international adoption Archives

Quite sometime back, I saw this documentary on TV – I love you, mummy. It basically documents an American family’s adoption of a child from China.

Now this was not a puppy or a shelter dog but an 8-year-old human child. Although she was abandoned as a baby, she had grown to view the Chinese foster family she lived with as her own. The foster mother was her mother and not the new adopted American mother. The foster siblings her real siblings and not her new siblings from her adopted family. Was it hard for the Chinese foster family to give up the child? I do not know the machinery of China’s fostering programs. But the Chinese foster family was on board for a reason I find hard to argue with. They explained that the international adoption was her best chance in life. She was born with clubfoot and dropped wrists and they feared she would have a hard time as an adult if she had stayed in China.

The documentary was emotionally hard to watch.

Puppies adopted and then returned to the shelter again when they are in their “terrible twos” may cry, may retreat into a corner as they struggle with their new circumstances. The child may be adopted by new parents but at the same time, wouldn’t she feel a conflicting sense of abandonment? What complex emotions does an 8-year-old child feel?

She struggled and she cried. She was the alien in a new country living among people who look not at all like her and who don’t speak her language. She can keep crying about how terrible she feels but no one can comfort her back in the language she understands.

It must have been difficult for the adoptive parents as well, taking a strange child (no matter how much they wanted her) who did not want them, who wanted to go home and who can’t communicate to them when she is hurting physically.

But as it is with life, people adjust when they are forced to it, no matter how difficult the circumstances. They make do. They adapt. And so the adopted child learnt to get along with the other children in the family and also a different set of expectations from her new parents. She learnt English. She gradually forgot her mother tongue.

The manifestations of love by man is manifold. Giving up a child with the hope that the child may have a chance at a better life even knowing that it would be very difficult for the child. Taking in a reluctant child that protests against being taken in and refuses to acknowledge you as family. Learning to be comfortable with and care for a strange new family that you have been forced into and had to depend on in order to survive.

The responsibility one takes on and the endurance and commitment the family, including the child, needed to put in to making the adoption work is perhaps hard to conceive unless one finds oneself in their shoes. Love alone is not enough. Now somebody tell this irrepressible dog please! :P