5/10/98
The pleasant sentimentality of Mother's Day is for some parents a jarring reminder that their families are not much like the greeting-card model. They're the ones who fared to Romania or Kazakhstan or Korea and brought home a child to love, only to discover with dawning horror that their infant or toddler had suffered grave and perhaps permanent harm from months or years in an orphanage. 
     For support, some of those families look to a grassroots group called the Parent Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child, which held a conference last weekend in Fort Collins, co-sponsored by the Colorado State University College of Applied Human Sciences and Adoptive Families of Denver. 
     The parents I talked to don't regret their decision to adopt; what they regret, or sometimes resent, is that they were totally unprepared. They were told, or allowed themselves to believe, that all their children need is love. But for the ones most severely wounded, no amount of love will ever be enough. 
     Lois Hannon, who edits the PNPIC newsletter, has a 10-year-old daughter adopted from an orphanage in Romania. The child is entirely nonverbal, Hannon said, so she's teaching her to communicate using pictures and signs from a notebook, stuck on strips of Velcro. 
     ``We wish we had known where to go for help the moment we got off the plane from Romania,'' she wrote in the newsletter. ``We wasted two valuable years thinking that the problems would magically disappear with love, nutrition and medical attention!'' 
     She cites a study of adopted Romanian children by Dr. Victor Groze that found 20 percent were thriving, 60 percent had made good progress but still hadn't caught up with other children their age, and 20 percent had improved hardly at all. 
     What kind of problems? At one panel discussion, a woman in the audience asked for suggestions on how to get the right kind of help from her child's school. The school wanted to label her child ``mentally impaired,'' she said. Another suggested she ask for the diagnosis ``multiple disabilities,'' and that seems to sum it up. 
     Some of the children are emotionally damaged. They've had virtually no human contact, and they don't know how to make emotional attachments. One woman told me her son was fortunate, because at the age of six months, he was badly burned when a heater fell on him. ``People had to take care of him,'' she said. ``They held him and talked to him.'' 
     Difficulties with attachment take many forms, said Dr. Theodore Gaensbauer. Some children never connect with anyone, while others will approach even strangers. Some are aggressive, even violent; others try to take on premature adult roles. 
     Renee Polreis, who was convicted last year of murdering her 2   year old son, claimed he had an attachment disorder. No provocation is sufficient to justify beating a child to death with a wooden spoon, but the phenomenon is real and it can be very hard for parents to cope with. Hannon told of a mother who is afraid to be alone with her 8-year-old son, because she believes one day he will kill her. 
     Other children have physical handicaps. Some of them result from abuse or neglect; one family adopted a 5-year-old girl who weighed only 22 pounds. 
     In other cases, the child was available for adoption because of the handicap. One couple from Alamosa County brought home a Russian boy who has already had multiple major surgeries and will have many more. Of all the people I met at the conference, they were the most luminously happy with their decision to adopt. But they knew about their son's problems from the beginning. 
     Finally, many of the children have mental deficits. They have suffered extreme deprivation, not minor differences in upbringing, and they may have brains 20 to 30 percent smaller than normal for their age. 
     ``On a good day,'' one mother said, ``with all his Ritalin on board, my son tests in the high 70s (for IQ) or low 80s.'' 
     Other children have normal intelligence overall, but with unusual patterns of high and lows. Robin McEvoy, who specializes in neuropsychological assessment, talked about one child who had well above average verbal IQ, but equally below average performance IQ, meaning he'd have great difficulty planning and organizing his activities. That combination is a prescription for disaster in school, especially if the parents are unprepared for it. 
     Dee Paddock, a psychotherapist and consultant who has three adopted children, said she gets very tired of people who come up to her and gush that ``they've always wanted to do `something like that.' '' 
     They still can, she notes with mordant humor. The orphanages are not yet empty. 
     She also said she hates it when people say what she did is ``special,'' but there I'll have to disagree with her. The people who adopt children with desperate needs, and then keep a bargain far different from the one they thought they were making _ they're very special.