Six When He Came to Us: A Memoir of International Adoption by Ellie Porte Parker

This memoir is not actually aimed at young adults, though the prose is accessible enough for a teen interested in adoption issues to get through it easily. Porte-Parker’s straightforward, mainly chronological story traces the journey of her adopted son, Dima, from his orphanage in Russia through his formative years in our western culture, with all the awkward adjustments.

We are carefully led through the adoption process itself, which will have the reader’s heart full by the time Dima, a shy, thoughtful, and introspective boy with some physical disabilities, leaves the only home he’s known on very little notice for America with his virtual stranger of a mother. Dima had thought he would be placed in a family living near the orphanage and thus be able to see his friends. Instead he finds himself thousands of miles away in this strange, rich country with a family who doesn’t speak his language.

Porte-Parker’s prose is conversational and witty, even as she admits her primal doubts in honest detail. There were many things to be concerned about in adopting an older child, besides his vastly different culture of origin. For example, there were academic delays that for an American child would have been addressed much earlier in his development.

The memoir addresses the many moral conundrums associated with intercultural adoption. If, like me, you believed that a child from the former Soviet Union hit the jackpot by being adopted by an American family, it will be revealing to experience the more complicated reality.   The old culture–especially in regards to the language–does not magically morph into the new. But Dima’s transition is lovely to read about, a slow and thoughtful journey toward adulthood in this new environment that allowed him to experience life-altering love.

Six When He Came to Us is available from Dog Ear Publishing. Below is a guest blog from the author of the book:

 

A writing teacher once told me that some stories just can’t be told over a cup of coffee and there’s just no way to share them without writing at least a short story, or God forbid, a book. I took that to heart, and when I adopted my son from Russia in 1993, when he was six years old, the experience was so life-changing for me that there was nothing else I could do but write. I come from a family of writers anyway, and those that aren’t published still have pages of writing stuffed somewhere or other in their belongings or on their computers, so I knew it was the only way. In my journey to explore my experiences with Dmitry and to share them, I started out with a short humorous story called Pet Connections which appeared in Chicken Soup for the Adopted Soul, but it wasn’t enough. I had to share the ways in which my world view and ideas about family and connections had grown and shifted, and it turned out that there was no other way for me than to write a memoir.    

I also wanted to tell our story because it had a satisfying outcome in contrast to the stories that were all over the news about heart-wrenching adoptions of children irreparably damaged by their early experiences. While I understood and had compassion for those families, I felt that our story was another necessary piece to the puzzle of international adoption because it spoke to the resiliency of the human spirit and the desire of people to connect to one another despite the risk. I wanted to explore the cultural assumptions that we make about family connections, love and belonging, and the ways in which our experiences shape us, sometimes with unlikely results. I felt that this experience had lessons about how we love without regard to blood ties, history and origins.

My own background is as a licensed psychologist with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Prior to beginning my rookie year as a mom, I had worked with families and children, and had a lot of experience assessing developmental issues in children. I’d seen the impact of early experiences on children and had spent significant time thinking about the interaction between the environment, the brain and the resulting behavior. 

I began writing this book in about 1999.  I went to the Saratoga Springs Public Library every day with my laptop and started to work on this memoir, sitting at the same table most times. Saratoga Springs is a small town and other writers noticed that I was there every day. It turned out that John McPherson, the cartoonist of Close to Home, and Matt Witten who was  at the time writing a mystery set in Saratoga, called Breakfast at Madeline’s, were, along with several other writers and artists, starting a co-op and I was invited to join. This became the Creative Bloc and over the years many cartoons, books, and other graphic art works have originated there.  I joined the Creative Bloc, and wrote this book during a couple of years there. I thought about getting it published, but it was difficult to find an agent, go through the whole process, and I was also a little uneasy about putting out our personal story while Dmitry and my step-son Franklin, who is also part of the book, were still so young. So, in true family tradition, the book lingered on my computer for years, the hard copy stuffed in my dresser drawer. 

Last year, I decided that I would publish it. It had become easier with the advent of accessible self-publishing companies, and of Amazon, and of websites to publicize the book. I found a copy-editor, and decided after a good bit of research, to go with Dog-Ear publishing. The process itself was easy and the book is on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.

So far it’s been a good experience. The book is accessible and humorous in part, and my hope is that it helps readers gain insight on different aspects of the intriguing and complicated world of international adoption. It presents our story as one part of the picture, and I hope a useful one.

The following is an excerpt from the back cover:

It didn’t take long to realize that parenthood was not going to be anything like what I’d imagined. I knew it on that very first day when my newly adopted son stretched out his fingers in front of him, in the cold Moscow air, to show me that he had no gloves on his hands and I realized I had left his brand new gloves on the plane. We watched together as the plane taxied down the runway, leaving with his new gloves still aboard. He looked at me with disappointment, reached for the packet of adoption papers that I carried under my arm and wordlessly took it from me.  He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he knew it was important and that, clearly, I was too careless to be trusted with it. From then on, he insisted on carrying the packet himself. The tone of our relationship was set.

I knew then that not only was I in over my head, but that parenthood was not going to be anything like what I’d anticipated. What I didn’t know was how deeply I would grow to love this child, and how parenting him would change my assumptions about the world.  While this is a personal memoir of raising a child who was adopted in 1993 and had lived in Russian orphanages the first six years of his life, it intertwines our story with the emerging research about the effects of orphanage life on children.  

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