When John Brooks first
emailed me I didn't respond. I read his request to share his family's
story here, and for a while, I just did nothing. It's summer
vacation, and my kids and I are living the life with trail hikes and
fresh berries, fireflies and flying kites, we're painting rocks and
rocking out in our wading pool air band, and it's nothing about
adoption or adoptive parenting or having been adopted, and then
here's this stranger... this, this father...
and I know he's trying to help other people heal, but his experience as an adoptive parent was (thankfully) very
different from my own. It's awfully sad, and I think about how each
time I slip down the slope it takes more out of me, and I'm afraid
one of these times I won't be able to climb back up, so I don't write
back.
But his story tugs like
a plaintive child. And I think of Myst and Von and Christina and
Amanda and Linda Lou Who and Ariel and Jeni and other people who reveal adoption's disturbing underbelly... and the children I know who were adopted from orphanages. And Casey.
So here it is: Casey's Story by guest blogger John Brooks, with gratitude to him for reaching out and telling it.
Casey's Story
Ours
was a familiar story. My wife, Erika, and I turned to adoption in
1991. We thought surely there were millions of babies out there in
need of two loving people desperate to be parents. Then we learned
about the realities of adoption. A foreign adoption seemed our best
bet, but options were limited then. To improve our chances, we’d
need to be open to an “older” or “special needs” child. This
was not how we envisioned starting a family, but we wanted to be
parents.
A
chance encounter with another adoptive family steered us to an
adoption attorney in Warsaw, Poland. Erika was of Polish descent and
spoke the language. Maybe this was our chance. In a late night phone
call to Warsaw from our home in Connecticut, the attorney was
sympathetic but discouraging. She had a long backlog of clients and
available children were scarce. What about an “older” or “special
needs” child, Erika asked. It was then that we first heard about a
fourteen-month-old girl in a rural orphanage. In a matter of five
short months, we’d rushed through home studies and background
checks before boarding a LOT flight to Poland to receive our
daughter, who we’d named Casey. It was nothing less than a miracle.
Casey was
an unwanted pregnancy, a three-pound preemie whose twin sister had
been stillborn. She went straight from the delivery room to an
incubator to an orphanage in Mrągowo in Poland’s northern lake
district. At fourteen months, she was withdrawn, listless, unable to
sit, crawl or feed herself. Medical records were scant. But to us she
was perfect; nothing that two able bodied Americans couldn’t fix
with love.
Indeed
in the years that followed, it seemed that a loving home was all
Casey needed. We moved from Connecticut to the San Francisco Bay Area
where she transformed into a bright, spirited, charming little girl.
But in the privacy of our home, things were often different - violent
tantrums, crying jags, defiance. We looked for answers from friends,
pediatricians, therapists, counselors and pastors, but were assured
repeatedly that Casey was just high-strung; she’d grow out of it.
In the meantime, we had to be tough with her. Though fully aware of
her abandonment and adoption, the professionals never explored the
matter.
At
seventeen, Casey gained early admission to Bennington College in
Vermont with a bright future ahead. She wanted to make a difference
in the world.
But she
never made it.
Just five
months shy of her high school graduation, she took the keys to our
car, drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped.
Drowning
in grief, I looked for answers. How could this have happened? What
did everyone miss? What could we have done differently? I went to the
library and scoured the Internet for everything I could find on
adoption, something I’d never thought to do before. I learned about
attachment disorders that can have a devastating effect on orphaned
children. It explained everything – the angel at school and the
tyrant at home, the tantrums, crying jags, low self-esteem and
defiance, things that she kept carefully hidden behind a suit of
armor from parents, therapists and friends.
How could
everyone have been so blind?
I
connected with other parents of children adopted from foreign
orphanages and heard similar stories. Some stumbled onto appropriate
treatments whereas others, like us, were left in the dark. Adoption
and attachment experts shared with me the therapies and parenting
techniques that have proven effective in dealing with the unique
emotional needs of orphaned children. This information was in the
public domain, yet everyone involved in Casey’s short life missed
it.
I can’t
have another Casey, a do-over. She was one of a kind. But regardless
of the tragic outcome, I’ll always consider myself the luckiest guy
in the world to have been her dad for sixteen of her seventeen years.
From her
death we learned that adoptees can be exposed to disorders that are
still misunderstood by many professionals. Not every adoptee has
attachment issues, but for those who do, treatment can be illusive.
Other
adoptive parents who may struggle with what we did can use our story
as a learning experience. Acknowledge your child’s loss, parent her
in a way that may not be intuitive to you, get her the right kind of
help. Just “loving her enough” may not be enough.
Hopefully,
that will save a precious life.
About
the Author
John
Brooks is a former senior media financial executive who has turned to
writing, suicide and adoption advocacy since Casey’s death in 2008.
He recently completed a memoir about his experience as an adoptive
father and his journey to understand his daughter’s suicide, titled
The Girl Behind
The Door: My Journey Into The Mysteries Of Attachment.
He also writes a blog, Parenting
and Attachment.
