Kids from another country, with a past

Publication date: 21 January 2009

International adoption is never easy, and can cause pain that lasts a lifetime.

Irina's surname may be Spanish, but that's little more than a legal nicety. She has no home, and no family. She did for a while, but it didn't work out. Hers is one of the untold stories of failed adoption. In this case, Irina rejected her new family, although she insists she is not to blame. She was just 11 when she was brought to Spain with her sister from a Russian orphanage.

"I didn't know that I was coming to stay forever. I thought I could go home, where my mother lives," she explains, adding: "The authorities had taken us away from her because she drank too much, but we used to see her every now and then." Her first words in Spanish were "I want to go back to Russia." They would be the start of a long, sad story that would end in a Spanish children's home, surrounded by other children like her.

Over the last decade, Spanish families have adopted some 35,000 children from Eastern Europe, China, Nepal, Ethiopia, Congo, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Most of the time, the children make a new life for themselves in a caring, safe home. But not always. While the number of adoptions that actually fail is only around 1.5 percent, Ana Berástegui, who teaches at the University of Comillas, and is one of the few academics to have carried out a study of the problem, estimates that one in five families with adopted children "faces very difficult situations" that will bring them close to returning the child to the authorities.

Her figures are based on her work with families. She says that some families try to hide the problem by sending their adopted children to boarding schools. But she also warns that a bond must be created between the family and the adopted child within the first four years. "International adoption is a recent phenomenon here. When children reach adolescence there can be major problems if close ties have not been established with their new families."

"A lot of parents delude themselves by thinking that all you need is love, but it isn't like that," says Jesús Palacios of Seville University, also an expert on adoption. "Adopted children have their own stories, their own past; they have lived through emotional adversity, and that shapes them," he adds. He says that as soon as the first signs of any problems emerge, parents must seek professional help; if they don't, things will only get worse.

Carme Vilaginés, a psychotherapist who has written about what can go wrong in adoption, says that she has met people whose lives have been destroyed when their adopted children turn against them. Her advice is simple: "Anybody who adopts must understand that it is as necessary to take the child to a psychologist as it is to take them to the dentist."

Irina remembers a great many visits to the psychologist, but they failed to solve her problems. "My adopted mother was always reproaching me for wanting to go back home after all they had done for me: the money they had spent; the clothes they had bought; the toys. But they never allowed me to play with them. I was always having to do my homework!"

After briefly returning to Russia to stay in a children's home, she came back to Spain. "When I got back here, the social worker asked if I wanted to live with my adopted family again, or live in a shared apartment with other children like me. I said I'd rather live in the apartment. I never felt loved by my adopted parents, and they never let me be with my sister."

The years have gone by, and Irina has grown up in apartments living with other children like her in what was initially a strange country. But she has no real complaints. She has finished her schooling, and now works as a carer for elderly people with mobility problems. "The problem is that I earn so little, just EUR 600 a month," she says, admitting that sometimes life gets on top of her.

"It's best not to think about it," Irina continues. Better not to think about how things would have worked out if her parents had understood that she was just a child, and unable to foresee the consequences of what she was doing. "Why didn't they understand me?" she asks. Time has not healed the wounds, and she has been unable so far to find a way to put her relationship with her adopted parents back on track. "And worst of all," she says, "I have lost my sister."

Psychologists Lila Parrondo and Mónica Orozco run Adoptantis, an advisory centre for adoptive parents. They have come across a lot of cases like Irina's, where neither party is able to understand the other's needs. They say that a very common problem is some parents' determination to convert children from China, Russia, or Nepal into their own image. "You see them reserving a place for the child at school, even before they have taken custody," says Orozco, adding: "And you realise that they aren't going to take the time to let themselves get to know each other. They can't accept that the child just needs them, and that he or she feels abandoned, and will never be their own flesh and blood." What's more, she points out, these children will always be coming up against reminders that they are outsiders and have no real family.

Jesús Palacios says that the number of failed adoptions is likely to increase over the coming years, more in line with other countries in the West with a longer tradition of adoption. He describes adoption as "a bet on uncertainty," and a bet that can easily be lost.

Almudena lost her partner and most of her friends after she took the very hard decision to return the child she had adopted to the authorities. "I still haven't forgiven myself for what I did," she confesses. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, but she says she still finds it hard to talk about what happened.

"It was the worst experience of my life. My friends criticised me, and the authorities accused me of not taking the matter seriously. But it wasn't like that. I loved the child, I tried to understand her, but I couldn't help her," Almudena says, fighting back the tears.

"I was 29 and obsessed with the idea of being a mother. I had often thought about adopting. I would say to myself: 'why bring another child into the world if so many of them have been abandoned?'" She says she would have preferred a baby, but was persuaded by the agency handling the adoption to take Natalia, an attractive six-year-old living in an orphanage in northern Colombia. "I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her. She was so small, so fragile, and her eyes were so black."

The first weeks were perfect, she says. Natalia was happy in her new home, with her own room and her new clothes. "To begin with she seemed very docile, but then this other side to her character began to emerge. She wouldn't do anything you asked her to - nothing. She would suddenly explode into attacks of rage, almost like epilepsy."

Almudena describes the next five years as hell. She says that she was never warned of the negative aspects of adoption, something that Miguel Góngora, head of ADECOP, the organisation that represents adoption agencies, says is unlikely. He points out that all adoptions carried out officially include courses for parents to discuss the possible problems that might emerge with their new charges.

"There is nothing altruistic about adopting; it's a very selfish decision," he says. Adopting is a lengthy, expensive, and emotionally draining experience, and very often one that fails to meet parents' expectations. Almudena looks back at the five years she spent with Natalia. "She was like a child that had no feelings. I'm not saying that she hated me, but she couldn't bear to hear her friends say, 'What a lovely mummy you have - so young and pretty'."

Almudena says that psychologists told her the child saw her as a rival. "In the end I just couldn't go on any longer. I feel guilty, and that guilt will be with me for the rest of my life," she admits.

"One day, at the height of the crisis, when I had already begun to think seriously about returning Natalia to the authorities, I was looking through the adoption papers - which I had signed without really reading properly - and I found a report. It said that the child was the daughter of a 16-year-old prostitute, and had lived in the brothel with her mother, and that she had been raped. How could I make sense of a child who at age six had been through more than I could imagine at 29?"

Almudena says that she still gets news about Natalia from time to time. She has returned to Latin America, and is now aged 20. She still has Alumdena's name, and legally is still her daughter, and always will be. "I am dealing with the paperwork to make sure that if anything happened to me, Natalia wouldn't inherit everything. I know that she would spend the money badly," she sighs.

Irina has no hopes of inheriting anything either. But she still believes that adoption is a good thing. "As long as the parents understand that their adopted child was born to somebody else, and that he or she is a human being that has had another life, and has a past."

Subject: Spanish news, international adoption

Countries: Spain, Russia