Those who exploit the powerless anger their Maker...

Proverbs 14: 31-33, from the Common English Bible:

³¹ Those who exploit the powerless anger their Maker, while those who are kind to the poor honor God. ³² The wicked are thrown down by their own evil, but the righteous find refuge even in death. ³³ Wisdom resides in an understanding heart, but it’s not known in fools.

We're not the most religious of folk, but then Proverbs is far from the most religious book in the Bible.  Most translations render the word "powerless" in the headline as "poor," but I like this translation, because it appropriately describes the following:

"Putin Signs Bill That Bars U.S. Adoptions, Upending Families," from the New York Times; dated today:

President Vladimir V. Putin signed a bill on Friday that bans the adoption of Russian children by American citizens, dealing a serious blow to an already strained diplomatic relationship. But for hundreds of Americans enmeshed in the costly, complicated adoption process, the impact was deeply personal....

The law calls for the ban to be put in force on Tuesday, and it stands to upend the plans of many American families in the final stages of adopting in Russia. Already, it has added wrenching emotional tumult to a process that can cost $50,000 or more, requires repeated trips overseas, and typically entails lengthy and maddening encounters with bureaucracy....

The bill that includes the adoption ban was drafted in response to the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Obama this month that will bar Russian citizens accused of violating human rights from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there....

Merry Christmas

Christmas presents, 2012

This was our second Christmas together as a family (here's last year's Christmas pictures).  We did something a little diffrent this year: rather than staying home for Christmas, we went to Toronto and stayed for a few days.  Elena opened presents just before we left (that's the picture above), and then we piled in the car and headed east. 

It was still a relatively quiet Christmas, but Elena had a lot of fun swimming in the hotel pool, and eventually let us know that she liked staying at the hotel better than staying in her room at our house.  Which is kind of the point of a vacation, right?

Toronto hotel view.  Elena is eating an apple.

We also went to a puppet show, and rode on Toronto's subway and streetcars.  The train and the streetcars were both novel enough that Elena thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  It snowed in Toronto early on the day after Christmas, so we got to slog through snowy streets, too.  After last year's lack of snow, this is really the first good snow Elena's experienced since leaving Kotlas.

To her delight, there was a heap of snow when we returned to Detroit, too.

Snow at home.

 

Sad Mama

We've tried to be very open with Elena about her adoption, her experiences at the Kotlas orphanage, and how she came to live with us.  That's not really that difficult to do, because we have lots of pictures (see for example this post, where we've collected some of the pictures into a book), and more importantly shared experiences that we can talk about.

What's a little harder is talking about the first part of Elena's story: her and her birthmother.  That's not because it's a taboo subject (because it's not), or because it takes some thought and sensitivity to talk with Elena about such an important person (although it does), but because we don't have lots of pictures, and we don't have shared experiences that we can talk about.  In fact, we know almost nothing about Elena's birthmother other than her name, age, and where she was born; Elena, of course, has no memory of her.

What we do have is a photocopy of her passport picture.  It looks like it was photocopied on a vintage Xerox: there are no grey tones and the blacks are a little blobby.  Moreover, it's a passport photo.  No one looks all that good when posing for an ID picture, and passports, where neutral unsmiling expressions are required, are worse than most.

The Kotlas Baby house, right now.

Just for fun, here's an article from the Kotlas news service (translation) dated December 4.  It's actually about the construction mess on the road in front of the orphanage, and not about the orphanage itself, but it has a picture of the orphanage as it looks right now, in December 2012.


Kotlas orphanage, December 2012

Little bit of snow on the ground in Kotlas, it looks like.  I wonder how noisy the construction equipment is?

Scars

We visited Teresa's parents over Thanksgiving, and during one of our outdoor hikes, Elena slipped, fell, and cut her palm on a sharp rock.  It wasn't just a tiny cut; it was a nice 1/2" gash, and pretty deep to boot.  It bled pretty well, too.

We cleaned it up and put some ointment on it, but Elena really didn't want a bandage.  She's expressed that opinion before: when she scrapes her knee or whatnot, she'll specifically request "no Band-Aid."  With a scraped knee it's not a big deal to agree, but with a fairly deep cut on her palm (a place that's sure to attract more dirt), a bandage is kind of a must.  So we insisted.

And Elena was upset.  She cried and cried, much longer than she normally does, stopping and starting more than once.  Maybe it wasn't the bandage, maybe it was the painful gash, but she's bonked herself pretty hard before, and after the initial shock wears off she's usually relatively stoic.  But she wasn't being stoic this time.

Her reaction, plus the fact that she specifically rejects Band-Aids, plus the fact that one of the things she remembers well enough about the orphanage to talk about is a trip to the doctor; all makes us think that there's something traumatic in her past associated with bandages.  A painful shot, or being (seemingly) abandoned in an examination room - not necessarily something that would be traumatic to an adult, but something that a child wouldn't understand.  We don't know; we weren't there.  And we'll probably never know.

Luckily, Elena seems to be pretty resiliant.  Before long, her uncle distracted her with a ride on his shoulders, and she forgot about the bandage long enough to realize that nothing bad was happening.  She was even OK with putting on a fresh bandage later in the day.

The gash in her palm is doing nicely, and now is nearly completely healed.  Elena and I were talking about it last night.  I showed her the scar on my own palm, where a broken garage door handle had gouged a hole years ago. 

"See?" I said. "Soon your cut will turn into a scar just like mine."

She looked closely at my hand. "Hard to see it," she said.

Sometimes it is.  But it's always there.