Baby wouldn’t let adoptive mother touch her. Finding out why it left her in awe. Raising an adopted child is a Noble cause, but at the same time difficult and requires special, subtlety. Sharing with that child child all the consequences of his lonely childhood is not easy. It takes a lot of time and effort on the part of the adoptive parents.
Tina and Ricky, a childless couple from America, adopted a girl from Siberia 14 years ago, whom they named Julia. When they returned with the baby from distant Russia, they could not imagine how long their path to happiness would be. The couple noticed that the girl was cold and indifferent. She never expressed a desire to hug and kiss. Her new mother did not look into the eyes of her adoptive parents.
Sluggishly reacted to the manifestations of their love. At first, Tina and Ricky thought that they were not able to become parents, but later it turned out that the problem was much deeper than they suspected. Every year, Julia closed herself in. More and more foster parents wanted her daughter to communicate with someone else Besides them and hired a nanny. But the girl also behaved alienated with her.
The problem worsened when it came time to take the baby to kindergarten. There, she categorically refused to establish contact with both other children and teachers. She communicated with them, but the cold blew from her. Tina began to be depressed. Every night she cried into a pillow, asking herself what she was doing wrong, why her little daughter was so indifferent to her and her father.
The woman constantly blamed herself for probably not giving Julie enough time and attention. Or maybe she unwittingly offended her or psychologically injured her. The specialist who has finally shown the girl explained that Tina and Ricky were not guilty of anything. This past of Julia left a deep imprint in her psyche, and now she is subconsciously afraid to get close to anyone because she fears being betrayed and rejected. Again, the girl suffered from reactive attachment disorder.
This is a typical problem of children who did not have emotional contact with significant adults in their infancy. The consequence of this disorder haunts a person for the rest of their life. Constant fear and anxiety, difficulties in communication and aggression of children. These symptoms have to face adoptive parents around the world. We’d be at the park with a bunch of tots and their moms on weekly play dates, and I tell myself my little girl was doing fine.
More than fine. Julia was walking, even running, before the other toddlers. Her vocabulary was robust, impressive, bright eyed and cheerful. And other moms constantly remarked on her exuberant spirit, self determination, and confidence. Solid and athletic, too.
Such fantastic signs for a child adopted less than two years earlier from the Siberian orphanage. I clung to the outward signs, these so called milestones and approving glances to quell a nagging feeling that churned my guts. Constantly look at her, I’d whisper to myself, she’s thriving. That’s what the world was telling me. That’s what the pediatrician said.
I second guessed my instincts for a long time because at 40 years old and a first time adoptive mother who found diapering a challenge, what could I possibly know about motherhood? What I couldn’t understand was why my precious blonde daughter didn’t cling to me or look me in the eye or tolerate being held, or why she wouldn’t reach for my hand or let me read to her or play with her. Every attempt at Mommy and me anything was a complete bust. She wouldn’t engage with me. I was uneasy with her manic behavior.
She hated being in a stroller or anything confining, especially in embrace. She was superficially charming, particularly with strangers to whom she would dole out quick hugs. But with me, she was emotionally absent. I told myself she might just be an independent child, but deep down I knew I was fooling myself. She would actually recoil when I tried to hold or soothe her.
This tiny force of nature needed to control everything all the time. Nothing float naturally. One night, a woman in an Orange issued prison guard was on television telling a reporter her story. Natalie Hire was spending a year in prison for voluntary manslaughter of her two year old Russian adopted son. Filled with regret and solace, she said she’d accidentally thrown the child into the air and he hit his head.
I wondered if it was really as simple as that. She revealed she was living with a child who refused to become hers. She described a child who was unaffectionate and exceedingly difficult, impossible to manage, that her husband, who traveled a lot, wasn’t there to comfort her and her son. Hire was alone in the world. She didn’t even know how to ask for help.
Sometimes adoptive parents don’t realize they need help. I believe Hire’s story was sent to me when I was ready to hear it. Julia looked good on the outside, but she was lost on the inside. She’d been with us for nearly three years, and she was not bonded. Our forever family was adrift.
I could have been any caretaker to her, as interchangeable as the woman who minded her in the orphanage. She called me Mommy, but she still didn’t mean it. She couldn’t, but it wouldn’t be her fault. Hire’s story was a wake up call. It led me and my husband, Ricky, to the Internet, to medical papers, to books and to professionals.
It didn’t take long for us to learn about Russian attachment disorder. In truth, we’d heard the syndrome mentioned by another parent of Russian adopted children when we were in Siberia. Only now we were ready to admit Julia was its poster child. Rad, as it’s called, is a syndrome seen in many international adopted children, particularly from Russia and Eastern Europe. It’s also common in foster care children.
Julia was only eight months old when we brought her home. Babies have trouble attaching to their adoptive parents because they began traumatized or neglected, and they view the adopted parent as another caretaker who may or may not abandon them because their needs were met so randomly when they were young. They believe the only ones they can trust are themselves. The notion of intimacy is particularly threatening. If I let someone else get close to me, they’ll hurt me.
It’s easier to stay in control at a safe distance. Young children do this by being disruptive and cheating chaos, they push you away. As an adoptive parent, it’s easy to be misled and think you’re experiencing the terrible twos because it’s subtle. Rad is a complex condition not generally understood by many pediatricians and certainly not by the many early childhood educators who cannot comprehend the mixed messages. What you end up with is life down the rabbit hole where everything is confusing.
When you are with other mothers and children of the same age, you feel as though nothing you see among other mothers and children mimics your own experience, where you’re alone and isolated in your feelings and unable to rescue your child. Knowledge, hard work, and commitment changed our course.
By understanding Rad and how Julia had been rewired by abandonment, my husband and I made it our life’s work to heal her. We learned that raising a child who has trouble bonding requires counterintuitive parenting instincts, some that disturbed and surprised family and friends. People could not understand why we’d respond to Julia’s fussing with a passive poker face rather than react to her.
We would laugh during her tantrums until she abandoned them and moved on as though they’d never happened. Because Rad kids are addicted to chaos and it’s crucial to take away drama. Neither family nor friends understood why Julia wasn’t willing to give hugs and that we didn’t ask her to do so. My husband and I certainly were met with disapproval along the way. You could see the looks of surprise or even discussed on relatives faces when we were stern or intractable with her.
But we knew for the first time that we were on the right path. With the help of research and case studies, we had a toolbox. Some advice was invaluable, some failed, some techniques worked only for a little while. We were living inside a laboratory. I knew I was lucky to have a partner like Ricky because so many marriages and homes are ravaged by the challenge of adopting difficult children.
Within six months we saw progress, and that progress compounded with every passing month and then year. It was not necessarily loving and warm at first, but it was moving in the right direction. We were drawing her out. She started to become very angry instead of indifferent. As her verbal skills developed, we explained to her that we loved her and we would never leave her, that we understood how scary it was for her to be loved by an adult and that she was safe.
We taught her how to feel at ease when we looked her in the eye and trained her to do the same. Understanding how hurt she was Also Opened my heart and made me more compassionate and more motivated to be her mother. By the time Julia was in the first grade, she was finally ours. Progress took time and the work of staying bonded with a wounded child Is a lifetime endeavor. The important thing is that Julius shook off her helmet and armor.