MoldovAnn

I wrote last week about my adoption conversation with my Ukrainian tutor. I cut the post short, partly because I was short on time and partly because I was so irritated by the conversation I couldn’t write very calmly about it.

I had another conversation today about adoption, this time with a 37-year old American woman who adopted a Ukrainian child 4 years ago. More on that below.

As for the conversation with my tutor, I’ll try to summarize her somewhat confusing position on adoption. As I mentioned in the previous post, we read a short article that stated 25 of 37 children adopted in one Ukrainian town recently had been adopted by foreigners. Valentina found this upsetting, saying it was a shame so many Ukrainian children are taken out of the country, and more are not adopted by Ukrainians. She followed up this statement, though, with a long explanation of why she herself could not (would not?) adopt a child from an orphanage.

First, she told me about the very special bond that she has with her two children, and how although she really adores her friends’ children, and she even had a young girl live with her for several weeks once, she just doesn’t feel the same kind of love for them as she does for her own children, and she can’t imagine loving “someone else’s children” the same way she loves her own. I tried to tactfully point out that there is a difference between living with a child full-time for most or all of his/her life, and just spending time now and then with a kid. So Valentina addressed the issue from a different angle, stating that you just don’t know what kind of kid you’ll get if you adopt - s/he could have alcoholic or drug-addicted parents, and for sure you already know “there is something wrong with the parents if they were willing to abandon their child to an orphanage.” All of these problems, and others, according to Valentina, can be in the child’s genes and so you are likely to end up with a potentially alcoholic, drug-addicted and/or socially undesirable child because they will inherit these characteristics from their birth parents.

I had a number of counter-arguments at this point, and didn’t quite know which sad and absurd misconception to tackle first. Earlier in the conversation, when I said I would have no problem adopting a child, Valentina accused me of being idealistic (well, she meant it as an accusation; I personally think it’s great to be idealist!). As I went through a few of my counterpoints, such as “perhaps some of the mothers didn’t just abandon their children, but really struggled with the decision and thought they were doing what was best for their kids”, Valentina again said I was being idealistic. She again stated her absolute confidence that the children are abandoned by terrible parents and are very likely to grow up to be terrible people themselves.

Now, my guess is that pretty much every Ukrainian family has at least one alcoholic in it. (In fact, I read a newspaper headline today that said Ukrainians spend 2 billion U.S. dollars a year on vodka. That’s 2% of the country’s GDP - and it doesn’t include how much is spent on other alcoholic beverages like beer or wine.) Valentina’s argument collapsed on itself a few minutes later when she mentioned, in another context, that her husband’s father had been an alcoholic. “How do you know that won’t be passed to your sons?” I didn’t want to upset or insult her, but I couldn’t help but point out the inconsistencies in her arguments.

So today I met an American woman who adopted a Ukrainian girl 4 years ago. I asked her how she and her husband had come to adopt a child from Ukraine, and she related a very touching story. She had been on an study abroad program in the mid-1990’s in Minsk, Belarus, for about six weeks. During her stay, she had the opportunity to visit an orphanage, and she was heartbroken by the miserable conditions and the hopeless futures of the children there. She saw children with mild health problems, with severe mental and physical disabilities, and almost all of them without warmth and love in their lives. She decided at that moment that she would one day adopt a child from Belarus. Pan ahead almost ten years, and she is now married with 2 young birth children. Yet she hadn’t forgotten her desire to adopt a child from the former Soviet Union. For a variety of financial and logistical reasons, she and her husband decided to adopt in Ukraine. They know that their daughter’s birth mother was an alcoholic, but she does not exhibit any of the characteristics of a child with fetal alcohol syndrome. Three years old when they adopted her, she had not learned to speak coherently. However, once home with them in the U.S., she learned to speak English “seemingly overnight”, her adopted mother told me. She is a normal, healthy, active 7 year old.

I wonder if Valentina will be able to understand the motives and mentality of this American family that opened their hearts and their home to a little girl from a Ukrainian orphanage. Until Ukrainians are able to be so accepting, thank god someone else in the world wants to help these children.