3A.M Confession

Adoption from hell

Friends have asked me for years to write down this story, and I have finally agreed now that I am only a few weeks away from retirement. I have worked as a social worker for the past thirty years in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The job was incredibly stressful, but I know for a fact that I improved the lives of dozens of families. There was a point, about thirteen years ago, which nearly caused me to say "fuck it" and walk away from the profession. I still deal with the lingering effects of posttraumatic stress disorder from this period of my life. I hope that writing all of this down will help me finally put this case to rest so that I can enjoy retirement.

The fall of the Soviet Union gave childless American couples the opportunity to adopt needy, white children. Thousands upon thousands of children from Russia and Eastern Europe were adopted in New York during the 1990's and 2000's, and I would say that the vast majority of these adoptions produced genuinely happy families. The children were excited to have loving families and the adoptive parents were excited to have a child to love. I was adopted, so I took a natural interest in any social welfare cases that involved adopted children. Some children had difficulty transitioning to life in the United States while others were victims of abuse. Almost every adoptive case I worked with had a happy ending. Every adoptive case except for one, but I hesitate to say that the "child" in question was actually a child. Sometimes I think that I legitimately was dealing with pure evil in human form.

The Polaski's were a young, successful couple living in Brooklyn, and commuting to their jobs in Manhattan. They had it all, wealth, good looks, charm, and generosity. I could go on and on about these two. The husband, Ryan, worked on Wall Street while the wife, Jenny, worked at a marketing firm a couple blocks away. They had everything but a child, as they had been unable to conceive despite trying for three years. Ryan's great grandfather emigrated from Russia in the early 20th century, so Ryan and Jenny decided to look to Russia for a child to adopt. They worked through a local Russian Orthodox Church to facilitate the adoption, which told them that they had the perfect child in mind. An eight year old boy named Dmitri, with blonde hair and blue eyes, was looking for a home.

Both Ryan and Jenny took two weeks off from work and flew off to Moscow to meet with Dmitri. They learned that Dmitri had appeared outside a church at the age of three. His records were suspiciously vague, but the Polaski's were charmed by the boy's good looks and grasp of the English language. They filled out the necessary paperwork and agreed to return in one month to accompany Dmitri back to the States. Over the course of the next month they excitedly prepared for Dmitri's arrival.

When Ryan and Jenny landed at the airport in Moscow they were surprised to find Dmitri, accompanied by two police officers, waiting for them.

The smaller police officer stepped towards the Polaski's and said in halting English, "Russia is grateful for your generosity. As a way to show our appreciation we have arranged for you to take the next flight out of Moscow which leaves in one hour. Your hotel reservation was already canceled."

Ryan and Jenny looked at one another in confusion. Jenny stepped forward and said, "What happened to the Priest we met with last time? We were expecting to meet in the same church as last time."

Dmitri spoke up and said in flawless English, "It's okay Mommy, my time here is done, let's leave now."

Ryan later told me that he should have followed his gut and demanded to meet with the proper authorities to figure out what was going on. However, youth, inexperience, and being a foreign country led them to go along with the situation. They had never failed at anything before in their lives, and they weren't going to let Russian bureaucracy ruin their plans of having a child. So they took Dmitri back to New York intent on creating a perfect family.