Sandi remembers her first few days with Masha in Moscow as being one long screaming session. Her sons – all of them went to Moscow with their parents to meet their new sister – had to sleep with their heads under the flat pillows in the grimy hotel. Masha’s passport photograph, taken at the US embassy in Moscow, has got her with tears streaming down her face, and Sandi makes no bones about the fact that it hasn’t exactly been uphill since then.
Given that we’ve been having a few problems of our own, it goes without saying that I was keen to meet this lady!
So, on Thursday evening last week, I went along to one of Sandi’s support-group meetings. And, boy, am I glad I did. It was a very large group, about thirty people, all crammed into Sandi’s house, and I must admit I sat back a bit, to let other people talk, but it was all worth hearing.
Sandi’s story of the plane trip home from Moscow is on her website. Basically she remembers her adoption attorney gave her a print-out, called something like Flight Home – 101 that was supposed to give her all the little tips and tricks she’d need to keep Masha entertained. She remembered saying to her husband, ‘How is this different from travelling with your own baby?’
Well, as everyone probably knows, Masha was awake – and screaming – for seven of the fourteen hours back to JFK International!!!!
It’s been pretty much the same story ever since: Masha fights and kicks and screams and squabbles. And the thing is, Sandi doesn’t mind talking about it! She’s one of those people who just believes that a problem shared is a problem halved, and I have to admit I felt so much better after being in her company for an evening, and here’s why: we’ve been having a lot of the same problems.
If I’m being honest, the whole process of adopting Benjamin and trying to get him to settle into our house wasn’t as easy as I said. It’s been really hard, even from the first moment that we arrived in Moscow.
I’ve already written about the nurse in the orphanage who brought our son out to meet us. What I didn’t admit was that when we first arrived, the first thing she said was, ‘Oh, you are here for Benjamin’ – she didn’t say the J so it came out more like Ben-ya-min – and she shook her head like she was quite amazed that somebody was going to take him.
We couldn’t work out why she was being so miserable. I said, ‘Yes, our son is Benjamin,’ and she said, ‘He a strange boy, but I think a good son for you.’ Well, I was absolutely furious, but what could I do? We were standing there waiting to meet our son! And the Russian people can be quite strange: abrupt, and humourless. If you’ve been there you will know what I mean. My husband, Colby, didn’t really react, but later that night, when we were back at the hotel, still amazed and shocked that we’d been able to take this little boy out of the orphanage and that he was officially ours, I said, ‘I’d be surprised if Benjamin wasn’t a bit strange after spending all those years in that orphanage.’
Because of course by then we were getting a handle on exactly how strange Benjamin could be. Like probably everyone who is reading this, I had been reading adoption websites for quite a while before we finally made the journey to Moscow, and my favourite bit was always the part where the child flew into the arms of their new parents, or else a happy nurse with a big bosom and a starched cap would come and place the baby in their arms.
I know I’ve already said this, but Benjamin didn’t do that. The nurse brought him out and he just stood there. My first reaction – the one that I never thought I’d admit to – was: ‘Oh, no, he hates us,’ because Benjamin did not look at all happy to see us. He didn’t even look up. I tried to rationalise it, saying to myself that was surely to be expected, given his background. But still, it was awkward.
Eventually I said, ‘Can I shake your hand and say hello?’ but of course he didn’t speak any English. The fat nurse gave him a little push in my direction and the next thing I knew, he was standing in front of me. I didn’t know what else to do, so we gave him the train and when that didn’t work I put my arms around him, but Benjamin didn’t respond to the cuddle. He was stiff as a board.
I stepped back and tried to make eye contact with him, but his gaze was all shifty. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just no matter how I dipped my face and tried to get a look at him, he wouldn’t let me study his face. I was a bit surprised. I’d been thinking about a boy throwing himself into my arms, and grabbing my necklace and nearly choking me, and saying, Mama! But if I had to describe the way Benjamin reacted to my getting down to say hello to him, I’d say he was limp. His arms were hanging there, his feet were flat on the ground, his head was hanging down. I took him by the chin and tried to lift his face up to meet my gaze and he turned his head away.
Colby was watching from the sidelines. He looked at me and said, ‘Well, this isn’t a great start,’ and I was trying to be as brave as I could. I said, ‘It’s okay, we’re just getting used to each other, aren’t we, Benjamin?’ But Benjamin just stood there, like he had his chin stuck to his chest.
So, it was around then that the nurse said, ‘You take him, you take him,’ and although we hesitated, it was like I said: I didn’t feel we had any choice. We took Benjamin back to the hotel with us, and I know that I said that those two or three days’ worth of appointments were really good, and that Benjamin just slept through everything, but the truth is, he pretty much had to be dragged around the streets of Moscow. There was just no way that he wanted to go anywhere with me, or with Colby, and we were mystified because that’s not the way it’s meant to be. And before I met the other mums at Sandi Miller’s house, I was just too ashamed to admit that we hadn’t had the perfect experience of everyone’s dreams.
The problem was basically that Benjamin wouldn’t lift his feet, and he wouldn’t lift his chin off his chest. Colby actually complained to me at one point: ‘The only part of him I’ve been able to get a good look at is the top of his head.’ I thought he might be cold – the clothes he wore out of the orphanage were pretty horrible, and not much of what I’d brought with us from New York would actually fit him because he was so small – so we went to that GUM department store and bought a fur coat – no PETA complaints, please! – but he refused to put it on. I bought mittens, too, but apparently they were no good, either. He didn’t throw them on the ground so much as peel them off when I wasn’t looking, and then I couldn’t find them. I could at least force him into the coat, but then I had an additional problem, which was, if he’s not cold, then what’s wrong with him?
Anyway, we got the things done that we needed to – mainly with a sullen Benjamin being dragged or carried around by Colby from one appointment to the next – and then we got ready to board our Delta flight, but as soon as Benjamin figured out that we were getting on a plane he immediately began to scream.
Honestly, you would have thought that we were murdering him. It was high-pitched, like a fire alarm, and my first instinct – like when a fire alarm goes off – was to want to do anything I could to shut it off, because the sound was like fingernails on a blackboard. But nothing I could do seemed to console him. I was incredibly embarrassed, and I was just hoping against hope that the other passengers would understand that it was just fear, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t understand that. It had taken all my courage to get on the plane, and here I was trying to get a small boy to join me for the return journey – taking him away from everything he’d ever known – on what to him was probably a big steel bird that was about to head into the sky.
Of course, I was hoping that Benjamin would settle down and we would all be fine once we’d taken off, but he wasn’t fine, believe me, and it may well be that we had a tougher time than Sandi. Benjamin kicked with all his power at Colby and at the stewardesses. He threw over the meal trays then stood up in his seat and howled at the ceiling. His face was beetroot red. Other passengers started out sympathetic, but there was soon a near mutiny in business class, so much so that Colby agreed to take Benjamin down to the very back of the plane, where he tried to muffle his screams in th
e toilet. There were quite a few other parents on the plane and they at least had some sympathy for us. One mum offered to give us her portable DVD player – she had Lilo and Stitch and Monsters, Inc. – and a set of earphones, saying, ‘Music soothes the savage beast.’
It was a kind and loving gesture from a fellow traveller, and I might have wept if it had worked, but it didn’t. I couldn’t get close enough to Benjamin, not even in the toilet, to show the screen to him, or to put the earphones on him. What he really needed was some kind of tranquilliser.
We gave up our business-class seats, in the end, to the family who had been sitting in the very back row of the plane, and we took their seats. A couple who had been sitting in the row ahead insisted on being able to move because Benjamin would not stop fussing. At one point – okay, at more than one point – the stewardess came over and said, ‘You must try to do a better job. He’s got to quit that.’ Benjamin was standing up in his seat at the time. His face was bright red, his fists were balled up and he was screaming. But when I tried to take him by his waist and force him onto his bottom, he balled a fist and punched me in the face.
Now my cheek was throbbing, and my eyes were watering, so I was pretty much useless, and finally Colby did a karate chop against the back of Benjamin’s legs, and he collapsed into the seat. But not for long. He was soon loose and on all fours on the ground. He crawled into the space between the last row and the toilet wall, and for the first time since we’d boarded he finally fell silent. A man who was sitting a few rows ahead said, ‘Thank God he’s calmed down. I was about to slap him myself,’ and it was all I could do not to get up and slap him.
I did try to explain to the passengers in the seats around us: ‘We have only just picked him up from the orphanage. He’s unsettled, he’s unhappy, please just bear with us.’ Colby had been saying, ‘He’ll fall asleep in a minute, I’m sure. He’s tired and he’s never been on a plane before. It’s been a tough day for him.’ Some people were kind but others were ruthless, looking at me like, ‘How is this my problem? I just want to get home in peace.’
I took advantage of the fact that Benjamin had quietened himself down behind the back row of seats to start searching frantically through my bag for things I’d brought to entertain him on the flight – things like the Magna Doodle, although I didn’t dare give that to him, given how violently he could thrash around when you tried to get him to concentrate on something. Colby, being stronger, was able to hold Benjamin even as he kicked and screamed, but for me it was like wrestling a wild animal.
I suppose he stayed behind those back seats for an hour or so, but then some meddling stewardess came and announced that it was against the regulations for him to crouch there and he would have to take his seat. Well, we tried to drag him out and you can probably guess what happened: he took off down the aisle, and actually stopped near the middle doors and tried to open them.
The other passengers were by now terrified and I just couldn’t work out what to do. In the end, a mum came up with a plan and, although I am ashamed that I agreed to it, I hope that everyone can see that we really had no choice: we held Benjamin’s mouth open and forced some Phenergan into him – it’s like a teething medication, or that’s what people use it for, because it’s got a sedative in it – and within half an hour or so, Benjamin had pretty much collapsed on the floor in front of his seat.
The same stewardess who had made such a fuss of Benjamin crouching behind the rear seats, went to say, ‘Children aren’t allowed to sleep on the floor,’ but there was such protest from people in the seats around us that she backed off and let Benjamin stay down there. And for the rest of the journey, he pretty much slept there, not peacefully, but horribly, making groaning sounds, like he was being tortured.
I was pretty hysterical myself by this point, sobbing, and I said to Colby, ‘What are we going to do?’ But what could he say? Nothing! All he could say was what I was thinking, which was, ‘I don’t know, babe. This isn’t how I expected it to be.’
I’ve got more to tell you, obviously, but to be honest just admitting all that was quite a leap for me and pretty exhausting, so I might leave it there for now and just say again, thank you, Sandi, for helping me tell it like it is.
Comment (1):
Dear Caitlin, it was so lovely to meet you at the catch-up and I wish I’d had more time to talk to you, but I’ve read your whole post twice now and I wanted to get in touch and say, good for you for telling it how it is! So many of us are concerned with appearances and desperate not to look like we are failing, but in sharing our experiences we learn that we are not alone and we can conquer our problems together. I look forward to reading more of your journey and I hope you will join us again soon. Kind regards, Sandi Miller, Ho-Ho-Kus, USA
Comment (2):
Dear Caitlin, you might remember that we said hello at Sandi’s and I have been following your website for a while. I’m relieved to read this post because I have to admit I was very jealous of how well you were doing too! Now we can just all admit to each other: this is really hard!
Comment (3):
WOW, way to put people off adoption!! You’ve said in the past how sorry you feel for all the kids stuck in orphanages around the world and then you go and write a post that basically condemns more of them to that life because who is going to want to take on this kind of challenge? Don’t you think it would have been better to do what adults do and SUCK. IT. UP????
Chapter 24
The (Alternative) Book of Benjamin
Well, what can I say? Firstly, thank you, Sandi Miller, for your lovely comment after my last post, and as for the (anonymous) commentator, well, you’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose.
I’m actually glad that I decided to be honest about this process that so many of us are now sharing. Meeting Benjamin and then bringing him home has been challenging, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t acknowledge that truth. Life is not a fairytale.
Now that Benjamin has been under our roof in Larchmont for a while longer, I thought I would update you all on his progress.
It was late at night when our flight from Moscow finally landed at JFK. Believe me, there was a great sigh of relief from everyone on the plane when we finally touched down. I suppose the other passengers were thinking, ‘Thank God that nightmare is over,’ but it was far from over for us.
I did think, ‘Well, the worst is surely over. Now let’s get our boy home and we can all start settling down.’ Colby had organised a town car from the airport to our home and Benjamin must have still been exhausted because he slept on the back seat. He only woke up when Colby started carrying him up the path to our house.
We put him down on the floor in our living room and he immediately scampered into the furthest corner and curled up in a tight ball.
I had already decided that it would be a good idea to try to get Benjamin into the local time zone and into our routines so I gathered him up and sat him down in our kitchen and tried to serve him some dinner. He had eaten very little – nothing really – on the plane and by rights should have been starving.
Well, maybe he was, but sitting down to eat like any other hungry four-year-old obviously wasn’t going to happen.
One of the first things I’d found out about Benjamin when we were still in Moscow was that he didn’t know how to use cutlery. He ate with his hands. I accepted that because I really had no choice, but obviously it can’t be allowed to continue. Colby says we need to get him into new, more civilised habits.
The doctor in Moscow had warned me that Benjamin had probably been taking a lot of his food from a bottle in the orphanage – meaning, he’d been sucking on juices and formula – because it’s easy for them to just drop a bottle into a cot rather than getting every child in the orphanage to sit up to eat.
Sucking on bottles had left him with really bad teeth.
I had let him suck on bottles in Moscow, thinking, ‘I’ll sort out the whole knife and fork thing when I get home.’ Of course, I d
idn’t expect it to be easy. You can’t just give a knife and fork to a child who has hardly ever seen one before and expect them to know what to do.
So that first night I served up some soft food – mashed pumpkin, mashed potatoes, some gravy – on one of Benjamin’s new plates and gave him the curved fork and spoon, made especially for small hands, but instead of trying to pick up a forkful of mashed pumpkin with the fork, he picked up a handful and squeezed it.
You have to imagine what this was like for us, just off the plane, after that horrific journey, exhausted, heads spinning, now having to try to start teaching our son table manners!
I tried to show Benjamin how to use the spoon, but he wouldn’t even pick it up, he just dropped it on the ground. I picked it up, and he dropped it again. And then again. Obviously I got sick of that pretty quickly and tried to spoon the meal into his mouth myself, but that set him off screaming again.
In the end, I just gave Benjamin another bottle, which he gulped down – so he obviously was hungry! – and then he collapsed onto himself, and started making the same terrible snoring sound he’d made on the plane.
I took him up to his room – that beautiful blue room that I’d put all my heart into – and put him in the crib we’d bought for him. I know that at four he’s too big for a crib, but everyone on the Yahoo chat boards – and even our attorney, Laura – said that even the older children in the orphanages sleep in cribs in the orphanage. It’s what they’re used to doing and you don’t want to give them too many shocks when you bring them home.
Can You Keep a Secret? Page 18