I'm taking a quick 10 minutes to write about this:
Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families Friday after a 7-year-old boy adopted by a woman from Tennessee was sent alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow with a note saying he was violent and had severe psychological problems.
It would take a writer with a lot more skill than me to really convey the agony of waiting for a Russia adoption to come to fruition. We waited over two years for a referral. When we got our referral, we made our first trip to the Russian Far East. We had an American doctor tell us we shouldn't adopt Laney. We flew home and waited 10 weeks before we could go back to get her. Every point of that journey was agonizing, but the worst were those 10 weeks between trips.
Everything in our lives stopped. We went to work and out with friends and read books and watched TV during those 10 weeks, but none of it mattered. Everything that was actually happening was only happening behind a prevailing, agonizing wait. The only thing that was really happening was that we were waiting, consumed with anxiety, for a call to tell us we could get our daughter.
My heart is breaking for that little boy. It's hard to fathom how he ended up placed with people so criminally fucking stupid that they put a seven year old child on a plane with a note and returned him like he was a stereo that didn't work like they expected it to. Like they think there should be a return policy on a child! Monsters.
Hearing this story takes me right back to those horrible 10 weeks between our trips to Russia. If this had happened then, I don't know what I'd have done. And right now there are people in that situation because of this family's criminal negligence, stupidity and cruelty.
I'm going to write to the Russian Embassy today. I'm going to send pictures of Laney and talk about how happy she is and how grateful we are. And this family in middle Tennessee... well, if I believed in God I'd say I hoped he'd have mercy on their souls, because I sure don't.
