Forever and Ever

The heartbreaking story of Artyom Savelyev and the subsequent fallout in the media and adoption communities has left me angry. Angry, frustrated, and …weary and sad, honestly. These sort of scandals have happened often enough since adoption became central to our family, that I can pretty much predict how the news arc is going to go. First - the shock and horror and condemnation of the adults involved: “Oh, what a terrible parent to do that to her child! How could she! She’s a monster! What is wrong with her?” and then – and I think this time around it probably took less than an hour or two for the tide to turn - the reports of Artyom’s “dangerous” behavior to surface. We start hearing terms like “Reactive Attachment Disorder, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Dissociative Disorder” getting thrown around. Then we hear that the child drew a picture of a house burning down. Then we hear that he threatened to burn the house down. And then, suddenly, even though nobody directly involved in this case is talking to the press, there are breathless reports of this child actually starting several small fires in his bedroom. In the blink of an eye, it’s not the adoptive mother who is the monster any longer – it’s the child; one so dangerous, so damaged, so broken as to become practically subhuman. And suddenly people are saying that obviously, the only possible course of action was to put this dangerous, damaged seven year old child on a plane alone, and fly him back to Russia, to be delivered to a government building where nobody had any idea that he would be arriving. And now he is back in the same institution where his adoptive mother has claimed he was regularly beaten with a broomstick. Because… because he deserved it, apparently. Brought it upon himself by being less than what was expected of him.

Judging from interviews with the driver who picked him up in Russia, Artyom had no idea what was happening to him. He seemed rather calm at first, drew some pictures, showed his crayons and toys to the driver. Even offered to share his snacks and a set of toy wings he had been given by the pilot. And then he asked for his grandmother – the same grandmother who had walked him onto the plane in D.C. and then walked away. (I wonder, I wonder what she said to him as they parted. Did she lie and say she’d see him soon? Did she tell him the truth – that she would never see him again? Did she kiss him? Did she care?). And the driver didn’t know what to say. And then Artyom asked for his grandmother again. And begin to cry.

I imagine Artyom sitting all those long hours on the plane. I imagine that the last time he was on a plane for these kind of long hours was six months earlier, when he was flying from Russia to Tennessee, with his new mother, when things were about to change for him forever. And now, here he was, alone, surely wondering what in the world was happening to him all over again.

I think about what it was like for FF when she flew for the first time since she had come home, a year after that long trip from China. We were visiting Oregon, and we thought a redeye flight would be easiest – surely she would sleep the whole way there. Instead, as the cabin grew dark and people drifted off to sleep around us, she repeated over and over and over again, “I want to go home. Where’s my home?” getting progressively louder and louder, sobbing and then panicking, as we walked her up and down the aisle, trying to calm her, trying to reassure our exhausted, frightened little girl. Until finally, it occurred to Ryan to state the obvious, to say, “FF, don’t worry, no matter where we go, Mama will be with you. Baba will be with you. Spikey will be with you. We aren’t going away from you. You will stay with us no matter where we are.” And at this? She immediately stopped crying, put her head down on her daddy’s shoulder, and fell into a long and peaceful sleep.

Sometimes, maybe, we forget. Our children, they seem so strong, so calm, so happy, going about their day to day lives. We bathe them and feed them, pull some pajamas over their heads, read them stories, hold them as they drift off to sleep, watch over them and love them with all our hearts. But sometimes, we forget to see things through their eyes. To remember what our kids have gone through. What incredible changes, what incredible losses, what strength they have shown, what trials they have endured. And we forget that they have weathered things that we wouldn’t imagine asking of any adult: lose your family, leave your home, lose everyone you know, your language, your culture, everything familiar, and start out new with a bunch of strangers who are insisting they are your family now – all with virtually no forewarning or cogent explanation. We forget how much we have asked of our children, how we assume they will fall into our lives like birds who smack up against a window – pick them up, breathe on them, and they will shake it off, and go right back to flying. We forget all this, because, often, on the surface at least, they have done just that. These kids who have gone through unimaginably brutal and shocking loss and change, have adjusted and adapted and trustingly put their hands into ours, starting over in a way that I don’t think many adults could possibly fathom living through. These kids – these kids are brave in ways that most of their parents might not ever fully understand.

We forget all this until suddenly, Artyom’s story appears in the news. And then something is wrenched open, and our children, our strong, brave, beautiful children, are being looked at as potentially troubled, damaged, even pathological and dangerous. The stories start circulating again: “Well, I had a neighbor who had a friend who adopted a child who woke them up in the middle of the night with a knife in his hand…” “I know a family who had a cousin whose adopted children accused them of unspeakable, untrue things…” “I knew a couple who were told a child was this, and it turned out he was that!”… It goes on and on – the whispering, the suspicion, the assumptions. And somewhere along the line someone says, “If I had a child like that – that’s exactly what I would do. End it. Send him back. I can’t blame that mother.”

And it is not fair that my child should ever have to hear such things; to hear the story of an adopted child being “returned.” To hear someone say that there could ever be a good enough reason for this kind of reversal. It is unacceptable to me for her to ever wonder if she was bad enough, or failed enough, or just not all we expected, she could be sent back to where we first met her. It is horrifying to me think that she could ever imagine a reason that I would stop being her mother.

So, I can blame that mother in Tennessee. And I do blame that mother. And, actually, I can scarcely bring myself to call her a mother. Because, here’s the thing, the minute these kids are handed over into our care – that’s it. That’s all. They are our children. And maybe it will be harder than we thought. And maybe there will be struggle. And almost certainly, it will not look exactly like what we originally imagined – because parenthood- any kind of parenthood – never really does. But that doesn’t matter. Because, from that moment on, it is no longer about us - the adoptive parents - it is about them – the children we have pledged to love and care for. The children we now call ours. And if we parents, who have these amazing examples of courage and fortitude standing right in front of us, these kids who have gone through unimaginable hardship and survived, can’t stand by this most basic, necessary promise? Then, in our weakness, we have become exactly the broken, dangerous creatures that people accuse our children of being.

FF plays and laughs, gives us kisses and hugs, loudly quarrels with her brother, cuddles close to me when I pick her up, pretends to be a dog, a horse, my mama, Shaggy from Scooby Doo, demands noodles and lollipops, shares a joke with her brother, won’t stop bothering the dog, giggles with her friends, climbs her baba, carries the cat around the house, changes her clothes a dozen times each day, ignores my call, breathes her funny confidences into my ear, runs naked through the grass, picks the dandelions, shows me the moon, dances to a song only she can hear. And she is my daughter. And there is nothing – nothing – that can change that.