To Sing Frogs Chapter 39a

Chapter 39

 

Armageddon and Beyond

 

Sarah sat on Amy’s lap, crying. “It was only a dream, princess. Everything is okay. Mama Oksana can’t come and take you away.” My wife was referring to Sarah’s birth mother in the manner she always did.

“Bot I am fraid.”

“I know, princess. You don’t have to worry, though. Mama Oksana doesn’t have enough money to come to America. She doesn’t know where we live. Do you remember we can’t find Marina because there are laws in Russia that don’t let people tell where children go when they leave the orphanage?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So no one can tell Mama Oksana where you are. Everybody has scary dreams sometimes. But you are safe, here. Don’t worry.”

 

 

My fears of only being partially successful in adopting the remaining siblings turned out to be correct. A few pages or even chapters in this book would not do justice to the story. A whole other book would be required. Even so, there were things in our second foray into adoption from Russia that affected our family dramatically. This book would be incomplete without touching those subjects.

According to an orphanage worker who claimed to have raised Oksana—birth mother of our daughters—the new sibling looked just like her mother. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “If you had that girl and her mother standing side by side, at the same age, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.” The resemblance didn’t go unnoticed by our other daughters. Bad dreams became the norm for Sarah and Celeste. The sibling who looked like Oksana turned our family on its ear.

In comparison to our new teenaged daughter, Sarah’s psychological difficulties were a Sunday school picnic. We learned a whole new vocabulary in psychology. Reactive Attachment Disorder was antagonized by her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Borderline Personality Syndrome, Developmental Disorder, with other syndromes and disorders suspected and discussed while not officially diagnosed. This daughter did hide butcher knives.

Marina-Grigorievna had been right to tell us not to take that girl into our home. We would have been wrong to follow her counsel. Everyone deserves a chance. The day would also come when Sarah and Celeste would need to know that we had done everything we could to avoid leaving anyone behind.

That didn’t help with the problems of the day. Brian Taracena did. The psychologist came highly recommended. That must have been the reason for the length of his waiting list. Eventually, though, he agreed to work with our children from Russia. Each of our children were given tools to work through their challenges. “Keel de Mama” games began to reduce in their frequency. Brian coaxed our family along in the right direction. The teen that was the image of her birth mother pulled us the other way.

Sarah and Celeste remembered the power they felt emitted from their birth mother as it came out in the aggressive behaviors of their sister. Of course they wanted to wield such power. We were constantly trying to keep them from rage. The worst of their orphanage behaviors, which had been slowly and surely improving, returned with a vengeance as they mimicked the actions and attitudes of an older sister.

It was Denney who suffered the most at her hand. The little boy was aware that both of his parents had died when he was a baby, even though he didn’t yet know the details. When the troubled sister threatened a bloody knife-induced death for her new parents, it was horrifically real for our youngest son. The little boy would come to his mother crying about dreams of finding our bodies in bed, decapitated and lying in sheets covered in blood. “Who will be my mama and daddy then?” he would ask. Eventually Denney would be diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The psychologist’s belief was that it was brought on by the death of his birth parents coupled with an overwhelming fear of losing his new mom and dad.

Jack withdrew. The joy of our home hated confrontation and he flatly refused to participate in the exchanges. He withdrew to his bedroom. We dragged him out for time with the family as there were breaks in the storm. He was allowed to slip away when the thunder rolled. We put a television with videogames in his bedroom so he would have something to do while avoiding the thing that bothered him most. Contention.

 

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