Cradle of Hope Family Stories

Family Stories

We adopted Vika in Teumen, Siberia in January 1999, when she was eight months old.

Our son, Laurie, was five when we finally made the decision to adopt a sibling for him. I couldn't stop myself wanting a second child. We went through the agonizing process, after three miscarriages, of accepting that we couldn't have another birth child; and although my husband, Matthew, was inclined to 'count our blessings', I felt overwhelmingly that we had a vacancy in our family.

The systems for preparing for adoption, and indeed attitudes to adoption in general, in Britain and the United States are very different. British would-be adopters have to go through a long, often forbidding, vetting process which is controlled by their local authority. This includes a home study by a social worker, based on many hours of questioning; writing memos on one's attitudes and lifestyle; interviews with three sets of referees; health checks, police checks and financial checks; plus an adoption training course. The social worker's report is then presented to a local 'panel', or committee, at a meeting to which the would-be adopters are not invited, and if the panel votes in favour of the applicants the case is forwarded to the Department of Health headquarters in London for final approval. If it votes against, it is very hard to reverse the decision.

One of the problems with this system is that there are inconsistencies: different local authorities have different rules, attitudes, and charges. In our case we lived in a rural area where adoption, particularly overseas adoption, was quite rare, and so there was little expertise available on the subject: we had to do our own research. But on the positive side, we got a lot of attention from our social worker, who dealt with our case as quickly as the system allowed.

We first contacted the local Social Services department in June 1997, and were told that we were too old to adopt a British baby - there are very few available, and birth mothers generally prefer younger adopters. We were asked to consider fostering; but we soon decided that it wouldn't be fair to Laurie or ourselves to introduce an older, almost certainly damaged, child into our lives. So we started to think about overseas adoption; but from which country?

In August a friend suggested Russia. There are hundreds of thousands of children in Russian orphanages, she told us. Matthew's Jewish family came originally from the Russian/Polish border, so this began to make sense. We embarked on the laborious process of the home study, and at the same time I set about trying to discover how to adopt a child from Russia.

This was a very difficult period. Everything we heard from the British Social Services was designed to deter us from adopting. There were delays - twice the process was held up for a month while someone or other was on holiday, and even after we had been grudgingly approved by our local panel it took another two months before the Department of Health gave its blessing, without any apology or explanation. When you are waiting for a child, after the long business of making the decision to adopt, time drags unbearably.

We were warned about the terrible pitfalls of overseas adoption: corruption, kidnapping, damage caused to children by being too long in institutions; and almost worst of all, Attachment Disorder. A psychotherapist friend, clearly worried about us, lent me books on the subject. Another friend who had had a fairly disastrous adoption experience many years earlier wanted to put us off.

It is so easy to get discouraged during the adoption process. It isn't like pregnancy, when there is a certain amount of inevitability. With adoption you have to keep making the decision every day, over and over again, to carry on. Matthew is a pessimist and champion worrier anyway. But I was determined to persevere. Of course there were uncertainties and risks; but then the same would be true of having a birth child.

Neither Matthew nor I had ever been to Russia; but I started using his newspaper contacts to talk to people in Moscow. I found several individual 'adoption facilitators' who had helped American families, but they shied away from dealing with Britons, because the law was more forbidding. I started considering agencies. I discovered that there were no overseas adoption agencies in Britain because the system would not allow it; I would have to look to the United States. But the first, big American agency I asked said they couldn't help me: it would be impossible, they said, for a British family to adopt from Russia.

In desperation I rang the British Embassy in Moscow. To my astonishment the officer concerned called me back and assured me that it would be possible for us to adopt, that the Embassy understood the difficulties, and would give us all possible help. That same week I tracked down a British family who had adopted two little girls from Russia with the help of Cradle of Hope, and who recommended them wholeheartedly.

From the time we first spoke to the staff at Cradle of Hope we began to feel confident. They were positive, sympathetic, and efficient. Our social worker there used the expression "When I refer a child to you". Not "if".

The Kafkaesque bureaucracy at the Department of Health dragged on. Although our local panel approved us, they had 16 supplementary questions for us to answer. Such as, how had Matthew felt about being sent to boarding school? And, when Laurie was a baby, were our parenting roles inter-changeable? They also had certain 'reservations' about us, such as they believed that our 'expectations of the (adopted) child were not as realistic' as we said they were.

At last, in May 1998, we got the approval from the Department of Health. It took another month to get our dossier out of their clutches and sent to Moscow. By July it was translated and we were officially on a waiting list. We had two more setbacks to deal with now. A baby girl was referred to us after only a few weeks; but she was still on the national register. The Russian adoption system, which seems very fair and efficient, includes a nationwide register of children awaiting adoption. Only after the child has been on this list for three months can he or she be adopted by foreigners. On the last day that baby Olga was on the register, we heard she had been adopted by a Russian family. This is rare, but it can happen.

Soon we heard about another child. But this time we had doubts. From everything we saw and heard about her, we weren't confident that we were right for each other. We said no, and this was also hard. But our Cradle of Hope social worker reassured us: "I will find a home for this child, and a child for your home."

In November she told us about Vika. The words that rang out from her phone call were: "she smiles". We saw photos, and a video, and all the information that was available about her. She smiled a lot, and we said yes.

Cradle of Hope prepared us for our trip to Siberia down to the last detail. In contrast to our experiences in Britain, it was phenomenally quick and efficient. We arrived in Teumen on Sunday night, met Vika on Monday morning, adopted her on Tuesday, took her out of the orphanage on Wednesday and left before dawn on Thursday. And again in contrast to the attitudes of the British, all of the Russians we encountered on our trip thanked us for having Vika. The nurses cried when she left: they told us she was 'the merriest girl in the orphanage'.

At first sight our new daughter looked like a little monkey. Very pale, very thin, practically bald, with big dark eyes and sticky out ears. Clearly, although the staff cared for the children as best they could, she had been under-nourished and lacking attention. But she greeted us with a slow, weak smile, as if to say: I've been waiting for you. What took you so long?' Back in our hotel room in her cot, she lay and beamed at us, basking in our loving smiles. After only a couple of days out of the orphanage, Vika began to get colour in her cheeks. She blossomed, developed blonde hair and an olive complexion, and began to discover boundless energy.

Vika and I had to wait for a week in Moscow, where the temperature was minus 28 degrees, until the British Home Office consented to let her into the country. We faced another nightmare when an inexperienced doctor at the American Medical Clinic told us Vika might be mentally and physically damaged. But that's another story, and he was wrong. Fortunately by this time we had friends there, and the Cradle of Hope host family were kind. The British Embassy staff continued to be sympathetic and helpful. And in any case, now that we had Vika, nothing else mattered.

The British legal system surprised us with further delays and expense after we embarked on the process of adopting Vika all over again under British law. We weren't allowed to start on this until she had been living with us for a year; and after a pointless hearing in our local court we were obliged to employ lawyers to represent us at the High Court in London. At last, in October 2000, more than three years after we had set out, we were entitled to call Vika our daughter. "You must be delighted," said the judge.

Since we adopted Vika there have been certain changes in the British system. Around the time she arrived in Britain there was a growing body of protest about its unfairness. Matthew contributed to this with a long article in the Guardian's Weekend magazine on May 29, 1999*. Pressure groups are working for improvements, and Tony Blair has at least promised support. The pendulum which had swung so violently against adoption is now gradually moving back in its favour.

Vika is nearly four now, and she's 'a pistol', as someone told me the other day. Laurie said she was the best present he'd ever had, and they are devoted to each other. She has brought us all great joy, and we feel enormously fortunate to have her. It feels to us as if her adoption increased the sum of human happiness. The memory of all that waiting, all that bureaucracy, like the pains of labour, has faded. It was worth it.

*(part 1) www.guardian.co.uk/archive/article/0,4273,3869604,00.html

(part 2) www.guardian.co.uk/archive/article/0,4273,3869617,00.html