Our Daughter's Russian Family, Page 5

The Golden Rule

I had left a camera, first trip, and requested through our coordinator that the caretakers take pictures of themselves and the baby's routine. On the second trip, the director handed it back to us. I don't think it had ever left her office, and not a picture was taken. I was able to give the young woman who brought Ilka up to us, the day we picked her up after court, a little "thank you" note in Russian. I included a line about being willing to host any caretaker who might visit to the US, and leaving an email address. The young woman read it and seemed happy and startled to the point of tears.

Later, back home, we registered Ilka with the Russian consulate. We dutifully made monthly post-placement reports to our agency and wondered what really became of them. (The Ministry of Education we were in seemed to have tattered and overloaded cardboard file boxes everywhere, including stacked in the bathroom. I wondered at the time if that was where all those apostilled dossier documents came to rest.)

I also, after a few months passed, and thinking through my decision carefully, wrote a letter to Ilka's birth mother. Why? The Golden Rule would be an easy reason. If I were Ilka's mother, I would want to know she was loved and cared for. I would also want to be thanked, and maybe, forgiven and reassured that what I did was not a terrible thing, regardless of what others in her society may have told her.

I felt compassion on a visceral level. Reading books ("The Adoption Reader" by S. Wadia-Ellis and "Waiting to Forget" by Margaret Moorman are both excellent) reinforced this. And, being a big fan of controlled studies and unbiased reports, I looked at Medline abstracts and university based research. Over and over, I read things confirming relinquishment of a child can "often lead to chronic, unrelieved grief" (Medline abstract of study "Postadoptive reactions of the relinquishing mother"). I also read many conclusions along the line of: "When compared to parents in confidential adoptions, those in open adoptions demonstrated higher levels of acknowledgment of the adoption, empathy toward the birthparents and their child, a stronger sense of permanence in the relationship with their child as projected into the future, and less fear the birthmother might try to reclaim her child" (Medline abstract of study "Adoptive family system dynamics").

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