I’m wondering why the guy is taking all the heat here. Did his wife have nothing to do with it?
Frankly it doesn’t matter what the initial situation was in Romania with the child or what her mother’s role in the adoption was. These two Canadians took on a responsibility. One of them is in a skilled and responsible job, so you assume that they’re not total idiots and understood what they were doing. If they had found that the adoption wasn’t working out and that no-one was benefiting from it there’s other courses of actions they could have taken. But instead they bailed out on their responsibilities and not only dumped the child, but left her in limbo. This alone makes them heartless and beyond callous.
I either hope there’s one enormous fact in their side of the story that no-one’s telling, or that she takes them for every penny they have.
In the 90s, Romania, by playing on the sympathies of the west, saw an opportunity to not only empty the orphanages, but to empty facilities that ‘cared’ for physically and mentally disabled children. Not wanting to miss out on the money train, many families sold their children to foreigners looking to adopt.
When I was there in about 1991, the American Consulate was in absolute mayhem every single day. People lined up outside and jammed the waiting area trying to get visas for their ‘adopted’ children. It was chaos.
In the hotel room next to mine, two children spent a night crying. The girl kept repeating ‘mama’ endlessly, while sobbing piteously. I had seen this American couple the day before, excited about getting two Romanian children, how it had been expensive, but how happy they were. The next morning I saw them, looking very haggard, and overheard them tell another person at their table that they were returning the children to their parents because they couldn’t take the childrens’ anguish. Not a proud moment in Romanian history.
You’d think, but there’s a pair of khakis at Abercrombe & Fitch that is suing me because I left some wrinkles in them while trying them on and they can’t compete on an even playing field with the other pants now.
I have already heard Alexandra’s opinion on what happened between Joe/Mike and her mother (the opinion in the lawsuit). Like I said, I believe that she is seeing it through rose-coloured glasses. I think Alexandra would love to believe that her mother was forced or weaseled into giving her away, because the alternative is to accept that her mother was a very bad judge of character and was so desperate to give her away that she palmed her off on the first Westerner who came through the door. I don’t think anyone would want to think that of their childhood.
I also think that Alexandra is trying to compare the conditions her mother faced as a single mother, with her own situation, unmarried and with a daughter. What Alexandra is not taking into account is that her mother was a single mom eight times over, and there was no foreseeable way that, if she remarried, she would have been allowed to stop having children she couldn’t feed.
I don’t think Alexandra can accept that she was fucked no matter what, because if she had stayed in Romania, she may very well have starved to death or died for want of health care. In fact, her baby sister had recently done so when the Westerners showed up, which is probably why her mother begged Mike Desrochers to take Cristian, who was the next youngest now that her baby was dead.
I can see how it would seem murky, because Alexandra’s mother is now dead and can’t explain herself. Even if there is doubt over whether she wanted to give Alexandra herself away, she did willingly hand over Cristian.
I share Alexandra (and everyone else’s) outrage over what Joe and Silvana did to her, but I’m going to call sour grapes when I see it.