Cards

Last winter I sat in the parking lot of the West Seattle Taco Time, preparing to inhale the Natural Soft Taco Chicken No Cheese (320 calories) and Medium Diet Coke that I buy after every Saturday morning workout at the gym. Despite my ravenous hunger, I sat in the car for twenty minutes before going inside. I wanted to finish listening to This American Life on NPR. Ira Glass was interviewing a woman who adopted a little boy because she and her husband couldn't have a biological child. This alone was not too interesting to me. What was compelling was the fact that the little boy this couple adopted suffered from an attachment disorder so profound that at one point he tried to kill his adoptive mother with a butcher knife.

"Attachment Disorder" very generally a psychological disorder developed in children who have not bonded to a caregiver in the first few years of life. It can be corrected, but sometimes it can't. A psychologist named John Bowlby did experiments with rhesus monkeys in the 1940's and 1950's and found that the baby monkeys who were either ignored or neglected often died early. The theory translated to humans is that infants and babies require the experience of bonding to a caregiver or they may never be able to form "normal" human attachments.

The woman in the interview endured many years of abuse from this adopted boy and at one point her husband nearly left her because he couldn't live with the violence and hatred they endured every day. But for some mysterious reason she soldiered on, visiting therapists, doctors, and experts until she found a program that seemed to work. Exactly what that program was I don't recall because what the parents endured and why they chose to endure it was far more significant to me than the cure. Mostly I thought "how can I make sure that doesn't happen to us?"

Clearly many - if not most - children available for adoption internationally are healthy and well cared-for. However, the longer a child remains in an institutional setting without the one-on-one love and attention to which he is entitled, the chances that such neglect will manifest itself in some negative way increase. The child that was the subject of the NPR interview was the victim of severe abuse and neglect. He was also the product of the American foster care system, where often the most tenacious foster parents can't save these innocent casualties, compelling a conclusion that a foster child who grows up to be a happy, successful adult should be the subject of further research and study.

At the time I heard the interview, we were interested in adopting a little boy from Russia would be nearly three when he came to live with us. He had a small genetic abnormality that caused a smaller lower jaw but that usually corrects itself by puberty. After initially deciding this child should be ours, I suddenly started losing sleep and panicking, which in my experience means that I'm making decisions simply to move in a forward direction but without considering all the implications. My husband and I had a lot of unanswered questions about this child's background and overall health; while with biological children, parents play the hand they're dealt, we certainly did not want the deck stacked against us. We decided to continue on in the hopes that we would find a child with as few mysteries as possible under the circumstances.

A year later I believe the little Russian boy has been adopted. I'm definitely sleeping better now.