Rescuing Julia Twice (35 page)

“You didn't answer me, Mommy,” she says.

I glance into the rearview mirror and notice an intensity on her face I seldom see.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Let me park the car. After your swim lesson, I will answer your question. Then we can go for cupcakes. How does that sound?”

“Good,” she says.

This day had to come. All along, Ricky and I had decided we wouldn't tell Julia she was adopted until we thought she could process what that meant and when we felt she was in a good place to absorb that shock. As the years rolled by, we became more and more afraid of telling her because our bond with her had been so tenuous. After she started attaching, the last thing we wanted to do was to give her another reason to feel
as though she didn't belong to us. Sometimes I'd wonder if she didn't instinctively know, but every time I played the soundtrack of the adoption talk either in my own head or with Ricky, neither one of us felt the time was right. In the meantime, we'd asked family members and old friends to keep it under wraps, and we hid it from new friends.

Years ago, when Ricky and I were first talking about adopting, a friend of mine told me about a friend of hers who had adopted two Russian girls. We drove to Philadelphia to visit them. They lived in a small house and welcomed us. The table was set. The house was quiet. The mother was preparing dinner, and the father chatted with Ricky and me on the couch in their tiny living room. He told us how he and his wife adopted a pair of young girls at the same time eight years ago. He had nothing but positive things to say about the process. While his wife was laying the salad bowl on the table, she called for the girls to come down.

All the adults were seated at the table. The two girls walked down the steps in unison and came into the dining room. They said hello and each said her name. Then in stereo they said, “We were born in Russia.” One named the town where she was born, and then the other did. I was surprised they weren't wearing peasant costumes. We'd stumbled into some bizarre version of
The Sound of Music.
They were like marionettes, trained to perform the circumstances of their lives. It made the hair on my arms rise, and I wanted to get out of there as fast as we could.

After I drop Julia with the swim counselor, I run outside and flip open my phone. I'm hyperventilating.

“You are not going to believe what just happened,” I say, repeating the question Julia put to me.

“What did you say?” he asks.

“I told her I'd answer the question after her swim lesson. What should I do?”

“What do you think?” he asks.

“I guess this is the time to answer her. Yes, no? Oh my God. We knew this day would come. What should I do? Should I wait for you?”

“No, no, you can handle it. Go on. I trust you. Call me later and tell me how it went,” he says.

“Should I figure out a script and call you back? I have an hour; she's swimming,” I ask.

“Don't be crazy. Just let whatever flows, flow naturally.”

I pace the village streets for forty-five minutes, rehearsing lines in my mind. I could lie by omission. Worm my way around the question. I could say something like, “You didn't come out of my tummy. The stork brought you,” and let it lie. No, that's all wrong. She's asking a question. She asked it twice.
Be brave. You can do this.
I'm afraid I'm going to lose ground. Now that I trust she loves me, I'm terrified to have anything rupture that fragile bond. I pace and pace, nearly oblivious to the woman I just nearly crashed into. “Sorry,” I say. I am in a major life moment here, and I'm having a mini meltdown. I glance up at the large clock on the church. Fifteen minutes. I'm sweating. How do you explain to a child that one woman gave birth to her and another became her mother? Would it help if I showed her a few things we got in Russia? Her passport?
No, that's ridiculous.
What about the tiny baptismal cross that the orphanage caretaker pressed into my hand before we took her that night? It's upstairs, nestled on a soft tuft of cotton, in a plain white box in my bedside table.

Should I tell her while we're eating cupcakes, or should I tell her and then go for cupcakes?

Julia is padding toward me, dripping. She picks up her pace to a trot and I yell out, “Don't run! You'll fall.” I take her into the dressing room and peel off the wet suit she's wearing. I towel her off. Her skin is cool from the water. I help her get a dress over her head.

“Did you have a nice swim lesson?” I ask.

“Are we going for cupcakes, Mommy?”

“Of course,” I say, waiting for her to reprise The Question, but she doesn't.

“Let's walk over to the bakery.”

We each choose a cupcake. I suggest we sit outside. Julia can barely hold off long enough to get outside. She's already engorged her face in it, and she's slathered with chocolate. I hand her napkins. Best to wait for the feasting to be over so I can get her full attention.

After we finish our cupcakes, we linger. It's a beautiful autumn day. Fallen leaves rustle in a corner where they've gathered. The sun is still hot.

“Julia, you asked me a question in the car before,” I say.

“I did?” she says.

“You asked me what you looked like when you came out of my tummy.”

She looks at me with no recollection of ever having uttered those words.

“Anyway, I want to answer that question, okay? You didn't exactly come out of
my
tummy. You see, I couldn't have a baby. And all I ever wanted was a baby girl. And there was this young girl all the way across the world in a place called Siberia who had a baby, but she couldn't take care of that baby.”

I stop to take a breath. My voice is quivering.

“And that baby was you.”

Julia creases her brow. She doesn't know what I mean.

“Remember, you had that book about Jesse and his adopted family,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, trying to connect dots.

“Well you have a similar story,” I say. “I didn't actually push you from my tummy, but I was there to catch you when you fell into the world, and so was Daddy, and we are your parents now and forever.”

Julia goes very quiet. I manage to prevent myself from going on and on. I've given her enough information to start with, and I wait patiently to see how she reacted.

“Is it like Patch? And all the cats? The way you've adopted them because they didn't have a home?” she finally asks, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“Yes, and no,” I say. “No, I mean yes. Yes, we adopted you the way we've adopted our kittens. Wherever they had been living, or whatever their situation was, wasn't good. So we took them in and gave them a warm, loving home.”

“I understand,” she says, and I hug her.

I look at her face and hope she does. She's not visibly upset or shaken. I can't imagine what it's like to try to process the idea that the woman you've been calling Mommy all these years might not technically be your real mommy.

“Let's go for a stroll,” I say, and she reaches for my hand.

As we start walking, I realize she doesn't have to understand the whole concept here and now. We have a whole lifetime together to make sense of this.

We are standing in an enormous circus tent on a one-hundred-degree July day. There aren't any free seats left in the bleachers. It is literally a three-ring circus here at French Woods sleepaway camp, with young campers performing acrobatics on mats and in the air. I've got the video camera ready to roll. I spot her, my brave daughter, dressed in a blue leotard and white tights, standing on a high platform and clutching a long wooden bar with two hands. She swings into the air like a tree monkey, and I swoon. Then she hoists her legs over the bar and dangles aloft, her head and arms hanging down. She floats through the air to another acrobat who catches her with waiting hands. Julia latches on and swings to a platform on the other side, where she lands victoriously. I am crying and hooting with joy. What an incredible leap of faith it is to trust that waiting hands will grab you and ferry you to safety. Even in this moment of utter exultation, I'm aware of what this means for my ten-year-old daughter. Flashback to the first time I put Julia in a baby swing in the park. She was frightened by the motion, by the feeling of being so out of control. For so long she was so afraid to trust anyone, really. But here, on this glorious day, I see how far my child has really come. To achieve this masterful act, she had to believe in her gut that others can be relied upon.

Moments like this, big ones, show me how far we've come. I am so proud of Julia and of my husband and myself. We've worked hard to put terra firma under Julia's feet, and doing so has allowed her to fly, literally. Very often I think about Torry Ann Hansen, a thirty-three-year-old Tennessee nurse who gave up on the Russian boy she adopted. In April 2010, Torry shocked the world after she put her seven-year-old boy, Atoyan, on a plane alone, returning him to Moscow with a note saying she didn't want to parent him any longer, that he was psychotic. The boy had been with Torry, who was a single mother, for only six months. When I heard the news, I was shocked, like everyone else. Although most of the world viewed her as a monster, I had an inkling of what it felt like to be a parent to a child who resists love. At this point, Julia and I were solidly attached, but the story sent chills up my spine because who's to say whether you can make love work or whether you can't? Torry may not have sought help, and returning a child as though he were a broken appliance is, by all accounts, wrong. Still, could I have ended up with a broken heart? No matter how hard my husband and I worked with Julia, we might not have had any success. When you've been on both sides of this equation, you know how fragile the line is. I can only pray that Julia understands I will always have my hands out, ready to clutch her, no matter how far the leap.

What Being Julia's Mother Has Taught Me, and Other Advice for Raising a Child with Reactive Attachment Disorder

I believe every adopted child, particularly children from Russia, Eastern Europe, and other international countries, is a “special needs” child. All have known profound loss at an early age. Most were denied prenatal care. Many carry forth a legacy of parental drug and alcohol use. Early life in an orphanage deeply influences their emotional and physical wiring. When we “rescue” them, we do so with so much love in our hearts. But love alone is not enough to undo their early disadvantages. Raising children with Reactive Attachment Disorder requires education, perseverance, patience, and an empathetic and informed community of people to embrace us.

Unless you live with and experience Reactive Attachment Disorder firsthand, it's impossible to understand what it's like. It's simply unfathomable that an infant could reject love and nurture. Adoptive parents raising RAD children will likely experience confusion, guilt, and possibly post-adoption depression before they begin to understand that it is the baby or toddler who is unreachable and that the child's inability to attach is not the parents' fault.

Anyone parenting a child with RAD—even those who were more prepared than I was—feels alone and judged. Ask one. Chances are
they'll tell you, “Teachers, pediatricians, therapists, family, and friends did not understand what was going on. They couldn't relate. I felt totally alone.” Since the early 1990s, sixty thousand Russian children have been adopted to American families. We all need to care about this.

I end my book when Julia is five years old—firmly attached by that time but always subject to the demons of Reactive Attachment Disorder. In my epilogue, I describe a scene that shows how far she's come, how she's able to trust. But from age five to forever, we will raise Julia with an understanding that Reactive Attachment Disorder needs to be addressed daily, often, and with focused attention. Looking back, I wish we'd intervened sooner. I feel blessed, however, because time has shown how effective intervention can be. My husband and I chose to work with Julia on our own. We threw everything into healing her. I am not necessarily advising other adoptive parents to follow our route. In many cases, professional help is necessary, especially if a child is violent or completely withdrawn. Julia's behaviors were never extreme enough to make us fear for our lives or hers. In contrast, the subtlety of her ways made it harder to figure out something was wrong.

Whether or not parents seek help, one piece of advice I have is to educate yourself on Reactive Attachment Disorder before you engage professionals. Put yourself in your child's shoes. Read everything out there. Ultimately, you are going to be your child's best expert and advocate.

My husband and I have and always will collaborate tirelessly to work with Julia. I can't stress enough the importance of having a good working relationship with your partner or support system. RAD children are experts at “divide and conquer.” RAD children are proficient at creating chaos. Many marriages are crushed under the pressure of raising RAD children. I know a lot of RAD children who are being raised by divorced parents.