My daughter, Caroline, was adopted from Russia 5.5yrs ago at the age of 11. Two years after her adoption, Caroline disrupted her first adoption and was readopted by us. This is part IV in Caroline's own telling of her story. (Any questions were asked by mom - answered by Caroline.)

Once you arrived in America with your new family, how long was it until you started school? I don’t remember, but I know that we didn’t know very much English at all when we went to school. When we were in school, they put us with a lady in the ESL program who tried to teach us the alphabet. She was Chinese; we were Russian. It didn’t really work out very well.

Another time, this teacher said she could understand Russian. So I worked on this project and brought it in. I showed it to the class and kept trying to explain it, but I only knew how to do that in Russian. The teacher didn’t understand a thing I said and couldn’t tell the class anything. I felt humiliated.

At one point, you went to stay with another family, right? Tell me about that. We got sent there because we were having trouble speaking English and our parents said they couldn’t deal with us or our behavior I guess. Actually, only Galina and I went. Our littlest sister stayed with the original family the whole time. Us older two moved around a lot, but never the littlest. This family was large. The father spoke Russian and so did some of the kids. We came there when school was ending, so at the beginning of summer. We went to the pool all the time. They had a big house, a huge tv, and lots of bikes in the garage. I don’t remember how long we stayed there.

There was another family though, before that family. It was just a few houses from this other house I was talking about. We stayed there for a while. The couple had no kids. They bought us Russian music. We went to school while we were there, on the bus. She was nice. She let us eat whatever we wanted. We could use the phone whenever we wanted to call our parents, but we didn’t call them much. She got our ears pierced, too. She told us that, if our parents took us back, she would come and get us from them. That was really weird.

Do you remember how long you stayed with either of those families? No, I really can’t remember. It seemed like a long time. It was long enough to make friends at school and everything.

Did your parents ever tell you WHY they would have you live with different families? To go on a visit. Did they ever tell you that it had anything to do with the way you were behaving? No. We didn’t really know much English so maybe they couldn’t tell us because of that, but they just took us to the place and told us it was for a visit or a vacation. We hadn’t ever lived with a real family before, so we didn’t know that it maybe wasn’t all that normal for kids to visit other families like that.



This "interview" went on so long that I will continue in the next blog. Also, I thought I'd remind you to keep in mind that this is Caroline's story in Caroline's words. The same events, told by the adoptive parents, are likely quite different. Both points of view are very valid. But, THIS blog series tells Caroline's story...

Part I - An International Adoptee's Story
Part II - In Russia Waiting for the Adoption to be Final
Part III - An Adoptee's Introduction to America