Everyone who has adopted a child has a story, so I didn’t think mine would be of interest to anyone else. However, Dan Needham has asked me a few times now to write my story, so I will tell my story as a token of my gratitude to Dan and Natasha and everyone at Happy Families, and maybe it will be an encouragement to you or someone you know.
My husband and I started out with the idea of adopting a toddler or young child from Russia as we already had a daughter who was 8 years old. After a long halt with all Russian adoption programs, a friend suggested that we visit Happy Families to see what programs they were currently participating in. While we were there, Alexis told us about the Russian Children’s Folk Festival and she suggested we attend one of the events to meet some of the Russian children. She told us she wasn’t sure if Joyce still needed hosting families or not, but she gave us her phone number.
I was somewhat afraid of being disappointed but I eventually made the call to Joyce who told me that she needed to place 6 boys between the ages of 13 and 16. After getting over the initial shock at their age, I asked her if I could take two because I thought that would be better for the boys. The hosting experience was so amazing, but also intense, exhausting, and very emotional, for me any way. By the end of their stay the boys asked us if we could adopt them. We never really thought about adopting teenagers but after having them in our home for two weeks and realizing that all of our experience mentoring troubled teens had equipped us in a small but sizeable enough way, we decided that we wanted to do this – that we would try to adopt these boys and love them and be the parents they so needed.
Once we sent the boys back, my main objective was to maintain communication with them and to continue to build our relationship despite the miles between us. I missed them so much and I wanted them to know that I thought of them every day. I wrote many letters to my boys, about once a week, and had a friend translate them for me. I would tell them what we did that week, what was going on at work, at school, at home… and basically paint them a picture with words of what our life was like. I believe this helped tremendously with bonding and with our one son’s acclimation to life in our home later on. Our second objective was to visit the boys as a sign of our commitment to them during the long wait period. It was a sacrifice on our part as a family to afford the two extra trips, but again, we feel the investment paid off.
We traveled as a family the September after we hosted them and then I went over by myself in January to celebrate Christmas and try to explain why they were not home yet. On this trip I stayed at the orphanage and attended classes with the boys each day; this gave such great insight into the boys lives and I also gained the experience of being immersed in a classroom/home where everyone was speaking a foreign language. When talking about this trip I always have to mention Ludmilla because she became my special friend on this trip. I needed to get my visa registered and I had three problems: I was staying at an orphanage, the director was ill with the flu, and it was past the deadline. So I was basically in a panic trying to find anyone who would help me do this. The children even took me to the police station and the post office to see if there was another way I could this. This was not an official trip so I didn’t want to bother Happy Families, but I was desperate. It was early evening when I reached Ludmilla, who had just returned from traveling to another region and was exhausted I’m sure. She was, however, so kind to listen to my dilemma and then offer to help me. It would just require three metro transfers, at night, by myself, to meet her; but many wonderful unexpected things happened that night.
Our referral trip came in March and we were told that we would be given the two referrals on this trip, even though they were not siblings, because we hosted them together. I planned to take my daughter along on this trip with me because it was to be a rather simple trip and I thought she could use the bonding time with her brothers. It ended up being the most difficult of the six trips we have made to date. The day our plane landed a news story broke about a Russian adoptee who had died of a head injury in the U.S. We did not know this until after our meeting with the Ministry of Education who only gave us one referral. Kostia, our facilitator, told me not to argue or I could lose the one I was given. This is where I say, “You need to trust your agency” because if I did not trust Kostia and Happy Families at that moment, things could have gotten much worse.
When I saw the faces of Kostia and Ludmilla at the apartment later, I new something had gone terribly wrong. They were very upset to tell my daughter and I that the MOE was so angered by the news report that they didn’t even want to give me one referral, but they were under obligation to do so because they had issued me an invitation for that purpose. I now find this so amusing because I can’t think of anyone who would have enforced that; it wasn’t like I had U.S. troops or officials waiting outside their office ready to back me up. So the next order of business was to break the news to my older ‘son’ (the week of his birthday) that the government had chosen the younger one to go first and that he would have to continue waiting. I should also add here that due to the incredible stress of the situation my daughter’s body started to react with episodes of fainting. I didn’t even share most of this with my husband because I new it would cause him a lot of stress and there was nothing he could do from so far away. But, inspired by my sons, I learned to survive many things.
A government official insisted that I make a second referral trip in September, because she was not available to meet and observe me when I was there in March. At our particular orphanage, the children leave the orphanage from the end of May through the end of August, so adoption work is put on hold until September. It was ridiculous at this point how many qualified Russian employees had observed me interacting with my boys and the other children for numerous hours on several trips with two complete photo albums as proof, but Happy Families’ earnest fighting was to no avail and I had to go. So I called another waiting mom to see if she wanted to join me to go see her ‘son’ and provide me with the opportunity to try out being a Moscow tour guide. This trip turned out to be such an unexpected blessing in that now she and I our very good friends and we are supporting each other through the difficult challenges of the first few months of having our sons home.
Trip number five was the week of Christmas for our court date and trip number six was three weeks later in January. It was probably my favorite trip, even though I was so tired of making the journey by this point, because I received a very special invitation to visit Kostia’s parents’ dacha in the country. My beloved adoptive grandparents grew up in the countryside of western Russia and it has been a dream of mine since childhood to see what their home might have been like. His parents also extended the invitation to my two teenage ‘sons’ which I thought was really amazing and spoke volumes of how much they think of their son, Kostia. It was so wonderful for me and my boys, who had never been invited to someone’s dacha before. I am so grateful we were given this special opportunity. The boys love their culture and I have so enjoyed exploring it and experiencing it with them. I even got to show them a few things they hadn’t seen before!
So, two years after hosting these two boys, my 14 year old son has been home and thriving for six months now and my 15 year old son is waiting for September again to make his final decision as to whether or not to be adopted. If his decision is yes, I will most likely be required to make another three trips to complete his adoption. I am still writing letters to him and he will receive a big stack in September because the orphanage would not give me his camp address. Adopting older children is not for the faint-hearted; it requires great patience, perseverance and the willingness to put your own desires aside and take on the incredible work of meeting this child’s needs. I would be happy to speak with anyone who is considering adopting an older child to answer any questions you may have. I also have read many books on adopting older children and by far the best one I have found is “The Connected Child” by Karyn Purvis, David Cross, and Wendy Sunshine. It’s been a tremendous help to my husband and I and I’ve been passing on a lot of information from the book to my adoptive-mom friends who say: “It’s working!”
I will finish this story by saying, the Russian government has let us down many times, but Happy Families has stuck with us through everything: navigating a new region, dealing with opposition to adopting older children, dealing with an anti-adoption orphanage that was very uncooperative when it came to communication and preparing paperwork, and being patient but fighting hard on our behalf when the government made ridiculous demands of us. No matter what I did (hosting 2 boys, making 2 voluntary trips, making 4 required trips, sending over 40 letters of reference from our community to convince them of our reputation, and submitting stacks of letters written to the boys) it did not matter to the Russian government. But the more I did for my sons, the more Happy Families insisted that they would not desert us and that they would do whatever it took to get these boys home. We decided to trust Happy Families and they have not let us down. I hope you have enjoyed my story; it’s been an amazing journey.
