Posted on 11/08/2007 8:41:58 AM PST by Lorianne
The moment Julie Jarman set eyes on Zahina she was smitten. The seven-year-old girl from Tanzania was desperate for a loving home and Julie felt sure that she and her 11-year-old daughter could provide it.
In turn Zahina would become the second daughter Julie longed for. "When I met her for the first time, she was a bit shy. I saw her hiding behind her social worker's skirt, peeping out at me with an enormous grin on her face. She was gorgeous.
"She was with her foster parents in Somerset. Laura and I spent a week with them, taking things very slowly.
"One day we took her to the park and one day we went swimming and I remember seeing Laura and Zahina teasing each other in the pool and thinking I had seen a glimpse of how things were going to be."
It was settled that Zahina would come to live with Julie, a programme manager for Oxfam, at her house in Manchester in July 2005. Julie was thrilled and spent the final days before her arrival getting everything ready.
She decorated her room with an African theme, she made curtains from some cloth she'd bought in Africa, and hung two framed batiks of African women on the wall.
She even stocked up on oats so she could make a similar porridge to one Tanzanian children are given called uji, which is made from maize-meal.
"She didn't seem upset at leaving her foster parents and was quite excited about the move," says Julie.
But almost from the moment she arrived Julie sensed a barrier between them. "Zahina would chat to me and ask questions about this and that, and on the surface it was fine.
"But I sensed that at a deeper level she was resisting me - I felt she was waiting for her mother to come back. Before she went to bed at night she would give me a hug but there was no warmth there. She was going through the motions.
"Often when I asked her to do something she would do it as the Tanzanians would say, 'kichwa upande' - unwillingly, or holding her head to one side."
As the weeks passed the house became filled with unspoken tensions, resentments and discord. Most worryingly of all, Julie's own daughter Laura began to withdraw into herself. In fact Zahina seemed to go out of her way to try to upset her.
"Once when I asked her to remove her mud-covered boots, she marched over to Laura, who was sitting in front of the fire playing Patience and parked her filthy foot right on top of the cards.
"Another time the three of us were supposed to go and see an African band but Laura refused to come because she was upset about something, but wouldn't say what.
"During the interval Zahina said to me, 'Laura was really upset, wasn't she?' and I could see she was really pleased that Laura was upset and that she felt she'd driven a wedge between Laura and me. There was something deeply unpleasant about the way she said it."
Her behaviour was a far cry from what Julie had hoped for. Indeed on paper, she reasoned, Zahina had been the perfect choice.
Her circumstances were particularly sad. Her family in Tanzania were very poor and she and her sister lived with their mother and stepfather in a one-room tenement.
"It is not clear why her family decided to send her to Britain but she arrived here after it was apparently arranged for her to stay with an uncle and his British partner.
Soon after this, however, the couple separated and the uncle's partner was left alone to look after Zahina. Attempts to send her back to Tanzania were unsuccessful because her parents could not be traced. Unwanted in Tanzania and here in Britain, she was taken into care.
One of the reasons Julie was drawn to Zahina was because her own daughter, Laura, now 13, was half Tanzanian. Her father is a Tanzanian teacher whom Julie had a long relationship with while working in the country as an aid worker in the Eighties.
Julie was pregnant with Laura when she returned to Britain in 1994. The relationship with her boyfriend ended the following year but Laura continues to see her father, who remains in Tanzania.
Julie had hoped she might settle down with someone else and have another child, but it did not happen. Five years ago, aged 44, she accepted that she was highly unlikely now to fall pregnant if she met someone and began to consider the possibility of adoption.
"I really felt that I wanted to become a parent for a second time and the idea of having two children appealed to my sense of family."
The following year she applied to Social Services to be considered as an adoptive parent.
She hoped she would be able to adopt a child aged three to four, preferably a girl, because Laura had said she would love to have a sister.
She underwent a rigorous assessment process, including inteviews with social workers about her past history and family relationships, her motivation and expectations of adoption, and a six-week course in which issues discussed included the emotional needs of children who have been through the care system.
Being a single parent was not an issue; Social Services now consider all types of family set ups. In 2004 Julie was told her application had been successful.
The next year, her social worker showed Julie an advertisement she had spotted in an adoption magazine in which an appeal was made for a home for Zahina.
"The ad said she was lively, bright and intelligent and said she had formed a close attachment to her foster carer and would have no problems doing so again. I thought she looked lovely, she had a really appealing face."
But appealing as Zahina undoubtedly was the little girl clearly had problems, too.
Julie says that for the first six months she lived with them she put in a huge emotional investment trying to establish a mother/daughter relationship with Zahina, chatting to her, playing with her, taking her on outings, but it was always the same.
"I simply couldn't reach her. I suppose I did get frustrated by it. I would say to her sometimes: 'Do you want me to be your mummy?', and she would reply: 'No, I've already got one.'
"Zahina would repeatedly push the boundaries and disobey me, it was very difficult. I would tell her she had to stay on the pavement when she went out on her roller skates, and she would go on the road. I would tell her she couldn't go knocking on friend's doors late at night, and she would do it.
"Once when she had done something or other I had asked her not to, she just gave me this look as if to say: 'What are you going to do about it?' I thought to myself: 'You just don't care, do you?'
"It was not the incidents in themselves that bothered me, more the underlying emotional gap."
She sought help from Social Services, asking if any psychotherapy was available for Zahina, with counselling for her, but was told it was not possible to access those services in Manchester.
After seven to eight months, Julie says, something inside her "gave up".
"I realised I would not be able to attain with Zahina anything approaching a mother/ daughter relationship. I was worried that I might in the future feel a creeping resentment towards her.
"Looking after children takes time, energy and effort and I wasn't getting anything back. I felt a dull ache inside me. It was awful.
"I could see myself in ten years' time being like one of those parents who go on about how they've done so much for their children, and got so little back."
Meanwhile, Zahina was clearly unhappy, too. She took to writing stories about her toy tiger, Stripes, and asked Julie if she would like to hear one.
"In this one, Stripes was living with a nasty adoptive mother who threw him out on the street saying: 'Get away you naughty cub, you can't come back here.' Luckily, all was not lost because Stripes found his birth mummy.
"I took a deep breath and asked Zahina whether she thought she might be thrown out on the street like Stripes.
"She said yes and though I tried to reassure her that this would never be the case, it hit me really hard. I rang the social worker for advice but she told me not to worry, saying it was great Zahina was expressing herself."
Over the following few weeks, Zahina wrote four more stories about Stripes. "The adoptive mother was not mentioned again, but they all talked about Stripes losing his mother and setting out to look for her.
"I didn't need to be a psychiatrist to work out what Zahina wanted most in the world. It was heartbreaking, because I knew she'd been abandoned and that no one was coming to get her."
Laura, too, was suffering and had started to retreat to her room to escape.
"But even then Zahina would not leave her alone and would push her way in," says Julie. "Sometimes she took things from Laura's room, causing terrible rows.
"With the benefit of hindsight I don't think Zahina should have been placed with someone who had a birth daughter, she would have been better going to a couple who had no children and would be able to give their undivided attention.
"She saw it as a competition to try to supplant Laura, not consciously, of course, and it was the behaviour of a deeply unhappy child.
"I think our situation reflected something in her past. I think she saw her sister as the favourite in Tanzania."
Around this time, Zahina wrote a letter to her mother in Tanzania, asking when she was coming to fetch her. Eventually she received a card, but there was no reply to her questions.
"The penny dropped, and she realised her mother wasn't coming to get her," says Julie. "She had no other option but me. At that point she actually started making more effort, but it was too late by then.
"It's hard to explain, but deep inside me I'd given up and I couldn't go back. I began to be very anxious about what to do."
A year after Zahina had come to live with her, Julie was confronted with the most agonising decision of her life - should she go ahead with the adoption?
She decided she did not want to but, desperately worried about the impact this would have on Zahina, avoided doing anything about it.
Ironically, it was Zahina herself who forced her hand. The little girl must have sensed that Julie was withdrawing from her and was having nightmares about falling down a hole. She was calling out to Julie but she wasn't there.
"I realised we couldn't go on like this, with all of us so anxious," says Julie. "I felt it might be damaging for Zahina."
She made up her mind - she would give Zahina back. "It was very sad and distressing, of course, but I could not ignore the fact that things weren't right."
And so this little girl, shunted from one place to another, was to be rejected once more.
"When I did tell Zahina she was incredibly upset, she just sobbed and sobbed. It was hard to take. She said she'd tried so hard, and got nothing back, and I told her I knew what she meant because that was exactly how I had felt.
"By that I don't mean I was blaming her. I was the adult in the situation and I had to take full responsibility."
One must ask at this juncture whether Julie was rather naive in undertaking this adoption. Zahina was not a baby, she was a seven-year-old whose life up to that point had been a deeply unhappy one.
She was a thinking, feeling young person having to cope with the distressing knowledge that her mother had dumped her in a foreign country to be rid of her.
Surely she was never going to be the malleable blank canvas Julie appears to have wished for.
And was it really so surprising that there were tensions and jealousies with Julie's own daughter Laura, an 11-year-old only child who was suddenly expected to share her home and her mother's affection with a stranger?
"When I told the social worker she didn't seem particularly surprised," says Julie defensively.
"She asked me to keep it from Zahina until they found a foster home for her because Social Services believe it is better if a move happens reasonably quickly."
Julie is under no illusions about the impact this second rejection may have had on Zahina. "I felt sure it was definitely the right decision for me and my daughter," says Julie, "but I was not absolutely sure it was the right decision for her."
In August last year, just over a year after Zahina came to live with them, Julie and Laura packed her bags and drove her back to Somerset to another foster family.
"When I asked Zahina what the hardest thing about it was she said: 'Leaving you.' It was terrible. But as we drove down to Somerset the barriers came up again, it was a form of self-protection.
"I couldn't bear the thought of leaving her with these strangers, I felt completely devastated and was crying, I was very emotional.
"But I was also relieved. I had my life back, my family back.
"What happened with Zahina made me appreciate how good my relationship with Laura is, how it works so well with just the two of us."
Does she worry about the impact her decision has had on Zahina?
"Yes I realise that I have set a pattern of rejection," says Julie. "I would rather it hadn't happened.
"Giving Zahina back was the hardest thing I have done in my life, but when she had gone my overwhelming emotion was one of relief.
"Zahina and I had different expectations. I hadn't expected to replicate the relationship I had with my daughter but I had expected a certain emotional closeness.
"That was not Zahina's expectation of our relationship.
"But Zahina and I went on a journey together and I hope she learnt something about the nature of parenting and family relationships. While she was with me she came to terms with a lot of her past."
Today Zahina is in a children's home, waiting to be found somewhere permanent. Julie says there are a couple of prospective parents who are interested in adopting her.
"I felt terrible about having to give her back, and the way things turned out, but I do not regret it.
"In the end I did what I thought was best."
but RAD kids who are unredeemable are RARE, even among children who have RAD characteristics. there is a LOT you can do with children devastated by early attachment breaks. You just have to KNOW what you’re getting yourself into, and be stronger than the pain of the child. I deal with parents every week who ask me for help and input about their adopted children’s issues. There is so much help available now. And knowing personally the love of God can turned EVERYTHING around, in understanding the power of redemption for your foster / adopted child.
That line struck me, too. The girl was hoping, somehow, to go back home to Africa. When she finally figured out that wasn't going to happen, she started really trying to make a go of it in UK.
At which point, she gets stiff-armed. Again.
That really sucks.
You don’t have the “call” or passion for adoption, and that’s okay. I don’t consider us “living off of government money”. If you saw our life, and knew us, you would never even think that. I’m glad that God provided a way to keep all four siblings together so that i do not have to work outside the home, and can at least not worry about where we will live and having plenty to eat and taking care of all their basic needs. Friends, family, churches help us each month with the shortfall. Down the road I will definitely need to work part time at something, I imagine. But for now — and the immediate future — we’re doing great. We’re in a VERY unique situation, and I’m glad for the monies available so that I can offer these kids the life they so deserve.
I wish so much for my kids to have a daddy someday, and God knows this also. He hears their prayers for this, and i trust Him to provide ALL our needs — in His way and time.
I guess I see the opposite, the truly fixed’ RAD child is rare. (at least that’s what I’ve seen and been told). I’m not saying they are all serial killers or going to prison, just that they usually aren’t the ‘huggy, kissy, touchy, feely’ kind of child. A person wanting to feel loved and validated by a RAD-ish will be very disappointed. They usually will have a degree of emotional distance and isolation that will make bonding in the classic sense rare.
Granted, I’m not throwing these kids under the bus, just understanding that their emotional depth and breadth will always be different is a big step in working with them.
and that’s the key — knowing the potential limitations, and being realistic about them. HOWEVER, it’s critical to making sure in your own mind you do not label them or limit them by the RAD diagnosis. God can and does heal deep wounds within the human heart, and that is all that RAD really is — deep emotional, mental, spiritual, physical wounds.
Bingo. I've learned that kids have incredibly sensitive BS meters. They may not always be able to put it in words (though Zahina seems to have done so), but they know.
And a little girl who's been through as much as this one has ... she's probably got a far more adult worldview than do either the author of this dreck, or the woman who couldn't be bothered to understand....
But, a few weeks, or 6 months surely isn’t near enough time to come to that conclusion.
This “woman” cut this kid loose because the kid wouldn’t fit her preconceived fairy tale plans. If after a couple YEARS, the child was still a problem, then I could accept this adoptive mother’s opinions, but still not accept her tossing one back in the pond. She would just have to learn to treat that child differently.
I guess it depends on your belief system and what you know about yourself. I personally beleive that you can’t create in a human what isn’t there-— limbs don’t grow back, nor can full emotions come from no source for basis. It’s more of an amputation or a missing organ that an actual loss.
Again, a lot of this is based on personal and familial experience. And the best thing you can do for an RAD kid is just say “Hey, whatcha are is just fine.” So if that kid/adult never understands bonding, or never reacts or feels a certain way that you think they should, that is who they are.
Oh I agree,
It’s like adopting a child wanting a piano prodigy and finding out that they don’t have the eye-to-hand coordination to play chopsticks, much less Chopin.
With these kids, you have to take three steps back and look at who they are, and sometimes its a shock. They may always be distant, cold, withdrawn etc. Still, it isn’t you they are rejecting, it’s simply they way they respond to the outside world. So you have to reformat how you deal with them.
Statistics show that children raised by single parents, especially mothers, have more problems than children raised by married couples. They exhibit more bad behavior, are more likely to grow up in poverty, to drop out of school, etc. This isn’t even debatable. While some single parents do a good job as a rule they cannot and do not do as good a job raising children as married parents do. Children need a mother and a father. It is wrong to deprive a child of the opportunity to have both a mother and a father by placing him or her with a single parent. Adoption isn’t about boosting the self esteem of the parent(s). It is about doing what is right for the child.
Allowing single people to adopt children is just another way of weakening and redefining the family.
This woman set about adopting a child as though she were adopting a puppy from the dog pound. She had no idea what this girl’s needs were or what she was getting herself and her daughter into. In the past, she would never have been allowed to adopt a child because of her marital status. If that had been the case today, everyone involved would have been spared a lot of grief.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/oct/30pune.htm
US cultural exchange turns into nightmare for Pune girl
October 30, 2007 14:16 IST
Top Emailed Features
Little did the 16-year-old Nikita Dhavle know when she left Pune for the US with dreamy eyes and an idealism of a cultural ambassador, that she would return in three months, with a scarred mind and a fractured hand.
In what turned out to be a nightmare, Nikita, a bright student of a city school, selected under a cultural exchange programme of the American Field Service, landed in of Minnesota in the first week of August unaware of the hostility that awaited her in the form of the host family in Pipestone.
“I was asked to clean the kitchen, dining room, wash clothes, clean utensils, mow the lawn. I also cleaned the barn where the horses were kept,” the girl, who returned to India on October 26, told PTI.
“It seemed to me that what they wanted was a domestic slave who parades as a cultural ambassador,” a disillusioned Nikita said.
Nikita, who joined the Raff family in Pipestone after an AFS local coordinator screened the host family.
She was in for a rude shock when after two weeks, Ryan, the teenage son who was away, returned home.
“I came to know later that he was on probation for drunken driving,” she said.
Nikita, a keen learner with good academic and extra-curricular activity record, joined the Pipestone Central School to utilise her 11-month stay under the programme. But her problems with her host family continued.
“Ryan hurled abuses at me and said he the never liked the concept of cultural exchange. I used to wake up to violent arguments between the boy and the host mom and at times I saw them wrestle with each other on the floor. The lady of the house used to ask me pretentiously whether I was overworked but never cared to reduce the load,” said Nikita.
“Once in a fit of rage, the host mom physically pushed me when I requested her to encash my cheque as I needed money. Ryan took every opportunity to insult me.”
A fall in the barn fractured her left hand. The Raffs took her to hospital to plaster it but did not care to keep the follow-up dates with the doctor, Nikita recounted. By that time the girl who had made a favourable impression at the school, had begun to think of returning home.
She spoke to her parents in Pune and sent an e-mail to AFS functionaries in Delhi urging them to bring her back as she was no longer interested in completing the stay. Nikita was directed to the local coordinator of AFS who told her “You can change the host. But it could be from bad to worse. All families here are the same. Learn to accept and take things in good humour.”
With her disillusionment mounting, and the fracture of the hand adding to her agony and she decided to put her foot down and told AFS officials that “students who come here do not deserve this treatment”.
The emotional bruises inflicted on Nikita did not escape the attention of an alert faculty member of the Pipestone school who was fond of her and the teacher sounded the local sheriff that all was not well with the foreign student who looked sulky and depressed.
“I could have proper meal only at the school for lunch. At home the cooking was subject to the whims and fancies of the host mom. For two weeks, I only ate omlettes at home. When I requested her to teach me some American preparations, Ryan said teaching you amounted to teaching a dog,” Nikita recalled.
“Sheriff Dan Delanie was a nice man, he spoke to me affectionately trying to understand my predicament. He said I could change the family if I want or return home as per my wish,” Nikita said.
When she conveyed all the concerned that she wanted to go back she was advised to cite ‘homesickness’ as the reason for her premature departure.
But she refused despite repeated pressure and stuck to her stand that she was not comfortable there.
Meanwhile, Nikita’s mother, Anita, a school teacher, and her uncle Sarang Kamtekar, who is vice president of Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena, the students’ wing of Shiv Sena, contacted some Indian Americans settled in Minnesota appealing them to help her out.
Kamtekar said they got a very heartening response from the Indian community who contacted Nikita and was ready to arrange for her return journey. But her status of a minor posed some legal difficulties.
Finally on clearance from the Sheriff, the AFS functionaries decided to send Nikita back cutting short her stay.
She was sent to Chicago where she failed meet with an AFS contact who was supposed to put her on a flight to Amsterdam en route to Delhi.
“With none to escort me and my hand in plaster evoked suspicions at the airport and I was subjected to extra scanning at every point”, she said.
On her arrival in Delhi, Nikita met Adnan Siddiqui, cultural counsel at the US embassy. He had been briefed by AFS activists. “He told me he would look into the matter,” said Nikita, who returned to Pune with her uncle Kametkar who has demanded action against the host family in Minnesota who subjected her to mental and physical torture.
what you clearly do NOT understand is the total HELL us “foster adoptive” parents have to go through before we can finalize our adoptions. The birthparents parental rights have to be terminated — and then they have usually YEARS of appeals granted to them with tax paid for attorneys to represent them (who fight like HELL for their rights, no matter how bad the abuse). It took 2 1/2 YEARS before we could finalize — for what the birthparents put us through. My kids attorneys told me that the court (Judge) realizes the birthparents are only trying to “retrive repossessed property” in fighting the termination of their parental rights, since obviously they didn’t care one BIT about loving their kids or keeping them safe before they lost custody of them. They’re just ticked off that the govt came in and took them away. But the RIGHT are all on their side — unlike international adoptions. It costs a whole LOT more $$$$ to adopt internationally, and it’s true that you rarely have to deal with birthparents, but you’re dealing with profound cross-culture issues that SCARE kids to death — bringing them on a plane to a new country that looks like a new planet — away from EVERYTHING familiar, and usually a new language also. All of that has a serious effect on kids, no matter how well they may seem to adjust initially.
Not all children need to adopted into a two parent home. Those with histories of long term sexual abuse do better in same gender households, at least until the are past a certain degree of trauma. And for the sake of those of the opposite sex, these kids have blurred lines between fact and fiction, time is elastic and the most innocent behavior reads differently to them.
So “he/she touched me there!” may have happened 2 months ago with the abuser, not 2 days ago with the adoptive parent.
For the first time in her 44 years, it would appear.
And even then,"taking responsibility" meant "taking the easy way out."
Sometimes you are surprised-— you may not get what you expect right away.
I have two friends that raised a niece and nephew for about 5 years, until they returned to their bio parents as teens.
Sadly, the boy is in prison now, but....they just recently heard from the girl. She’s healthy, happy, married with a family of her own. And she credits them with her success, and even tells her kids that they were who made the difference in her life.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.