Meeting
In Person
“We
ought never to bear a grudge against people,
ought
never to judge them by some memory of an unkind action
for
we do not know all the good that at other moments
their
hearts may have sincerely desired and realized.”
– Marcel
Proust
The
weekend of May 2, I traveled to the Cleveland area to attend a family
function, the First Communion of my goddaughter. Prior to leaving, I had called Denise Hubbard and asked if I could stop
by her home to review my documents and meet with her personally. Happily, she granted my request and I was able to meet her family at
their home in Medina.
The Hubbard family lived in a modest home on beautiful acreage. I met her three sons and husband on my way in.
Denise greeted me pleasantly and I got to meet her daughter Emily who was
happily running around prior to her nap. Finally,
Denise put Emily down for her nap and we began to talk shop.
While we met, her cell phone rang a few times and the mailman delivered a
Sunday Express Mail delivery package. She
opened it to show me a fellow BBAS client’s paperwork and some photos of the
family, who looked excited.
I commented on how neat and clean the dossier was that the family had sent. She replied that some families sent her very dirty paperwork – “ketchup stains and everything,” she said.
I wondered too if that family was as excited as Daniel and I were about
our up coming child. She also took the time out to say that some of the women who
adopt “just sit back and wait for their babies to come home.”
At that time, I asked her a few questions about her business and how she placed children. I asked her about the race issue in adoption, one thing that really galled me that few people seemed to talk about publicly.
She told me that she had clients who had asked specifically for referrals
with “blonde hair and blue eyes.” To those clients she claimed to say she
could not guarantee that. I had to
agree, for we weren’t adopting from Russia because of race.
I wondered then, how Denise had come to adopt Emily. It was she who told me that they had been taken by a “large agency” in Ohio for a failed Russian adoption and had lost approximately $8,000 with the “large agency.”
She didn’t need to
mention names – it had to be EAC. It
was known at that time that they charged from $25,000 to $30,000 per adoption,
which was on the high end of things.
Sarcastically I asked her, “Oh, do you mean EAC?” Denise vigorously shook her head up and down yes; she claimed that she was in litigation with EAC for the $8,000 and was very dismayed at how they handled their business by swindling prospective adoptive parents.
Building Blocks, she
assured me, was nothing like EAC. No gifts and no bribes.
She then asked if I would
like to see videos of referrals that had already been accepted by families. It was the first time I had ever seen referral videos before, so I was
curious as to how the children appeared.
The videos, shown on her large-screen TV set, were children of various ages. The older children were shown singing and dancing in a group; Denise said that they always sang the one song.
The next part of the video would have the child being asked questions in Russian – “how old are you?’ “What is your name?” It was like an interrogation to highlight the fact that the kids had brains in their heads.
I then asked her if the children, the older ones especially, knew why
they were being videotaped. She
said that they did. I could imagine
that to these children, these videotapes were the physical line between heaven
and hell, salvation and damnation to a life in the Internat (the Russian system
that, nominally at least, takes care of older orphans).
Of one little boy in particular Denise said, “Definitely FAS” and another of
another little girl in the background who was dancing and singing with the
group, Denise had said she was interested in adopting out; however, the girl was
not available because her biological mother would not relinquish rights. She felt that she was very adoptable due to her willingness to
cooperate and the fact that she hadn’t been in the orphanage system for that
long of a time.
There was one interesting video of a boy who appeared to be about a year and a half old — maybe older. He was shown with his fat caregiver — something Denise commented on.
She said, “I would just love to take the fat off of those women and feed it to
those kids!” I had to agree. The
fat was literally hanging off of the caregiver’s arms in quite a Russian
fashion.
The boy, who I was told had been adopted by a BBAS family, was shown sitting on a couch, moving his head back and forth.
In one scene, the heavy caregiver is speaking to him. He appeared not to be interested in following the caregiver’s instructions. He lay on the floor and whined.
Denise explained to me that the parents had this particular videotape reviewed by a physician who specialized in doing international adoptions. The physician allegedly told the family that the boy was autistic, for he was moving his head back and forth on the couch.
The parents ignored the doctor’s advice; Denise said that the child was
in no way autistic, but had an ear infection the day the video was shot.
“Today, “ she said, “he is in a loving home and has no health
problems whatsoever.”
I asked Denise if that was to show the sex of the baby. I noted the closeups that the cameraperson made on the baby’s faces — to show any signs of FAS, explained Denise.
“When you watch this video, the baby almost falls off the stand they
have him on. You just want to rush up to the screen and catch him before
he falls off!” And indeed, he
almost did roll off the table — right into his caregiver’s arms.
“Case” it said on the outside. From her actions, I believe that it was the first time that she had looked at it.
She pulled out the photos of our house and the rooms in our home. One room we have was set up for a little girl (we had never gotten around
to de-feminizing it, and even today with its cutesy pink-and-white décor it
does double duty as our guest room and computer room). Denise said, “Oh, what a perfect room for your little girl!”
But more importantly, a document as critical to our adoption as our homestudy had sat
for approximately two weeks without anyone bothering to review it
Thankfully, I was informed then. She
also informed me that our financial documents had to be redone — notarized,
certified and apostilled.