@ossobuco,
Quote:She had reasonable options past putting a small child on a plane across the world by himself.
I think that is the essence of most people's objections to what this woman did.
This 33 year old single woman went out of her way to adopt an older child from a foreign country, apparently without sufficient knowledge of the types of problems and challenges these children present. She should have expected this child to have behavioral and emotional problems, and possibly developmental delays as well. She also should have expected that the child would have considerable difficulty adjusting to his new environment in her home. And she should have sought out appropriate resources, in advance, to help her, and the child, cope with these predictable issues.
This woman may have failed to do the necessary homework, prior to the adoption, and consequently she found herself overwhelmed by the child's problems when they became manifest. She then failed to get any professional help for the child, and may well have responded to his difficulties in ways that made the problems escalate. When the situation became intolerable for her, she did not seek reasonable options in terms of having the child placed in foster care or in a residential treatment facility. Instead, she sought to simply rid herself of the child, and she took the course of action that was the most detrimental and damaging to him--she put him on a plane and sent him back to Russia.
This woman, who had not adequately prepared herself for this adoption beforehand, and who had not sought professional help or intervention when predictable problems surfaced, then blamed the child and the Russian agency for the failure of the adoption. But she was the one who assumed the responsibility of parenting this child, and she was the one who failed to behave as a responsible parent. Her final act of "mothering" this child--putting him on that plane by himself--shows just how irresponsible she was in terms of considering his welfare. There is no reason to believe that any of her prior behaviors toward this child were any more responsible than her final action.
Nothing this child might have done in her home warranted that final treatment the child got from this woman. His biological mother had failed him profoundly, and now an adoptive mother failed him profoundly. To blame the child for any of this, or, even worse, to label him an incorrigible sociopath, is absurd. It is the adults in his life who have acted without conscience, not this child. It is the adults in his life who have acted in truly destructive ways, not this child.
This little boy came to his adoptive mother with an identity, an identity that included the memories of his past life experiences as well as
his name.. The adoptive mother seems to have ignored this past identity to the point of trying to erase or obliterate it. She was not prepared to deal with, or even recognize, the problems he had as a result of a rather hellish past, and, in a significant act of denial on her part, she changed
his name, as though that would cleanse him of his past. This child already had enough chaos and confusion to deal with regarding his adjustment to the adoption--a new language, a new living situation, new authority figures, new routines, the loss of everything familiar to him--and this woman takes away the one constant he has always had, a central part of his sense of identity,
his name. This wasn't an infant, where a change of name doesn't affect the child. This was a 7 year old, who knew himself by that name. And the name change didn't occur after a long period of living together and bonding, it happened very soon after the adoption. And, she didn't just change his last name, which might have been reasonable, she changed his first name, the name by which he had always been called, and the name he used to refer to himself. Do you think she was even aware of what she was doing to him by taking away
his name? Do you think she was aware that, by depriving him of his name, she was stripping him of the last vestige of certainty he had to hold onto?
At least when she put him on that plane, she gave him back his name...
