Stahlke Adoption

FRUA and CHEER

Yesterday, Jonathan attended a lecture at the home of a FRUA member in a distant Chicago suburb. FRUA, which stands for "Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption," was founded in 1993, about the time that the number of adoptions in Eastern Europe started to take off. The national office of FRUA publishes an excellent quarterly newsletter, with research articles on behavioral issues, language acquisition, attachment, etc. FRUA also maintains local chapters, and our family attended a wonderful "Grandfather Frost" event last winter.

Jonathan made the trip to hear the lecture while I stayed home with the kids. We had planned for several weeks to watch a parade yesterday from the home of church friends. But the busy Little League schedule has been taxing on the kids (as well as the parents), and most of them were showing some marked regression in behavior. In their state of mind yesterday, I couldn't imagine keeping the kids corraled by myself amidst all the excitement of a parade! So we spent a quiet afternoon at home to recover, followed by some swimming at our familiar YMCA to burn off their excess energy. By Sunday night, things were much calmer, and they could face the week a little more grounded.

The lecture that Jonathan attended focused on adoptees' return trips to Europe to visit their former orphanages and/or reconnect with birth families. Among the families attending the talk, the most common situation was the adoption of an infant whose birth family had several older children and for whom rearing another baby was beyond their means. In these cases, the child was too young to have any language ability or memories. Yet, they often have birth parents and older siblings still together as a family unit in Russia or Eastern Europe. Sometimes, the trips back were solely for the child to see the orphanage, but in a few cases, the children also met their birth families. There are organizations available to do the research to find the birth families, especially since all the records are in Russian or other foreign languages. The trips themselves also require facilitators and translators, since the journey is often to remote areas, and the adoptees and adoptive parents seldom speak the language of their birth families.

I've always read that the impetus for a return trip needs to come from the adoptee and not the adoptive parent, which makes a lot of sense to me. Our own children have expressed relief that they won't be traveling with us to Ukraine to pick up Kola. I think they are apprehensive they wouldn't be allowed to return to the U.S. In fact, they might even be afraid that Jonathan and I will be held back permanently in Ukraine. While the children know that we are a forever family, and that they are our children, some fears are too deep to be explained away even with our assurances.

But when Jonathan described a few details of the FRUA lecture to them, their reaction was not as negative as I had expected. Neutrality is often a good thing, since it means a lack of strong feelings against something. Their willingness to listen made me think that they will want to visit Ukraine again sometime in the future.

Besides FRUA, the Chicago area has another support group for families like ours--CHEER, which is "Children of Eastern European Regions." We haven't been very active in either FRUA or CHEER, for we just don't have time. But if you're interested in more info, see their websites:

frua.org
cheerchicago.org

posted by Stahlkes @ 12:18 PM