew one thing for sure, I didn't have what it would take to help this child overcome this kind of a start in life. 

So, I did the hardest thing I have ever done. 
I said "no" to his referral.

 

If I had been able, I would have gotten on the plane that same day and flown home and we would have forgotten the whole thing.  But, this was right before Christmas.  Flights were booked up.  I had to stay and return home several days later with the group of families from my agency, as I had originally planned. 

The facilitator was determined that while I waited, I should go meet other children.

So, with very, very low expectations, I did.

It was heartbreaking. 

Most of these little boys were so terribly damaged.  If you want a perspective on just how horrible mankind can be...go touring through the orphanages in the Russian Far East.  And I wasn't seeing the worst.  I was seeing the children my facilitator thought might be adoptable.  God only knows what the rest of them looked like. 

On the last day (on our way to the airport) we stopped at one final orphanage.  There I met a child that didn't seem so completely damaged.  That is how I chose my son;  he was the least damaged child I met.  His size was the same as Evgeni's...but he was only 25 months old.  His head circumference was larger than his chest.  He could build a lego tower, toddle around, giggle when tickled, drink from a straw.  He opened a cabinet and pointed out where the therapist kept her bar of soap...she usually made him wash his hands when he came in to her room.  He said "Opa!" when his pull-toy fell over.  Most importantly, I felt a connection to this child.

 

But, at this point, I had really decided that a Russian adoption was not a good risk for our family.  Having seen how things really were there, I felt these children were much more terribly damaged than children in US foster care.  I had read the horror stories.  I was afraid to expose my other 4 children to this.  In the end, I let Jim make the final decision.  He felt that a child as young as 25 months that appeared to be in reasonable condition could not have been too terribly traumatized and that we should continue with our adoption plans.  So we did.

I should say here that we received a pre-adoption medical/developmental report on this little guy, Lukianov, Alexei Sergeyovich (known in the orphanage as Alyosh.)  The information it contained was pretty grim...but in light of the fact that I had seen the child and knew that he was functioning, it wasn't a deal breaker.  We later learned it was also almost entirely a fabrication...some facts were there, but everything was heavily white-washed.  We hired a private investigator to dig up the real story.  He found the birthfamily and interviewed them for us.  We went to this trouble and expense mainly because the medical records that we were given during our adoption process mysteriously disappeared during our time in Russia.  We had a travel file...when we went searching for the medical record at home, it was no longer in the file.  We had been looking forward to having an independent translation done, because during our adoption hearing, the judge said "Why would you take such a damaged child when there are so many others waiting for families here?"

When we adopted Josh (3 months after I met him), he was just getting over a case of salmonella poisoning.  Apparently the whole orphanage had gotten salmonella from contaminated eggs.  He was very ill...had lost weight and was very weak and poorly.  In the end, this was probably fortunate for him.  If we had experienced his true behaviors while still in Russia, I am not sure we would have left the country with him.  In the orphanage he was apparently kept sedated...was sedated when I met him in December.  "Lots and lots of needles" he would tell me later when his language development allowed.  Without the sedation, he was a different child.  If you have spent any time around a child that has been institutionalized...Josh had all those type behaviors.  But, he also had many many other abnormal behaviors that were very disturbing.  He performed rituals and would become very upset if he was not allowed to complete these.  He had visual hallucinations.  He thought he could fly and on several occasions we narrowly prevented him from seriously injuring himself by jumping off playground equipment and other things.  Later, he told us "In Russia, I could fly!"  When questioned furthur he said "the people were mean to me...and when they were mean, I just flew away!"  We were never certain if this was entirely due to dissosciation or if it had something to do with the medication they kept him on.  He also had PTSD.  He had extreme memory problems.  He would wake up some morning and have forgotten the last week, or the last month, or the last several months.  He kept having to relearn the same things over and over.  He stayed confused.  He had Tourette's type tics and did lots of strange 'sensory seeking' things with his hands and his face and body all the time...but especially when he became overstimulated.  Everything overstimulated him.

One thing became certain, he had been terribly abused/neglected in one or all of the 3 facilities where he lived until we found him.  The last orphanage seemed like a pretty happy place to me.  The workers there were concerned with the children.  The building/equipment was in a dreadful state, but the children all seemed pretty open and animated.  The food they cooked at mealtimes smelled/looked fine.  There were photos everywhere, including many that showed the children having parties for the different holidays.  Josh remembers getting an orange at Christmas and a balloon for his birthday there.  Things were not as bad there as in other orphanages I saw.

   

By the time Josh had been home for a year, he had been to the International Adoption Clinic atleast 4 times.  He had repeatedly seen a pediatric opthalmologist (and gotten glasses and had his eyes patched to overcome esotropia), a pediatric gastroenterologist (to finally end the salmonella diarrhea), a physical/occupational therapist (plus had early intervention services until he aged out.)  He had been to multiple appointments with a pediatric cardiologist, 2 pediatric neurologists and a pediatric psychiatrist that specialized in traumatized children.   He had had an EKG, a regular EEG, a 7 hour EEG, an MRI scan of his brain and many other tests...standard hearing tests and a BAER, tests for lactose intolerance, H.pylori infection, PANDAS, lead poisoning, parasites, etc.  Also tests for allergies and celiac disease and other infectious diseases and anything else anyone could think of that might be causing some of his abnormal behaviors.  And this did not include the visits to his local pediatrician for everyday things like infections, vaccinations, check-ups.  It seemed that all I did was cart him to one doctor's appointment after another.  Except for his local pediatrician (only a half hour drive from here) all of these specialists required a drive of 2-4 hours one way...a whole day's work for one appointment.  Was it hard to carry on with our family life...our homeschooling...our sports and lessons for 4 other children in light of all this?...you bet!   And to make it worse, his behavior was continually disintegrating during this time.  He got steadily worse and worse until the psychiatrist we found started him on medication.  Clonidine to be exact.  After the clonidine, he began to turn around.  But that was after he had been home over a year.  Before clonidine, we were more likely to get the 'freak out' response.  What did that involve exactly?  Well, for example, I remember one evening while he was playing in the livingroom I said, "Time for your bubble bath, Josh!"  He leapt up, threw his toy at my face, let out an unearthly scream (my other children called this his Nazgul scream, after the creatures in the Lord of the Rings) and ran like a mad man through the house to the bathroom.  By the time he had reached the bathroom he was running out of oxygen, but in the midst of these fits, he was unable to breathe, so he stood there gasping/making a strange clicking sound in his throat, then turned completely blue and passed out on the floor (knocking a huge goose egg on his forehead) with tonic/clonic jerking that looked just like a grand mal seizure.  This sort of thing happened ALL THE TIME.  
Specialists assured me he was not having a "true seizure" and did not require medication.  That it would just eventually go away by itself. 
Right. 
Clonidine put a stop to that, thank heavens!  And it helped to calm him down enough that he could begin to learn (up until that point learning was VERY slow...and often things we had spent months learning would be forgotten suddenly.)  And the clonidine kept him from becoming upset over nothing.  It saved all of us...it saved our adoption.  We had gotten our information back from the private investigator by this time and were very seriously considering moving Josh to another family.  Without the medication, he was just way more than we could handle.  In fact, I cannot imagine any family that could have handled him before the medication...he was like a wild animal.  With the medication, life began to be much more like normal.  By the time another year had passed, he was almost human.

On March 18th of this year, we celebrated his 6th adoption anniversary. 

If you met him, you would hardly notice that he has issues.

Like other kids his age, he rides a bike, swims like a fish, jumps on the trampoline, loves Legos and Playmobil, reads popular books, loves going to movies, etc.  By homeschooling him and using neurofeedback therapies and limiting his environment, keeping him very active, etc. we have been able to keep Josh on track. He is on target academically, according to recent testing, though his handwriting is not very nice. He has been doing Suzuki violin with his sisters for 3 years now...he will never make a violinist, but it is good therapy for him. He is almost finished with book 2.

We continuously struggle with keeping his medication balanced well enough for him to be able to function.  Fall and Winter EVERY YEAR are very very hard for him and for us.  And we cannot figure out why.  He has tried many different medications...but due the extreme levels of prenatal drug/alcohol exposure and/or the prematurity/low birthweight, neglect/abuse/early trauma, he does not respond in typical ways to many types of medication.  So, by trial and error, we have had to work to find what does help him and keep him on it.  We NEVER miss a dose.  (This would be a huge mistake!)  Right now he is on 4 different medications:  clonidine, Wellbutrin, mirtazepine and Zoloft.  We cut these up in tiny pieces and he gets them throughout the day at 5 different times...bit of a full-time job by itself.

 

We love our son...and we have made HUGE sacrifices as a whole family to get him the help he needs.  But, we could not have done this without financial resources, excellent medical insurance, the help and support of the large online Russian adoption community and by the grace of God.  I 'know' so many people through the internet that have not 'made it' and not from lack of trying.  So many of these children are damaged beyond repair.  Not only is love not enough....nothing is enough.  They cannot even survive in therapeutic homes or treatment centers.  Many families have exhausted their finances and are left to manage violent, out of control children with no other options for their care.  All because they felt a call to provide a home for an orphaned child. 
It is so sad.

 

So, I am blogging the truth, as I see it, today.

 

Do I blame the Mom in Tennessee for her actions?  No.  I believe she acted out of desperation.  I wish she had searched for a better alternative...I wish the orphanage workers would have told her about the kind of behaviors she was going to have to endure with this child...I wish she could have found a child psychiatrist with a specialty in traumatized children...I wish she would have chosen to disrupt her son to another family...I wish she might have had easy access to attachment counselors, or a respite care program, or a partner family that had been through this already or ...whatever she needed.

But I can't blame her.  She chose to return the boy to the place he came from.  Russian families do this all the time.  They take children from the orphanage and return them if/when they feel they can't handle their problems.  (Josh spent some time in a Russian adoptive placement...he remembers them, their home, the toys they gave him and the shouting match the father had with the orphanage director when they returned him.)  

And I can see the logic behind returning the boy to Russia.  If anyone is responsible for the condition he is in, it is certainly his homeland.  I refuse to believe the orphanage personnel didn't know exactly how damaged he was. 
And tragically there are 750,000 more children just like him, living their lives out in Russian orphanages.  The Russian people do not want these children...they rarely adopt.  They do not care to financially support these children...their orphanages are abysmal:  crumbling buildings, inadequate numbers of staff with high turnover, not enough food/clothes/stimulation for the children, etc. etc. etc.
  

So what is the answer? 

End foreign adoptions?  How will that help? 

Punish the other families adopting from the USA?  What problems will that solve?

 

I have an idea.

 

How about the truth?  ...start with the truth. 

Tell the truth about the children. 

Tell the truth for the children.

 

We are the truth.