I opened an email this morning with the link to this most disheartening story. My first reaction was, “Really? She did that? How on earth did she get him all the way there without anyone realizing what was going on?” After reading a few accounts, I’m still not sure all of the facts are out in the open. It doesn’t matter. Putting a child on a plane to send him overseas and abandoning him in the process, making him carry a note explaining that he’s being sent back, is wrong. Given that this was such a public way to abandon a child (how could it not make the news?), my inclination is that this woman had reached a breaking point. Regardless, she is the adult. He is a child. He is a broken, abandoned child, back at an orphanage, among one of 740,000 other Russian children without parental custody. Adults–we have to do better than this. We must do better than this.

I don’t know where to begin.  I can tell you my first response was not outrage or disbelief, as it should have been.  Nor was my first response a protective reflex to send Ms. Hansen to the far reaches of the world, alone, rejected, abandoned and confused as her son must have felt, although it should have been.  My first response was despair – for what the boy has been through, for what humans are capable for doing to one another, and for all the failures of many people in this story.

I honestly can’t make heads or tails of this story.  I’m not knowledgeable about contemporary adoption laws, issues, reform and advocacy, as my GIMH colleagues are.   I only know what I have lived – abandonment and adoption have been with me my whole life.  Ms. Hansen and Artem haunt me.  It would be so easy to demonize Ms. Hansen, but I can’t help but believe that she truly felt she was doing the right thing.  Perhaps that is my inner adoptee speaking – we are programmed to believe that mothers abandon for their children’s own good.  I can’t help but hope that another family with find their happiness in this innocent boy.  Perhaps that is my inner adoptive mom speaking – hoping that a family’s love can cover the wrongs done to any child.

We are all relieved that Artem is at least alive.  However, I also believe there are worse things than death, and I’m not sure if this could be one of them.  I know the damage one rejection does to a child.  I can’t fathom what a second would do.  I have spent many years contemplating the ways that people can hurt one another and the ways we can heal each other.  In a world that fails so many of our children, I can only pray that we haven’t lost Artem Hansen for good.

Lisa Says:

Maybe this single mother tried to get help and nobody listened to her.  Maybe she was so desperate and alone and frightened that she didn’t know what to do.  And just maybe she feared that she was becoming a monster who might snap; maybe she was afraid that she would hurt or even kill this little boy.

This is terrible and tragic, but it could have been worse… much, much worse for this little boy.  Have we already forgotten Lydia Schatz who died only two months ago?   Another internationally adopted child who was beaten to death by her parents.

I don’t know  Torry Hansen’s story, and maybe she is a vile, wicked, selfish woman – but maybe she is not so different from me or you.  Perhaps she was reduced to somebody that even she could no longer recognize.

Please don’t think I am making excuses for her… I’m just glad that the boy is alive.

My mind is swirling with sad thoughts about this situation; I think it is time to take a breath and walk away from the computer.  I have plenty of dirty dishes to wash.

If you have more emotional energy to think about adoptions that don’t make it, go to the blog, Is There Any Mommy Out There to read the post, Differences.

Carissa says:

I have really been trying to think this situation through for the last few days. And at first read this situation angered me, what mother would send her child to a foreign country (even one the child had been in for 7 years prior to becoming her child) without anyone knowing her son was coming or any word to him about what was going on. I was angry that it appeared that the woman was only thinking about her, what about this child ~ what about everything he had been through in his short life. I am usually a child advocate and not really a parent advocate (even before I became an adoptive parent I gave very little benefit of the doubt to parents who did things that would affect their children).

Then a friend, a good friend, made a few points that I had not even considered like what if this little boy had been suffering from some major issues from before he was born or even that had occurred during his institutionalization, what if mom had major post adoption depression and really was not thinking clearly, what if all these things played together and this appeared to be the only option to her at the time. But I wonder if that was the case where was this woman’s support system, the people who could help her see clearly. The question that has been swimming in my head is where was this woman’s agency? I read an article that said just 4 short months after the adoption everything was good according to a post placement report ~ so all of the problems occurred in just three months? Really, how much help could she have sought in three short months? Not much in my opinion, the circumstances of his life for seven years cannot be undone overnight, it takes time, it takes love.

The other thing that I wonder about is how much information this woman was given about Russian orphanages, about what it is possible that her new son had seen or not seen, what it took for him to survive to this point, what the transition to loving family would be like because I am here to tell you that I do not think that the adoption community puts out there enough that rarely when you arrive home with your new child is it all roses and rainbows and the older the child the less that chance. I know that all I read were the happy stories, the ones where the children “fit like a glove in their family immediately” and that is NOT what happened in our family and as soon as I put out there that it was not what I had been expecting (or been told to expect) I had fellow adoptive parents coming out of the woodwork letting me know they had been there and it does get better and if not there is help, even if that help may also include a new home for your child to do what is best for him/her.

I agree with everyone else that at least this little boy is alive, and I thank God for that but I also pray that someday we get the whole story instead of the bits and pieces that are out there now, there has to be more to the story. And maybe it is a good time to take a look at those adoption agreements and make it so this type of child abandonment/abuse can never happen again.