The Solution Room Part 1

The Solution Room
By Douglas Hardy
traumanation@gmail.com
Chapters 1-7
2 The Solution Room
CONTENTS
SUMMARY.....................................................................................................................................................3
AUTHOR’S NOTE.........................................................................................................................................6
PROLOGUE – THE LABYRINTH .............................................................................................................7
1—AUGUST 5, 1998 ....................................................................................................................................11
2 - LOVEMAKING LOGISTICS ...............................................................................................................16
3—BORIS AND NATASHA .......................................................................................................................36
4 - GRACE HAPPENS.................................................................................................................................51
5—PLAYING DETECTIVE .......................................................................................................................63
6—NEW-DEPENDENTS DAY...................................................................................................................79
7—CHILDREN’S HOME ...........................................................................................................................94
POSTSCRIPT .............................................................................................................................................111
THE AUTHOR ...........................................................................................................................................114
COPYRIGHT © 2010 BY DOUGLAS HARDY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Douglas Hardy 3
SUMMARY
Imagine your lifelong dream disfigured into nightmare. That’s what happened to Doug
and Rose Hardy after they adopted a “perfect” trio of orphans from overseas, only to be
thrust into a ten-year struggle with their children’s horrific past.
Within days of the adoption, Doug and Rose’s new children told the secret story the
adoption process had obscured: they had been victims of unspeakable abuse and neglect
in their native Russia. Safely arrived in America, the children exploded into rage and
despair with a thousand acts of violence against themselves, their parents and each other.
Desperately seeking relief, the parents undertook a daily battle against the trauma that
threatened to consume them all.
The Solution Room tells the story of that battle: its disturbing setbacks and steady
victories, its tragedies and teamwork, its unforgettable losses and unexpected blessings.
And finally, The Solution Room reveals the astonishing paradox that holds the key to
recovery for traumatized children and their parents as well.
Step by step, we follow the family as they summon the courage to face their pain and
loss, and begin to heal. Compassionate therapists help the children confront their buried
memories. Teachers and helpers support the family through good days and bad. Some
friends, misguided or indifferent, prescribe amateur diagnoses or even deny the children’s
condition. Others rally to the family’s side with superhuman patience. Just becoming
“normal” becomes the family’s shining and nearly impossible goal.

4 The Solution Room
And step-by-step, the children show remarkable resilience. They learn English rapidly.
They revel in their physical gifts and American abundance. Out of their early depravation
emerges transcendent joy from activities like riding a bike, playing a game, eating (and
eating and eating) fresh fruit. Their parents learn to treasure those simple pleasures.
In this deeply researched, compelling true-life narrative, we follow each family member
on the daunting, and finally triumphant, journey to healing and love.
The book is structured as a classic narrative in three parts (titled Children’s Home, The
Face of Rage, and The Solution Room). The story’s climax takes place as simultaneous
crises cause Doug and Rose to place the children in three separate therapeutic institutions.
The parents, who have survived through ingenuity and sheer toughness, learn at last the
great lesson from their children – that in order to make the final steps to becoming a
family, they must actually let go of the personal qualities that once meant survival.
Surrendering those qualities – going to the Solution Room at the center of their own
psyches – is the family’s final step in the journey from despair to hope.
Today, the family is strong. Lara is preparing to go to college. Alexei, a self-styled
entrepreneur and outdoorsman, is overcoming dyslexia. And Ivan, once condemned to a
short and brutish life in Russia, is finishing high school, taking vocational training and
exploring a military career in service to his adopted country. The family has beaten
Douglas Hardy 5
overwhelming odds to gain the thing they thought a thousand times they would never
have…a good life.
Trauma is one of the most intractable of afflictions, causing intense pain yet often buried
almost beyond recognition. Anyone who has held a dark family secret, welcomed a
wounded loved one home from a hospital or a battle zone, struggled to regain a normal
life after crisis, or felt compassion for a suffering child will resonate with the power of
this story. All who have fought for the survival of love in the wreckage of tragedy will
recognize themselves here. All who wonder how they might someday survive a loss will
gain comfort and insight from this family’s ten-year journey of recovery, in which each
family member discovered for himself the liberating secret of the solution room.
6 The Solution Room
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Residential therapeutic schools, which treat severe emotional and behavioral disorders in
children and adolescents, are also charged with educating them in a standard curriculum.
The ordinary stresses of a long school day, such as conflict with peers or frustration over
schoolwork, make this especially difficult. If the internal pressure builds too far, many
kids explode in what is coolly termed “disruptive behavior.”
When a child’s disruptions become extreme – attacking teachers or peers, throwing
furniture, shrieking obscenities, for example – he is removed from class. Typically, a
student is brought by his teacher to the nearest hallway, “taking space” to master his
emotions. If the child continues to be violent, or angry or defiant, he is escorted to a small
room used exclusively for isolating out-of-control students. The room has an open portal
but no door. There is no window; the walls are naked. The child has no music, no books,
no toys, no pencil or paper. A bench is bolted to the floor.
The room resembles a monastery cell, and there the child must remain in the company of
his invisible demons. He stays in isolation until his “tools” – the learned behaviors of
therapy; or inner strength; or grace – allow him to regain his composure. Although help is
nearby and available, he must finally confront his rage, fear and violence alone.
In therapeutic schools I have known, this chamber is called the solution room.
Douglas Hardy 7
PROLOGUE – THE LABYRINTH
Picture yourself in a labyrinth: a dark and baffling maze of the kind the mythical Greek
hero Theseus searched in his mission to kill the monstrous Minotaur. Now, pause long
enough to imagine that the labyrinth’s walls are constructed of mirrors, like the Hall of
Mirrors in an old amusement park. Finally, imagine that these are funhouse mirrors,
which distort both your reflection and your image of the world around you, even as you
wander the labyrinth’s corridors.
That warren of nightmare reflections, with a murderous beast lurking nearby, aptly
describes the inner life of a child with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Children
with PTSD wander a maze of toxic emotions, behaviors, thoughts and reactions. PTSD
bends their reality and shatters their relationships. It transmutes a healthy home into a
Hogarthian hell.
Almost eight million Americans suffer from PTSD. Three of them are my kids.
Along the wide spectrum of trauma-caused mental illness, childhood trauma causes a
particularly virulent form of PTSD because it alters, distorts, realigns and otherwise
screws up the basic wiring that gets laid down in early childhood. Like the spherical
shock wave blooming from a nuclear explosion, trauma spreads destruction in every
direction. Traumatized adults (combat veterans, for example) recover using therapy and
their own qualities of cognitive understanding, emotional intelligence, and attachments to
loved ones. For traumatized children, these qualities themselves are often weak or
8 The Solution Room
lacking. Traumatized children may lack empathy or a sense that their behavior affects
others – and this is not surprising, because trauma at an early age destroys a sense of
personal power. Ironically, the PTSD child cannot connect his own violence to a feeling
of fear in others. Because childhood trauma damages the psyche at exactly the time that
feelings like loving attachment, empathy and self-control are forming, these feelings
grow into perverse imposters. Normal parent-child interactions become assaults, and
behavior that would shock and scare a healthy person feels “normal” to a child with
PTSD. To strangers, on the other hand, the child might be usually friendly, outgoing and
friendly – a reversal of they typical child’s reserve with unknown adults.
The most worrisome quality of childhood PTSD in children is its tenacity. Wipe out one
toxic behavior, and another will take its place. Eight years ago, a therapist warned me
that, “This thing is endlessly inventive. It will always find new ways to break your heart.”
Even as my children progressed in a remarkable path of recovery, the prediction proved
true. Trauma is tenacious, crafty and cunning, and it wants out.
In a family, PTSD is also a communicable disease: The victim’s violent and contradictory
behaviors actually traumatize the parents and siblings, and even professional caretakers.
Soon, an entire family is feeling traumatized and exhibiting classic PTSD symptoms:
Parents become depressed, irritable, irrational, and desperate. They rage, they drink, they
run. Divorce rates of parent with traumatized children are sky-high.

Douglas Hardy 9
For ten years, over hundreds of conversations with specialists and thousands of hours of
study, I mapped the labyrinth. My wife, children and I navigated strange emotional
corridors of PTSD, and step by step managed to find our way back to daylight. Our
children re-patterned their thinking and feelings toward healthy behaviors, and my wife
and I re-imagined what it is to be a family.
My family’s story is the narrative frame of The Solution Room, but you won’t find a lot
of breast-beating here, or claims of superhuman recovery powers. My purpose is not to
revel in memoir but to unravel the mysteries of childhood trauma and the winding,
paradoxical route to strength, recovery and unanticipated happiness.
People ask Rose and me, “How did you survive?” Perhaps the most candid answer: We
didn’t. Our children survived, our marriage survived, our values survived, but in order to
save those things, Rose and I had to change so profoundly that the people we were in
1998 no longer exist. We had to abandon much of our identities as parents, as family
members, as educated, ambitious and self-sufficient members of a community. Learning
to heal our children’s affliction; getting them the help they needed, often against
indifference or hostility; working through the maze of contradictory behaviors and
conflicting feelings; letting go of our long-held vision of a family and creating a new
vision; Rose and I remade ourselves as well as our children.

10 The Solution Room
Thus, The Solution Room is not only about survival. It is about rebirth. Embracing severe
trauma, by accident or intent, one struggles beyond endurance to create an entirely new
life. This book is about how that new life came to be.
Douglas Hardy 11
1—AUGUST 5, 1998
I crush the breath out of him. If I can prevent him gasping another pint of air he might
stop screaming, and the screaming has to stop.
I tighten my arms around Ivan’s skinny chest until he can’t draw air. Hs eyelids dilate in
panic, expanding the white circles around his sea-green pupils. Under his ribs, I imagine,
his lungs have wrung dry, like a sponge. Although his mouth still gapes, there is no
sound. Good, I think, he’s paying attention to me. The thought is clinical, cold and
detached, powered by a rage as unrelenting as my grip on this boy. I outweigh him four
to one, and even though Ivan is strong for a six-year-old, he cannot squirm out of my
encircling grip. Silence is his escape from the vice of my arms. So he stops screaming.
I taste blood in my mouth.
Silence and swift pain bring me back to sanity. I have bitten my lip again, and the
stinging salty taste cuts through my rage. I ease my arms a little, and I feel his lungs fill
against my chest as my right hand reaches to cradle his head. I lean forward, tipping Ivan
back as if he has fainted, even though the terror in his eyes demonstrates he’s as alert as
prey. My legs stay clamped around his waist so he cannot escape. I bend over him stare
into his eyes, my face now soft and smiling.

“There, there,” I say. “Haroshe malchick. Good boy,” I repeat the words as gently as
possible. He grunts and tries wriggling out from under the iron hoop of my arms, but I
still have him trapped in this lover’s embrace. He cries out, not a scream but a long sob of
despair. For a moment, Ivan manages to wrestle an arm out from my grasp and bites his
forearm until purple dents appear. I trap the flailing arm with a roundabout sweep of my
left hand and pin it back against his body. Now I lean forward and he leans back in our
combat tango. We stay like that for twenty minutes, until I ease my grip and stroke his
sweaty hair and face.
Below us, on the first floor, eight-year-old Lara grabs a broom from the pantry and runs
to the porch. Weeping and jabbering in Russian, she sweeps the porch once, twice, and a
third time. Lara always sweeps the porch during Ivan’s screaming fits. Rose runs to Lara
and gently takes the broom away. Lara stamps her foot and starts twirling. Rose holds her
and leads her back inside.
At the foot of the stairs, three-year-old Alexei rocks in a squat, his eyes frozen in the
expression combat veterans call the thousand-yard stare. He barely notices when Rose
picks him up, even staying in his squatting posture as she gathers him into a hug. Rose
brings Alexei and Lara back to their bedroom and comforts them while I hold Ivan.
There is no comfort for Rose or me. Ivan’s screams are not the shrill tantrum every parent
confronts. They are the crashing sound of a nightmare, the music of a vision so lurid, no
parental detachment can erase its horror.

Douglas Hardy 13
Even as I pinned Ivan in the therapeutic “safety hold” my body reacted by trying to snuff
out those screams. Only my own physical pain, and the taste of my own blood, could
belay the desperate urge to make the music stop. Disobeying my rational mind, my body
had nearly tipped into the abyss.
Exhausted, Ivan falls asleep. I put on his diaper and carry him to bed. Rose sings Lara to
sleep, and then brings wide-awake Alexei down to the front room, where she wraps him
tight in his blanket and croons the repetitive lullaby that will ease him to sleep.
Sometimes it takes 20 minutes for him to drift away, sometimes two hours. Tonight he
falls asleep quickly, but he thrashes as she lays him in the crib at the foot of our bed and
we know he’ll be up later. Kid kicks like Beckham. I check on the two older children and
come to bed. We turn out the lights.
Rose and I lie with our heads at the foot of the bed, so she can reach down and place her
palm on Alexei’s back when he wakes. Sometimes that’s enough to knock him out again.
If it isn’t, it will be my turn to carry him down to the rocking chair for another fifty
choruses of “The boy went over the mountain…”
We are bone-tired but alert. Rose weeps. I ruminate; I’ve stepped just one stride apart
from my own life. The day’s events unreel in my mind as I stare at the ceiling.
Today, all the clues about our children’s past fall into place: Of course the children lied
about their home life to escape the orphanage. Of course the orphanage ignored evidence
in order to get the children adopted. Of course the adoption agency promoted a vision of
these kids so sunny and optimistic that it blinded us to the evidence. And Rose and I
wanted children so much, and put so much faith in the system, that we bought into it all.
Up to this day, our family has lurched between happy clichés and screaming fights – a
sitcom in a psych ward. And today the children told the real story of their life in the
slaughterhouse, before the orphanage delivered them from evil. Now Rose and I lie
awake and staring at the ceiling, devastated by the truth our children have revealed.
“How will they ever recover from that?” asks Rose.
“I don’t know” I say. Then the calm that always settles over me in a true crisis steadies
my voice, and I start reasoning. “Honey, everyone knew they had a rough story. We just
didn’t know how rough. We’ll get through this.”
“Where’s Maya?”
“She went out with James. I gave her the car. I wouldn’t blame her if she doesn’t come
back.”
“God, Doug, what in the hell are we going to do?”

Douglas Hardy 15
“I don’t know.”
“Is it going to be like this for the next 10 or 15 years?”
“I don’t know. Sleep tonight, if you can.” I turn to her and pet her hair, counting out ten
strokes to soothe her.
“Why didn’t the Agency know about this?”
I stare at the ceiling and think, they suspected something. I wonder, were they just trying
to get these kids out of Russia, and to hell with the consequences? For an instant, the
whole conspiracy of their mercy comes to me – the Agency knew enough to know…they
didn’t want to know more. They figured we could take it, and after all, the kids would be
in better shape than if they stayed in Russia. Better than growing up to be two thieves and
a prostitute.
It’s clear why. “Maybe they looked the other way. Maybe this is a typical story for them:
mental illness, violence, bastard children, economic collapse, alcoholism, murder, and
abandonment. In a word, Russia.”
Rose sighs. She pets Alexei’s back. He sleeps.
I add, “And that’s just the part we know.”

2⎯LOVEMAKING LOGISTICS
The first thing you need to know is this: Infertility is not one journey but two.
The first journey winds through the labyrinth of advanced medical technique, a maze of
needles and blood samples, of confident doctors and success percentages, of next steps.
It’s a series of projects the couple can control. If they’re willing to wander the labyrinth
until money or hope runs out, the journey can take years. Promising new procedures take
the place of failed ones. There is always a chance that the next try, or the more advanced
procedure, will lead the couple out of the labyrinth, into the light.
The other journey, taken at the same time, is a walk through unfamiliar territories of
expectation and disappointment, of hope and the withholding of hope, of faith in a good
outcome, and the mystery of what a “good outcome” actually is.
And at the end of both journeys, there is usually a family, whether children are born to
the couple or adopted. Both journeys change the parents in ways known and unknown to
them, simply because the long sojourn marked them as different from others, even before
the children came.
In October 1993, in a Connecticut bed and breakfast, we discarded the birth control, and
set about making babies. Rose was in her second year of business school, and like good
project planners we had the scenario figured just right – she would graduate Yale School
Douglas Hardy 17
of Management with six weeks to go before the baby came; I’d stay in my job as a
magazine editor while she took care of the baby for a year, and in that first year she
would leisurely explore job possibilities. We weren’t naïve about the first year of life
with a child, but it looked possible that by the fall of 1995 we’d have two jobs and a kid,
just like our friends.
“I’ve never cared much about the pregnancy itself,” Rose said. “It’s just something I
would go through to have a child, but I’m not one of those women who has always
wanted to feel a baby growing inside me. What I want to do is look down into that little
face and see you.”
“If that’s what we get, I pity the kid,” I said.
We talked while driving, and we drove a lot in those months. We knew each other’s
strengths. Her strength is breaking down big projects into smaller, manageable parts. My
strength is in knowing where we need to go, and keeping us moving. So I would drive,
and Rose would write lists, and together we talked about how to raise children.
I was surprised by how much she had already contemplated. She knew about discipline,
food, games, and education. Children need structure and rules to feel safe, she said, and
when they feel safe, they play and grow and thrive. Even if they don’t like broccoli,
we’re going to keep serving it to them because that’s how they’ll develop a taste for
healthy food. Public education is good, and our kids would go to public school like we
did. She wanted four children, and I wanted two, but there was no need to decide then.
Instead, we figured that having one or two children would tell us, over time, whether we
could manage a third.
Several months passed without a pregnancy. (Several cycles, in the parlance of the
fertility docs.) Our internist arranged for the first tests.
However strong their marriage bond, infertility immediately separates a couple by the
differences between male and female plumbing. Couples pay a lot of attention to this,
especially in the game of who’s to blame for the inability to conceive. If marriage is a
partnership, that game is fruitless. Who is to blame for injury or disease or heredity or
waiting too long to conceive?
“My bad or yours?” We asked, but we didn’t mean it. We were in this together, and
together we started to meet a very long line of physicians.
I went first. Although fertility testing requires male orgasm, it’s no more sexually
interesting, and for that matter no more embarrassing, than the frequent genital probing
that women endure. I didn’t take it personally. I masturbated into a plastic container,
twisted the cap on and gave the container to a nurse. The urologist asked a few questions
about our sexual activity, a few general questions about my health, and the appointment
was over.
Douglas Hardy 19
The first physical problem: I had a low sperm count due to a kind of blockage called a
varicocele. It was easily corrected with outpatient surgery; a little delightful anesthesia, a
roll into and out of an operating room, and a few days with stitches tugging at my groin.
My sperm count went up. No worries. (Note to self: no martini on earth feels as good as
that anesthesia.)
The second physical problem: some polyps in Rose’s uterus. She went through a similar
process to me – a few tests, an easy bit of plumbing, and we were back in the game.
These two simple surgeries didn’t result in pregnancy, and what we’d hoped would be a
brief encounter with fertility treatments turned into a long-running series. Infertility, we
learned, can result from a collection of interacting causes, rather than a single condition,
and for this reason, fertility medicine becomes a game of three-dimensional chess with
symptoms, causes, probabilities and possible paths to success. We tested possible reasons
for the infertility, from most likely to rarest, and each new scenario, it seemed, indicated
a diminished possibility of success.
We looked for help, and found the best almost by chance. Rose’s gynecologist Dr. G.
said, “You have to schedule a visit with Dr. C. He’s the best.” Later, a friend would
exclaim, “Oh, you’re working with Dr. C? You’ll have no problems. He’s one of the
world’s best.” After meeting with Dr. C we discovered that he was the featured speaker
at an international convocation of infertility specialists.

Thus a pattern began: We weren’t seeking “the best,” but always seemed to find them.
Dr. C had developed several innovative procedures in fertility treatment. He was a large,
amused-looking man in his fifties, and he saw no reason why we shouldn’t have a baby
or two with a little outside intervention.
Confidence follows demeanor, I thought, and good luck follows confidence. We decided
to behave as if this little inconvenience was not only easy to fix, but that success was
inevitable. With an editor’s curiosity, I saw infertility treatments as an opportunity to
learn more about the impact new medical technology might have on social norms. There
were fascinating questions – how old was too old for a woman to have a baby? What
were the long-term health risks? Did Dr. C see a time when infertility was no more than a
minor inconvenience? Becoming a student made me feel less like a patient. As with
disease, infertility poses a struggle for control, and in the role of intrigued student, I could
distance myself from the possibility that This Might Not Work. After a few more
months, maintaining the student pose helped create a more crucial distance – from the
reality that This Wasn’t Working.
The percentage of infertility patients who carry a child to term also decreases with every
switch to a new treatment, and also with each repetition of treatments. If at first you don’t
succeed, it’s less likely that you will succeed next time. In this, infertility treatments are
more like disease than mechanics. The early 1990s saw an explosion of treatments for
infertility, as women of the baby boom generation reached the last-chance years for
childbearing. Age makes the difference in the game of Assisted Reproductive

Douglas Hardy 21
Technologies. If the woman is under 35, typical infertility treatment stands a 37% chance
of resulting in a live birth. By age 42, the success rate drops to about 11%. Rose was 39;
we had about a one-in-five shot.
Medical advances are driven by social and market forces like any business, and demand
for infertility treatment grew just at a time when technical advances made it seem as if
any woman under fifty could become pregnant. Celebrity gossip magazines featured
actresses and singers having babies into their 40s. Yet Dr. C wasn’t sanguine about the
technology he’d worked hard to advance.
“We’re solving the wrong problem,” said Dr. C. “A huge amount of infertility is caused
by women postponing pregnancy, so they can be secure in their work before they have
children. You want to reduce infertility rates? You want Americans to spend less money
for advanced treatments? Then change the attitude of employers, so women can step
away from the workforce for five years in their mid-20s without damaging their careers.”
Good advice, I thought, but a little late in our case.
“I’ll still have enough cases of infertile women and men in their 20s to keep me happy,”
he added. “But as long as our society forces women in their prime childbearing years to
choose between children and career, infertility will be a big problem.
“And, not incidentally,” he added, “A big business.”

The treatments continued.
Rose underwent more invasive procedures like laparoscopy (“That’s where they examine
your lap,” she observed.) There were endless blood tests and temperature charts. Dr. C
prescribed drugs to stimulate the process of a fertilized egg traveling to the right place at
the right time. The first Rx takes a couple into a new territory where visible mechanics –
human pipes and fluids and cells – are altered in their natural course by invisible
chemical interactions. This is a watershed for women; what other effects will the
chemical have? Will it stimulate facial hair, or aging, or cancer twenty years hence? And
now we faced the question we had not anticipated: “How far are you willing to go to have
a baby? How much risk will you accumulate? How much pain will you endure? How
much will you become an uncompleted narrative of anxiety for your families?” And
finally, “When do we give up?”
We told each other we’d know when to give up. Every month, we decided to keep going.
****
In the fall of 1994, my younger brother Sam invited me to Columbia University, where
he was completing a journalism fellowship. “Meet me at the library,” he said. The room
smelled of Lemon Pledge and leather books; computers had been placed on tables meant
for reading, their keyboards too high to type comfortably. “Here’s how we do research
Douglas Hardy 23
for newspaper stories now,” he said. On the screen, an aerial photograph of the Columbia
library’s dome slowly rendered from top to bottom, with the words “Card Catalog”
superimposed across the picture.
Sam said, “They’re calling it the World Wide Web. It’s like CompuServe or AOL, except
it’s full pages, just like a magazine.”
Sam, my brother Robert and I inherited journalism from generations of writers. We grew
up with magazines and books, and among us spoke from reporters’ and editors’ points of
view. Ink’s in the blood, and sitting next to Sam that day I made a brilliant journalistic
prediction:
“Holy shit,” I said. “This changes everything.”
I got a job at a new online publishing venture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and took a
small apartment there in January 1995. Rose worked as a management consultant in
Stamford, Connecticut. We decided we could spend weekdays apart for six months. The
menstrual cycle, being older than the phenomenon of two-career traveling couples,
asserted its right to come any damn time it pleased, and so we met in a motel in
Connecticut for conjugal visits through the spring. Rose moved to Boston in the summer,
bringing our belongings and reams of medical records to America’s home of Big
Medicine.
New England Medical Center, August 1995.
Dr. D enjoyed putting interns on the spot. Valerie, a youngish doctor-to-be with the
serious earnestness the interns put on for infertility patients, was the latest object of his
puckish hazing. After she had asked her score of questions, studied our medical records,
and examined Rose, Dr. D asked for her diagnosis. I sat in a hard plastic chair next to the
examining table where Rose lay.
Again, the fallacy of medical certainty fell away to reveal the nature of so many
diagnoses – a set of symptoms, history of treatments and reactions to treatment, and
possibilities that the physician must fit into a coherent narrative. “Given all these factors,
occurring in this order, to this woman, and this man, we can see two possible causes and
several potential treatments….” It’s no longer a world of mechanical parts with
predictable actions and reactions. By this stage of infertility treatment, we were dealing
only with probabilities, scenarios, odds of success and failure. Treatment became a hall of
mirrors.
Dr. D and Valerie agreed that a post-coital exam was needed to decide on a course of
treatment. A course correction. Rose and I returned to our apartment to make love, and
boomeranged back to New England Medical. Perhaps it’s a testimony to our mutual
libidos, or maybe our sense of sexual detachment by this point, that even weaving
through the (unending, eternal, infuriating) construction that tied up Boston in a 20-year
traffic jam known as the Big Dig didn’t decrease our ability to have sex on demand.
Douglas Hardy 25
(If anyone at New England Medical is reading this, I suggest they add a few conjugal
visit rooms. A couple of hours pretending to be Swedish prison inmates would be better
for couples than the round trip, and you might charge rent to their insurance carrier.)
Other couples can be abashed to have sex on demand, but we liked it. “Doctor’s orders”
became a joke, and our lovemaking had always been easy, frequent and fun. Our doctrine
of being exceptional was like a good luck token: We don’t mind lovemaking on a
schedule, and in the backs of our minds, that made us exceptional, and deserving of
success.
Back at NE Medical, Rose lay on the table once more. The surprising low sperm count
(“Do I get my money back on last year’s surgery?” I asked.) suggested the next rounds of
treatment should be concentration of sperm and artificial insemination or in vitro
fertilization. They described the procedures, and we immediately agreed to go ahead.
*****
Needles are the guy’s job. Tolerating the daily jab is the gal’s job. She also has to
relinquish control of her body’s weight, sleep cycle, hair growth, and mood swings.
I learned by injecting colored water into an orange, and got the hang of it quickly. Giving
Rose shots was easy enough – fill the syringe, tap out the bubbles, thrust the needle
quickly into her hip or buttock (a wrist-snapping move I learned playing darts), draw up
the piston to check I hadn’t hit a vein, then steadily inject the clear liquid. That was
always the moment she drew sibilant breath through clenched teeth. Rarely, she cried out
from the hot and tearing sensation the hormone cocktail provoked as it spread through her
muscle. Then, I pressed more firmly with fingers spread around the needle, to dull the
sensation as best I could before finishing, and withdrawing the needle. A second swab
with alcohol, and we were done. She rose, rubbing the site, said with a disbelieving
laugh, “Wow, I hate that,” and then dressed for work.
The hormones set Rose’s body on their schedule. Once a month we’d schlep down to the
clinic, where the nurse would confirm the release of several eggs, and I would spend a
few minutes by myself in the bathroom “collecting semen.” What I remember of my part
in completing a pregnancy is watching Boston’s Green Line trolley roll southwest
through suburban Brookline, a hundred yards beyond the bathroom window. (As
romantic inspiration, public transit systems do not endanger candlelight, poetry or wine.)
There were a few false starts, but the doc said keep trying, and so we did. In October
1995, we concluded a procedure as usual: I accompanied the doctor to Rose’s bedside.
She was lightly drugged but conscious enough for conversation. Smiling, he said, “We
created this many zygotes,” – hold up eight fingers, -- “And we were able to place this
many in your uterus,” holding up four fingers.
“I think we’ll get at least one, and as many as four viable embryos from this,” he
concluded.
Douglas Hardy 27
I thought, it’s a game of musical chairs, each tiny multi-celled potential human circling
the hormone table, each vying for a place in the placenta.
Rose asked, “What happens if they are all viable?”
“As you know,” he answered, “Multiple births can happen in this course of treatment.
But the body has a way of working things out most of the time. I have personally never
seen four out of four fertilized eggs thrive. But I have seen three. It could happen.”
“Triplets,” said Rose.
“Let’s see how these thrive in the coming weeks and we’ll know better,” said the doctor.
This is a conversational technique used often by physicians trading in hope: stick with the
here and now, the immediate facts, and suggest we all deal with facts as they arise, not
suppositions or wishes. At the time, it seemed a reasonable hedge against failure.
Rose relaxed until the anesthesia wore off, and we went home. She rested the remainder
of that afternoon. Our two cats slept against her. I stood at the foot of the bed, watching.
She began to show at six weeks, just a little stiff round belly below her waist. We were
thrilled. We lived in an apartment north of the city, and bought an old farmhouse in
Concord, Massachusetts. The farm had gone under during the Great Depression and the
house converted to apartments. Through the fall we worked with a crew of Irish cousins
to restore the building to a semblance of its original state. Rose left her long-distance
consulting job and took over as site manager, trading business analysis for a backhoe for
the autumn. She was careful to avoid any building materials or toxins that might harm the
tiny babies growing under her sweatshirt, but bringing a derelict house back to new life
seemed fitting as we prepared to be parents.
Rose’s early pregnancy proceeded as the books we consumed that fall predicted. She felt
mild morning sickness, a little tenderness and bloating (familiar from the months of
hormone shots), and unpredictable bouts of bone-deep fatigue. To me she looked radiant
with anticipation. Blood tests gauged her body’s hormone levels off the scale.
We shared the news of her pregnancy only with Rose’s sister Katherine and her husband
Mark, so that Rose could compare her experience to Katherine’s first pregnancy two
years before. When the sisters talked in detail about symptoms, timing, and physical
manifestations of pregnancy, I felt the first real sexual parting of our paths. Now,
however supportive I might be, nature moved me a step away from the action.
Couples undergoing IVF treatments undergo pressures different from typical expectant
parents, as friends and family members share their apprehension of failure. We didn’t
dare talk about child names or sexes. We postponed happy talk about how to decorate a
child’s room. Superstitious couples worry that such talk will jinx the process, but we just
wanted to take it one step at a time. Even in great anticipation, something reminded us
Douglas Hardy 29
not to get our hopes up too high. We wanted to be prepared for bad news should this
early, delicate, first real pregnancy fail.
We were careful to eat right, to avoid alcohol and caffeine, to rest. Rose abstained from
heavy exercise to avoid jostling the embryos, small as a grain of rice, that we had begun
to call the little goobers. It was the ironic culmination of two years of sex on schedule.
I started a new job at a new company, on the leading edge of broadband web
development. This was shortly after the Initial Public Offering of Netscape released an
ocean of venture money into any company with a prospect of Internet riches, and editors
with web experience like mine found good jobs easily. One salary was plenty for the time
being. With a new job, a new home growing inside the shell of an old farmhouse, and a
new family on the way the days were full beyond recording.
Two nights before Thanksgiving, crossing Boston Common on our way to dinner, Rose
talked about having more than one child.
“I think my body can handle multiples,” she said. “And I think we could manage with
twins, or even triplets. I wonder about having four children at once, though.”
I was startled, and instantly understood the foolishness of my surprise. I hadn’t given five
minutes’ thought to having three or four children at once, and yet the possibility had been
in front of us for years.

I’m an identical twin. Rose’s father is an identical twin. Rose has two sets of twin
cousins. It seemed inevitable. But three…or four…how could we bring that many into
our lives? The male’s psychic safety valve, that she would take care of the kids while I
worked, didn’t seem adequate to that kind of crowd.
Rose continued, “You know I’ve always wanted four kids. That would be a lot to handle,
but we could manage three.”
I managed to ask, “How?”
“We’d have to get help,” she said. I was doing silent math. One salary wouldn’t support
us forever, certainly not if we had four children. She revealed in a matter-of-fact tone,
“Dr. D told me all of them might thrive, but then we have a choice”
“What choice?” I asked.
“He can take one or two out,” she said. She looked straight ahead, across the Common.
“That gives the remaining ones a better chance to come to full weight anyway. Of course,
then you have to choose.”
I said, “Some choice.” Like Rose, I imagined how the fertility work had made us
reluctant arbiters of which potential lives would continue, and which would not, and that
Douglas Hardy 31
we would make the decision not knowing if any of these amazing tiny potential lives
would actually become a baby. I said, “I’m not sure I’m ready to make that choice.”
“We don’t have to,” she said. “Not tonight.”
On a Tuesday morning just after the holiday, we returned to the clinic for a check-in. Our
nurse practitioner, Susan, glided the ultrasound machine’s silver cylinder over Rose’s
belly, and we saw not four, or three, but one embryo with a miniscule throbbing heart at
its center. I thought, this sight is one I’ll remember forever. Rose and I smiled at each
other. Susan’s expression did not change.
“It’s too small for six weeks along,” Susan said. “And I’m concerned that the heartbeat is
too slow.” She was sympathetic in tone but respected us enough to talk straight. “I think
you should come back in a week for another look.”
We drove without saying much to Boston’s North End, the old Italian neighborhood
where I worked, and ate lunch in a fine restaurant. People will tell you bad news kills the
appetite, but we ate like coal heavers that day. I went to work and Rose went home to
sleep.
In the business of making babies, not every story follows an unbroken trajectory to
conclusion. We were resigned to losing the pregnancy as soon as official word came the
following week. Then Dr. D. called Rose, saying he had “seen these embryos survive and
go on to be perfectly healthy kids.” And so we re-entered the twilight of waiting for the
more sensitive ultrasound test the following week. The waiting was hard. Waiting can put
the rest of life on hold, until the waiting is over. When the news could be joyful or
dreadful, waiting is a country unto itself.
Fertility studies estimate that seventy percent of pregnancies after age 30 self-terminate,
but most of the time the pregnancy isn’t even noticed before the embryo fails. The
difference between typical couples and those undergoing fertility treatment is that the
latter are hyper-vigilant to both the appearance of life and its disappearance. Sometime
over the weekend following Thanksgiving, the one embryo in Rose’s placental sac
released its hold on life, and Monday’s ultrasound showed no significant blood flow
through the sac’s three centimeters. Our disappointment, climbing and descending
through the previous week, finally settled into a trough. No baby this time. All that
remained was a simple procedure to clear the uterus – you couldn’t call it an abortion, we
couldn’t think of it as one – and rest.
The following spring we went through one more procedure, with the bemusing acronym
GIFT, as a last shot at making babies. Another round of injections, multiple ovulation,
masturbating into a sterile receptacle and waiting while Big Science fertilized her eggs
with my sperm in a dish. Then the doctor placed five fertilized eggs into Rose’s fallopian
tubes (and froze the remaining three).

Douglas Hardy 33
That pregnancy never got off the ground. We were glad to go through it anyway as a
kind of last shot, or even a postscript on the infertility work. We knew couples for whom
GIFT had worked, and yet we suspected that we went through the procedure just to close
the subject. Like the more exotic treatments for terminal disease, advanced infertility
treatments have a lower and lower success rate each subsequent time they are performed
on a woman. By spring, it was time to change the subject.
One night we lay in bed and decided we were really done. I said, in order to hear it aloud,
to make it real: “We’ll never make a baby the way our siblings have. So: Adoption. The
loss won’t make us love adopted children less but more. If we’re to get on with our lives,
we have to close this door, to say good-bye, and to embrace the adoption of children
looking forward, not back.”
Rose said, “This is the time to mourn and grieve, and then go on.”
I had a deep distrust of those words – mourn, grieve – thinking that my losses were less
dramatic, less painful, than the losses others suffered. I lay next to my beautiful wife in
the house we had restored, drifting on the other side of gratitude, wondering if I even
deserved to feel loss worthy of those words. All those years of trying, all those shots,
surgeries, plans, actions, anticipation, disappointments. We had to believe that we had
earned the sorrow, to take a moment to mourn and grieve what might have been, in order
to move on.
Just turned forty-one, Rose and I had seen our share of ordinary tragedy. In the early
years of our marriage, I helped ease my father’s way through six years of Alzheimer’s
disease. As a young man, I lived with a woman who couldn’t stop drinking until our love
was irretrievably lost. Rose survived a brief and tormenting first marriage with a man
who suffered crushing bipolar manias and depressions. We had both watched friends die
slowly, and young, of conditions as merciless as cancer, cirrhosis and AIDS. We thought
we knew struggle, but none of those garden-variety tragedies prepared us for the roller-
coaster ride of infertility. Really, it’s murder.
Years ago, friends with their first children described the impatience and stress that a baby
brought into their lives along with all the joy and love a baby inspired. One in particular,
when he caught himself cursing his responsibilities, would say, “When you have
children, you’ll understand.” It was his way of explaining the fault line in his life – the
new child made him someone he hardly recognized. As the years of infertility treatments
piled up, Rose and I would sometimes say to each other, “When you can’t have children,
you’ll understand.”
We did not pity ourselves; we looked at our broken expectations and asked, “What do we
do now?”
Like a million other couples, here’s what we did: We went through the medical
procedures until it made no sense to continue. We walked quickly past maternity shops in
the mall (still do), and we dropped our eyes as pregnant women passed on the sidewalk.
Douglas Hardy 35
We silently condemned a father yelling at his child in the parking lot, because we thought
it must have been easy for him to have a child, so what right did he have not to treasure
every moment with that child? We gave away our copy of What to Expect When You’re
Expecting.
And then, like a million other couples, we went on to plan B.

3—BORIS AND NATASHA
We couldn’t make babies. It was time to go out and buy some.
Rose and I don’t go in for long periods of grieving. We gave pregnancy our best shot, and
it didn’t work out. Stow that path to parenthood in the failed projects drawer, and bring
me the adoption file.
In 1998, the cost of adopting a child ranged from almost zero to more than $30,000. The
key variable then as now was good ol’ supply-and-demand. The rarer the kid, the higher
the price of adoption. Do you use a public child welfare agency, a private adoption
agency, or a private lawyer? How soon do you want the child? What kind of child did
you have in mind, Mr. and Ms. Middleclass Educated Optimistic Can-Do?
You squint into a kaleidoscope of choices, and each turn changes the shape and color of
your future life. Do you want a perfect Anglo newborn from the U.S.? You’ll wait six
years and spend a fortune. Is trans racial adoption fine with you? Great -- white, black,
brown, yellow, red – this country or overseas? And how do your parents feel about
transracial grandkids? Are you interested in adopting older children? Much shorter wait
on that one, dears, but birthparents don’t lose their children because someone got a
parking ticket – there will definitely be some history. And as for you fairy-tale types:
Douglas Hardy 37
Forget that fantasy of adopting a perfectly adorable 2-year-old whose parents died in a
plane crash – she’s gone to Idaho to live with relatives.
Then there’s the question of contact with birth parents. When my mom and dad adopted
children in the 1950s, the past was sealed; birth mothers gave up their right to know
anything about their children, and adoptive parents could decide whether their children
would even learn their original names. Now, state laws have moved toward the frequent
wish of birth parents and adopted children to be in contact in some way through the
years. So if you’re going for domestic adoption, you have to consider a lifelong
relationship with an adult stranger or two in addition to the child. As for hiring a
surrogate mother….Rose and I dismissed that option in a five-minute conversation. It’s
your legal and moral right to contract a healthy young woman to make a baby; we’re just
not gonna do it.
Then there’s a question of adopting more than one – siblings can be adopted faster than
single children, for the simple reason that very few couples are willing to take on more
than one at a time. Imagine going from no children to several all at once. Now imagine
that they have a strong relationship with each other, but not you. They are, in the simple
language of adoption agencies, difficult to place. You do, however, get a nice volume
discount.
Ultimately, you will be faced with choices about the changing indications of mental,
emotional and physical health. What can you handle? With a newborn, you’ll only face
the uncertainties of DNA. (As if that weren’t a crapshoot.) Are you willing to give up the
experience of bringing up a toddler through childhood? Are you ready to take on a
teenager who is already thinking, “You’re not my real parents.”
Before I spoil you with this rich set of choices, let me mention that the kids come first.
The purpose of adoption is to make the best match between a child and prospective
parents, and competent adoption professionals insist that parents-to-be make these
difficult choices early, because the worst result is an adoption that falls apart after the
children come to their new home. Self-understanding is the first reward, and self-illusion
the first casualty, of a good adoption process. Think of them as side benefits.
(In case you’re wondering: The reasons you decide to pursue a certain kind of child are
nobody’s damn business but yours. Maybe your friend thinks it would be perfect for you
to have a cute Korean girl to match hers, but if you know in your heart you want a child
born to Anglo parents in America, you are no less a loving and adequate parent than her.)
Rose and I made several decisions quickly. We were in our early 40s, and six years
seemed too long to wait. We were not interested in a lifelong pen-pal relationship with
birth parents (couldn’t get the image of a stranger showing up at the door). We were
willing to take on toddlers and young children, because they’d be about the same age as
their nearby cousins and – hedging our bet a bit – we didn’t like the risks of knowing
nothing about our kids’ past. We were willing to take on two at a time.
Douglas Hardy 39
All these factors and more pointed us overseas. We live in a Massachusetts town where
international adoption is common. Overseas events (the fall of the Iron Curtain, the
changes in China) had opened the doors to an enormous number of children who needed
parents. It’s not unusual to see parents, children and siblings of different races or
obviously different heritage.
“In 2012,” I said, “There will be a high school glee club consisting entirely of adopted
Chinese daughters of legally married lesbian couples.”
“They’ll be beautiful, too,” said Rose.
We looked for an agency that specialized in overseas adoptions, and like finding a good
plumber or a reliable car dealership, the best practice is to find satisfied customers.
Friends recommended three big agencies in the Boston area, and as the shoe-leather half
of the team, I attended their open houses in hotel conference centers.
At those gatherings I saw scores of couples, all looking alike. “Too many goatees,” I
thought in my smug little private self. “Too much polyester and bad blonde hair, too
many hopeful looks.” I thought, “Poor suckers. They can’t have children and now they
have to adopt.”
Janet, a friend at work, had adopted two girls in Russia in 1996. She had the no-nonsense
approach of a Chief Financial Officer who went and got two kids without waiting for Mr.
Right to appear. Janet had found a high-spirited young girl and her graceful older sister
there. They were poster children for Russian adoption, as Janet was an extraordinary
mother.
“I got a monkey and a swan,” she said. We took them for a canoe ride, and Janet told us
the story of finding her children through the Agency, of their quick adaptation to
America, and her impending retirement to spend more time with them.
“They’re perfect,” I said. “Russia seems like a great prospect.”
Janet said, “They are perfect…for me. They got ‘tude, just like their mom. But
understand this, Doug: You won’t get my children. You will get yours, and they will be
different, because no two kids are alike.”
“Of course,” I said, “I knew that.” But my kid-envy must have shown. “How did you
decide on these two?” I asked.
“I had a good feeling from the moment I saw their picture,” she answered, quickly
adding, “Oh, sure, I had a lot of doubts. Then I realized this about adopting older kids:
You stand at the edge of a cliff. You look left and right, searching for a safe way forward.
And then, because there is no other way, you leap.”
I wondered, what would give me the courage to leap? How will I decide?
Douglas Hardy 41
Janet recommended one adoption agency in particular, and Rose and I visited them. We
were delighted with their approach – straightforward like us, unsentimental, but also
clearly dedicated to matching children and parents perfectly. We decided to go ahead,
signed the first papers, and simply called them, “The Agency.” Their director was a
confident woman named Valerie.
Under the microscope
The next step was the dreaded “home study.”
Infertility treatment invades the privacy of your bodies. The home study invades the
privacy of your marriage, employment history, bank account, tax returns, family history,
mental health, sex life, hopes, dreams, ambitions and illusions. The agency studies your
home as thoroughly as the CIA studies foreign governments. It probes all the
uncertainties particular to adoption. (What if the child shows signs of a genetic disease?
What if she wants to find his or her parents?) The process compels you to share your
thoughts about subjects you haven’t even considered. It’s a deeply reflective experience,
somehow capturing both the excitement of scrubbing a litter box and the playful fun of
being waterboarded.
Memo to the American Psychiatric Association: I recommend a promising new technique
in therapy. Let’s call it “Mock Adoption,” and do it like this: The patient documents
every thought he or she ever had about family dynamics, power relationships, shifting
alliances, and money. He has to determine how he feels about his upbringing and
siblings. He confirms that nasty little incident with uncle Felix (since sentenced to 2-5
years on an unrelated but similar conviction). After revealing all that, he then has to come
up with opinions on every aspect of child-rearing: What about food? Spanking?
Religion? Video games? Pets? Alcohol? Smoking? Exercise? Boys versus girls? Birth
order? Discipline? Sports? Allowances? Whether Uncle Felix can come to Thanksgiving
dinner when he’s out of the jug?
The home study exposes all the history that lies buried beneath a normal psyche, an
emetic for any toxic memories, opinions, values or wrong-headedness from which you
might suffer, dear. It’s like a ten-month job interview; only what’s at stake is not your
next gig, but whether or not you will ever have a family.
Really, it’s therapy-in-a-box.
As for Rose and me – we liked it. I was pleasantly surprised at how much Rose knew
about parenting, and I was happy to crib from her notes about such arcana as bath
sequencing among siblings, the purple-eyelid giveaway (the kid needs a nap) and the
importance of even four-year-olds having responsibility, even if it’s just folding socks.
Rose saw that I possessed an infinite capacity to make pancakes, the endurance to toss a
toddler in the air 30 times in a row, and deep wisdom about boys (“They’ll set each other
on fire. No big deal.”)

Douglas Hardy 43
There were some nail-biting moments. Call me paranoid, but inviting strangers to pry
into every corner of your life can be unnerving. During the home study, we were kind of
involved in this little community dustup.
Okay – not so little. We were at the center of a sex scandal in our church. It might have
blown over if Bryant Gumbel (remember him?) hadn’t made it the lead story in the first
episode of his new TV show.
The facts were straightforward enough: our church teaches a respectful and spiritually
uplifting course to its teenagers about love, sex and relationships. It’s part of the religious
education curriculum and it’s been part of the national curriculum for thirty years. It
teaches responsibility, caring and self-respect (as well as self-restraint). Parents are
shown the course in advance and have to grant permission for their children to attend.
In the spring of 1997, a two sets of parents balked at the content of the curriculum and
discussions in the classes. They pulled their children from the course. Fair enough. Then
someone got in touch with Bryant Gumbel. Fresh off his long appearance on “The Today
Show,” Gumbel finally had a show of his own, a 60 Minutes wannabe called The Public
Eye. And the eagerly anticipated premier show opened with a lip-smacking
“investigation” of a church that taught its teenagers about sex.
The members of the church rallied and overwhelmingly defended our curriculum and our
faith. Rose and I, however, held our breath as the accusations swirled, grandstanders
rushed to the microphones, friendships fractured, and the public got a very open view of
our churches’ attitude about sex. That year, Rose and I had taught the course.
Great, we thought, the Agency is going to ask us all about this pipsqueak affair. And
we’re going to have to tell them that we’re the teachers. Standing at the center of a
nationally televised sex scandal – hey, that’s the kind of people we want adopting our
kids!
The church managed to keep our names off the air, thank God (or maybe God kept us out
of it, thanks to the church). The scandal was short-lived, as was Gumbel’s show, and in a
few months, the whole mess was forgotten by the public.
As we wrote our home study through the summer of 1997, we considered countries in
which to adopt. Again the process of elimination kicked in. The Philippines seemed
promising, but they frowned on divorce, so Rose’s short first marriage was a roadblock to
that country. China’s adoption relationship with the U.S. was excellent, but China only
allowed one adoption at a time, and had an age limit on parents – the combination meant
we could adopt a single girl, but we’d be too old to find her a sister three years later.
We dove deep into the possibilities of Brazil and Guatemala. Friends reported great
adoption experiences there. One night, as our families discussed the adoption process
over dinner at my brother Robert’s house, Rose remarked that we could paint our
children’s rooms bright tropical colors. When my brother asked what color would be
Douglas Hardy 45
right, Rose replied, “We’ll have to wait and see what color the kids are, before we
decide.”
Robert and his wife Gwen laughed, but my mother and Rose’s parents blanched.
“We were hoping,” said one, “That you would have children who looked like you.”
So there it was. We were up against that issue too.
A peculiar dynamic plays out among the loving relatives of adopting couples. Everyone
wants to support the couple. Everyone knows that finding a child is the couple’s decision.
And yet – everyone has a stake in the outcome. And so they offer advice. This makes
decisions complicated enough for all, but what if the advice is not followed? Are old
family dynamics taking over? Is the adopting couple acting out of principle, or are they
reacting against one more set of outsiders telling them what to do? Perhaps they feel
rebellious, and are tempted to go forward with just the kind of adoption that will drive
their families crazy.
This is the essence, indeed the purpose, of the home study period: It forces you to answer
questions others never have to consider.
White kids were also an option, of course. We briefly considered Romania, inspired by a
friend of Rose’s family. George had escaped Bucharest as a young boy. He was florid,
passionate, and mustachioed and lived so vividly you would swear there was something
to the legends of hot Roma (a.k.a. gypsy) blood.
“Romania!” he cried, then raised his glass of wine. “The people are passionate. They love
children!” He drained the glass and gripped its bowl in both hands, and said darkly, “But
what Ceausescu did with those orphanages earned him a thousand years in hell.”
George’s eyes glimmered. His grip tightened around the glass as he lifted it neck-high.
“Prisons for children! Babies lying for days in their own shit! Dumping grounds for
society’s castoffs! I only wish that Ceausescu were still alive, and here, right now. I’d
strangle that bastard myself with these two hands!”
Okay, maybe not Romania. That left Russia.
Russia
Our journey through infertility ran almost concurrently with the unexpected
transformation of the once-mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The parallel paths
of family and nation began as a turbulent new era in the mind and heart of Mother Russia.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party
of The Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991. Four months earlier, a botched coup d’etat
had failed to remove Gorbachev from office. The coup, organized by officers of the KGB
and the Soviet elite, had been the hard-line Soviets’ final (and inept) death-grip on power.
Shortly after the coup, an astonished world witnessed a bearish man in a brown suit
named Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, climb the steel track skirt of an
Douglas Hardy 47
army tank in Moscow and state flatly that the overthrow would not stand. Russians would
no longer tolerate the sclerotic, resentful banality their country had become. Gorbachev
was restored to power, but everyone knew the jig was up. The Soviet Union officially
ceased to exist in January 1992, and Russians, now surrounded by 14 new countries in a
short-lived “Commonwealth of Independent States,” got down to the business of re-
inventing their country.
Things went downhill from there.
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. No people on Earth have a greater capacity for
work or endurance than the Russians. In some ways, things got materially better from
1992-1998. There were certainly more goods in the shops, less restriction on personal
freedom, and more opportunity to move around, to work and find a way to live. Russia,
however, suffered the all-to-frequent malaise of a formally totalitarian country once the
lid came off: corruption metastasized across the economy, and the structures of state that
had given stability, at least, to the people slowly collapsed. Fortunes were made by some,
and a new elite acquired power through close business and government deals. After the
initial rush of popularity, Yeltsin seesawed between absent (sometimes drunken)
mismanagement and occasional improvements in governance. He traded natural gas with
Europe and traded shots of vodka with Hillary Clinton.
By 1998, a financial crisis kicked over the scaffolding of international banking
confidence that sustained Russia’s growth, and the whole structure collapsed. Russians
would spend years clearing the economic rubble. Culturally loathe to adopt orphans –
more about that later – the average Russian family now just couldn’t afford to feed
another hungry mouth.
In 1992, 324 children were adopted internationally from Russia. By 1998 that number
had increased fourteen-fold, to 4,491. The kids were getting out, and American adoption
agencies led the way in finding families for the occupants of orphanages in Russia,
Ukraine, Georgia, and other post-Soviet republics.
Although classic economics is far from the minds of scrupulous adoption agencies,
supply and demand kicked in again. International adoptions into America also soared
after World War II (kids from Europe), the Korean War (Korean kids) and the War in
Vietnam (Vietnamese and Cambodian). The number of international adoptions climbs
during times of war, displacement, crime, corruption, and economic collapse. Russia in
the mid-nineties seemed determined to set new records in all of those categories.
Russia it was.
*****
We finished writing our autobiographies on commuter trains, in planes, at home in the
garden. The Agency interviewed us. We turned over medical records, financial records,
fingerprints. Through that summer, the children grew more strongly in our imaginations.
Yes, children. We told the agency we could handle two children. Instant family. It was a
Douglas Hardy 49
lovely, limpid summer of anticipation. On the solstice, Rose said, “Imagine this: next
summer there will be two little kids playing on this grass, picking these morning glories,
pulling the cat’s tail.”
I could imagine it. Magical.
“Calling them ‘the kids’ seems impersonal,” I said. “What should we call them?”
“I’m not ready to think about names. We don’t even know if they’ll be boys or girls, just
that they’ll be orphans and they’ll be Russian.” Rose thought for a moment, and then
suggested, “How about Boris and Natasha?”
Boris and Natasha became our imaginary children, and the waiting resumed.
The next months were filled with preparations, as the Agency filed our dossiers with their
partner orphanages in Russia. Summer became fall. Fortunately, both our jobs kept us
busy, and we took advantage of our last flexible months before Boris and Natasha arrived
to travel. Rose had a consulting client in Europe – she spent work weeks in Madrid and
Cologne. I flew to Jacksonville, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and San Francisco
on behalf of the Internet company. We even met in Denver one weekend on overlapping
business trips – the ultimate DINK1 date.
1
(Double Income, No Kids)
One night that autumn I stayed with my brother Sam, his wife Leslie and their two boys,
Augie and Sean. They lived in a bungalow in Berkeley, California, where Sam worked as
an admired business writer for The Wall Street Journal. The adults gratefully accepted
my offer to baby-sit. I played with the boys for hours, and then brought them through
their bedtime routine like a pro. I thought, there’s nothing to this – tolerate a little noise,
stick to the routine, and sing ‘em to sleep.
As my brother’s children dreamed, I stepped out the back door, into a soft California
autumn night. The full moon rode up from the Oakland Hills to the East, throwing indigo
shadows from silver trees. I studied the moon and thought, it’s shining down on Boris
and Natasha tonight, at this moment, over there in the east. In a couple hours they’ll wake
up in the orphanage. They don’t know who we are, but they are waiting for us.
I spoke silently to them and to the moon, saying, “Wait just a little longer. We’re on our
way.”
Douglas Hardy 51
4⎯GRACE HAPPENS
Fall became winter. We worked in our jobs, and continued filling out endless forms,
answering questions from the Agency, and making plans. We decorated rooms. Long
after the code names Boris and Natasha became habit, we revisited the question of how
many children, and at what age, to adopt. Our ideal remained two, ages one to six, but
we told the Agency we could start with one and return for another the following year.
We got unexpected signs that we were on the right track at last.
For example: Just as we wrangled with the question of parental leave around the
adoption, my employer announced it would shut the Boston office the following summer.
All employees were offered the option to move across the country or take a generous
severance. The timing couldn’t have been better – I would transfer my job to the west
coast over the spring and collect my severance just a few weeks before going to get our
kids. I’d have several months as a full time dad, all paid up, and then get a new position
in a hot job market. Rose’s employer offered her three months’ parental leave following
the adoption, then reassignment to local clients for two years, meaning she wouldn’t have
to travel.
You can call this kind of timing luck, or coincidence, or God’s little finger nudging you
along. Christians call such moments grace – the love and support of God that comes
through no doing of your own. Sometimes it’s better not to look too closely, but be
grateful and make the most of it.
We made the most of it. I studied tourist Russian, listening to tapes in the car and the
gym, counting off sit-ups adin – dva - tree – chitheri. Rose consulted Valerie on scores of
details, such as what gifts to bring to the orphanage staff (yes, they needed money, and
yes, it was also traditional to bring small gifts of goods they wouldn’t find in Russia).
When Rose gets on a project, amateurs had better step aside. Valerie mentioned that
children in Russian orphanages chronically lacked shoes, and Rose got on the phone.
Within a week, a major clothing retailer shipped us 200 pairs of children’s shoes, donated
at cost. We stuffed them into a duffel bag and set it aside for our trip. Soon, we were
packing office supplies, toiletries, and other hard-to-find-in-Russia items into duffel bags.
These were more humanitarian aid than gifts, and as the bags swelled with swag I
thought, here’s another role I didn’t anticipate: I’m a mule for a Russian orphanage.
The Russian term for orphanage is Detsky Dom, which translates to “Children’s Home.”
The Agency worked with three orphanages in Russia, and we learned more through the
winter about the Russian system of caring for children who have lost their parents. There
were three classes of orphanage – the bottom two were condemned by Amnesty
International in a scathing 1998 report as little more than a series of holding pens, or
children’s prisons. Yet the Children’s Homes the Agency supported were at the top of the
triage system, places where some children survived to become functional adults. They
Douglas Hardy 53
provided adequate food and shelter, and even schooling, for children ranging from
infancy to adolescence. Dedicated adults gave their lost population affection, structure
and a chance for survival in a country too preoccupied with its devastating economic and
social disruptions to care much about a few stray kids.
Valerie explained that American and European parents supported the better orphanages,
with money, gifts and fund-raising. “This makes some people squeamish, because it
looks a little too much like buying children,” she said. “But who else is going to help
them out?
“I’m not in the business of fixing Russia,” she continued. “I’m in the business of finding
good homes for children.”
*******
Rose’s sister Katharine went into labor on March 16, her birthday, and asked us to get to
Manhattan fast. “Oh, I can tell what this kid is going to be like,” she told Rose, calling
from her taxi ride to the hospital. “I told her she could have any day for a birthday except
mine. And bang, here she comes.”
We had packed bags for a two-night stay, ready to pitch in after the baby was born. I was
grateful for the excuse to leave Boston, and avoid the temptation to drink pints of beer
and sing “Kathleen mavourneen” in the Glocca Mora or the Harp or the whatever-Irish-
bar. We were connecting the hubs of faux-Irish excess, and living in New York and
Boston all those years I’d grown used to seeing Jamaican guys wearing oversize “Kiss
Me, I’m Irish” buttons. If you can dodge the drunks, St. Patrick’s is a great day to drive.
We drove south through the winter night in our black sedan, two hundred miles from the
Boston suburbs to New York; a drive so well known to us that three hours usually passed
unnoticed, like the time spent dozing in a chair. That night, however, time seemed to
move deliberately, and I was thinking, these are the moments in which our lives change
forever. The dun-colored concrete ribbon of Rte 84 outlined the hills of Connecticut in
the headlights.
My habit is to blurt out news as soon as I come home, but Rose speaks less impulsively.
She said nothing unremarkable as we set out that night. She listened for a while as I
chatted about changes at work; she answered the phone when Mark called to say, “Hurry
up, the contractions are coming one hour apart.”
Thirty minutes into the ride, Rose drew a thick pad of notepaper from her black leather
briefcase, and said, “Valerie called today.”
We had finished our final home study dossiers just three weeks before. Could she have
found a match that quickly? I drew the moment out, not asking about children directly. I
ask, “Did she have some news for us?”

Douglas Hardy 55
“I spoke to her for several hours this afternoon,” Rose continued. She indicated the notes.
My eyes on the road, I couldn’t see her expression. If I could, I might have sensed the
surprise coming. “She asked me several times how flexible we were about the ages of
children in a sibling group.”
I thought, she wants us to take on a couple of older children. Well, I’ve thought of this,
and we’ve talked about an older pair. I imagine it might be all right, but wonder about
older children being more confirmed in their mental or emotional health. I thought about
Nancy’s kids, about living more like foster parents and missing the little-kid fun I’ve had
with Stevie lately…. But Rose is leading up to a point. What?
She read names. “There are two children. A girl named Larissa, who’s seven.” I grinned
and said, “Larissa. Lara. God, it’s right out of Dr. Zhivago. Maybe she’ll look like Julie
Christie.”
“It’s a common Russian name,” she said, and continued. “She has a brother named Ivann,
who’s six. They’re generally healthy, but they come with something we have to discuss.”
“What’s that?” I asked, recalling the long list of psychological, physical or mental defects
we’d reviewed for months.
“Aleksei. He’s three.”

I glanced away from the road to see Rose smiling. “Tell me more,” I said. I was shocked.
I thought, be open, listen, you don’t have to say yes tonight. Glad to be the driver, I
focused on the black outline of Connecticut hills, the highway, and the familiar road.
Rose repeated details from Valerie: The children were in an orphanage near Krasnodar, a
city in southern Russia whose name can be translated to mean “beautiful gift.” They had
been there a little more than three weeks, following a stay in foster care. The agency had
a longstanding relationship with the orphanage, and it was run by a formidable woman
named Svetlana, whom Valerie respected deeply. The three were siblings, and they were
all born on a local collective farm. Father dead, mother disappeared. Valerie had few
details about their past but was asking the orphanage for more.
Larissa, Ivann and Aleksei all appeared to be in good physical health, although the older
two had been exposed to tuberculosis, a scourge of post-Soviet Russia. Valerie laughed
when she said, “Wait until you see their teeth!” and we knew the story – Russian
orphanage kids get sugary tea instead of milk, and the combination of more sugar, less
calcium, and tea stains are a pediatric dentist’s dream. If we say yes to these kids, I
thought, some Massachusetts dentist will be able to buy a new boat.
There were other details: they were in foster care for a few months before the orphanage.
They are full of energy. Typical kid notes, but not much about the children’s past. The
mystery that haunts most adopted children later in life appeared for the first time to us on
that drive.
Douglas Hardy 57
“What happened to their parents?” I asked.
We would learn to resent this question later, when strangers inevitably asked it. But I was
on the inside track, needing to know; entitled to know. Prospective parents look for clues
to the children’s heritage, however, and I suspected the story would tell us something
about the family.
“All we know tonight is that their father died and after that, their mother fell apart. She
became an alcoholic, had trouble with the law, and finally the courts took them away
from her. She is probably dead as well. Old Russian story.”
“Why these three? Why us?” I asked. “Is it because we said we’d consider siblings? Did
she already know about these kids when we sent in our home study dossier?”
“Valerie said she usually goes through the matches point-by-point, but as she went
through the files of possible parents for these children, she just kept thinking of us. It’s
more a gut call than a rigorous analysis.”
We bypassed Hartford to the south; it was a clear night and the city lights shined on the
Connecticut River below the Charter Oak bridge. Hartford is the 100-minute mark on a
fast-traveling night. Rose continued to recite the details, which we discussed and
pondered.
Finally, as we approached the New York state line, Rose told me that Valerie had sent a
package with medical records, pictures, and amazingly, a videotape of the three children
taken just a week before. It would be waiting for us when we returned.
We arrived at New York Hospital as Katharine’s contractions peaked. Katharine and
Mark had chosen a natural birth technique called the Bradley Method. The birthing center
rooms resembled a Midwestern motel. Medical equipment was hidden behind artwork,
and the midwife and the nurse were calm, friendly, confident. They treated birth as a
natural process not a disease. We peeked into the room and saw Katharine seated, with
Mark holding her, and then we went to play with their 4-year-old son, Stevie. And then
we heard a simple cry from Katharine, a loose and calm complaint rather than a shriek of
pain. Like Rose, her sisters are strong, steady and game. The cry was followed by a little
cat-like squawk, and the baby girl came into our lives. They named her Grace.
We returned to the birthing room twenty minutes later, with a piece of birthday cake and
a candle for Katharine, and there they were: Mom, Dad and Baby, sitting comfortably
together on the bed. We took pictures, held the baby, let Stevie hold the baby and fuss,
and chatted and cooed for an hour. And then went home to Brooklyn.
The night that Grace was born, Rose and I stayed in Katharine and Mark’s new apartment
on Clinton Street in Brooklyn. Before bed, we drank glasses of white wine by the kitchen
Douglas Hardy 59
counter. Every room was strewn with boxes; Katharine and Mark had moved into the
floor-through rooms only ten days before.
I got to the point: “Tell me – how does it make you feel, watching your sister give birth to
a perfect, healthy girl?”
Rose said, “I feel really happy for Katharine, but sad for us.” She corrected herself a
moment later, saying, “No, not sad, really…wistful. Why should it be so hard for us?”
The next day, St. Patrick's Day, I kept Stevie busy with a trip to the supermarket (and
realized that the President does not have the hardest job in the world -- a parent loading
groceries with a four-year-old does). With the squawk and drone of Hibernian bagpipes
sounding from Fifth Avenue across Central Park, I picked up Mark and Katharine and
Grace at the birthing center, and brought them home to Brooklyn.
We stayed for two days, playing with Stevie, helping with little Grace, but eager to get
home and see the videotape. On the weekend, we headed back to Massachusetts. We
spoke little on the return trip, because when you anticipate that your life is about to
change, silence is the best preparation.
*****
“Ready?” Rose asks. I nod. She pushes the videotape into the player, and then returns to
the couch, scooping up our cat Jessie as she sits. As always, Jessie sets to purring up a
racket. The screen glows bright blue, then flashes a picture of three children standing in
line. A woman’s voice off-camera says something in Russian, and the tallest child, a girl,
clasps her hands in front of her green dress. She looks past the camera and up at the out-
of-sight adults. Then she begins to sing.
“Baum baum vero goradu, eta krasnie boradu…” The little girl flaps her arms as she
sings the nursery song – something about a baby bird, I think. My tourist Russian can
hardly understand her high-pitched voice. Adult voices laugh and urge her to continue.
Next to the girl, a younger boy in corduroy pants and a red turtleneck grins and weaves
about but keeps his hands in his pockets. Next to him, an even younger boy, three years
old at most, stares an uncomprehending half-smile at the camera. He wears an olive
Russian army cap on his head and grips a toy AK-47.
I think, “Nursery rhyme and assault rifle – nice way to cover the bases. Maybe they’re
reasoning, ‘One for Mom and one for Dad.’”
I stay silent, however: Once in a while – for example, in the instant my life changes
forever – I manage to suppress a joke. Rose is rapt, and also laughing.
Lara stops singing, still flitting her hands by her shoulders, imitating a little bird. She
twirls, and then notices that the boys are frozen in stage fright. Crying “Deela!” she
Douglas Hardy 61
elbows her nearest brother, Ivan, who joins her imitation. The littlest one, Alexei, still
stares from under his cap.
“They are so cute!” Rose cries. “Those little pot bellies on the boys – and look at those
fried eggs in her hair!” Lara’s hair, cut short against lice, is pulled into two vertical
ponytails at the top of her head, held there by oversized hair clips, made with doilies and
yellow paper. In the grainy video they do, in fact, look like fried eggs.
We watch the tape a second time, and a third. Rose becomes more analytical and
observant. Handing me the cat, she writes questions on the ubiquitous pad of graph paper.
The girl is missing several teeth – normal or some problem? The little boy giggles but
doesn’t talk much – average for his age, or is his silence an ominous sign of fetal alcohol
syndrome, malnutrition or mental disability? The unseen adults give directions every
moment of the tape and my Russian isn’t strong enough to understand – are they simply
encouraging shy children or directing kids without the ability to act natural?
The little boy sits at a table and chews, with blackened teeth, some peasant combination
of root vegetables and winter leaves.
“What is that gray stuff he’s eating?” I ask.
Rose answers, “Purina Orphan Chow, of course.”

Every viewing ends with these images, at once delightful and haunting: Alexei, the
littlest, plays with chalk and then, with a mischievous grin, wipes his fingers on his
brother’s pants; Ivan, the middle boy, waves and calls one English word: “Hello-ah.” And
the girl, Lara, having ordered her brothers around for five minutes, playing the little
mother, pauses in the closing seconds of the tape. She stands before a bright window, her
half-lit face suddenly serene.
Rose declares, “She looks like an ethereal princess.”
Happily, I wonder, “Are these our kids?”

Douglas Hardy 63
5—PLAYING DETECTIVE
“Adoption,” said a friend, “Ain’t a trip to Bloomingdale’s.”
Our adoption agency did not feature aisles with a rich and satisfying variety of off-the-
rack children. Their method was to propose a single match and ask for a yes or no. If
parents said no, the Agency searched for another match. The reason: every child they
represented was worthy on his own. As a benefit to the parents, the up-or-down decision
prevented comparisons based on skimpy facts.
There is a cost to the yes-or-no method, however. First-time adopters had no comparison
to the experience, and so their choice inevitably clashed with their fantasies. Could the
next matched child be healthier, happier, or more intelligent?
Adoption ain’t a trip to Bloomingdale’s (well, you do get a choice of colors). It is an
imperfect attempt by near-strangers to make a match. We understood that, and indeed, we
were reluctant to question anything about the match we were offered.
Lara, Ivan and Alexei were different from what we had expected. We had thought long
and hard, and said two kids, ages 2-6, would be right. Yet after gathering all these facts
about us, the Agency people brought forward three children, ages 4, 7 and 8, and said:
“We just have a feeling about these kids, and we kept thinking of you,” Valerie repeated.
And then the Agency people raised the stakes. They said, “This is one of the best sibling
groups we’ve ever seen presented to us…You can say no, and these children will find a
good home, but in our experience, you never find three kids this healthy.”
So there it was, a perfect dilemma: Say yes to these three and take on challenges you
never expected. Say no, and you will never find kids this healthy. Maybe it wasn’t a dare,
but it should as hell sounded like one to me. I could see the Agency was doing its job,
and yet to us, the rules seemed to change faster than we could consider what to do.
And the three children in the video were adorable. We asked for time to get more
information.
The documentation that came with the videotape contained ominous facts. The children’s
father died of a “brain trauma.” In the court order withdrawing their mother’s parental
rights, there was mention of a drinking party in which another man had died. The mother
surrendered the children against her will – what was the children’s reaction to this? What
had happened in the 2 ½ years from the time their father died to the time their mother lost
custody of them? What was this notation about exposure to tuberculosis? We asked the
Agency to find out what they could through their connections in Russia.
We talked it over. We talked about nothing else for days.

Douglas Hardy 65
“Their father was killed. They’ll be traumatized.”
“All orphans are traumatized. They’ve lost their parents, for crying out loud.”
“Something’s fishy. If the children have only been in the orphanage for a few weeks, how
do they know they’re okay? Maybe they’re just glad to be in one of the better
orphanages. They were in foster care and it didn’t work out.”
“Wouldn’t the orphanage staff know when they have real trouble?”
“If you had three kids, cute like these ones are, and you figured they had a chance to get
out, to go to parents in big old rich Amerika, wouldn’t you say they were fine?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know what to think.”
“Neither do I.”
A few days later, Rose and I received this message from the Agency:
The orphanage director talked with the children
about their memories about the birth family…. The
children stated that they were afraid of their
stepfather, that he hit them and hit their
mother. They do not appeared [sic] to have any

sexual abuse. The children said that they did not
want to leave their mother, but stated that it is
much better in the orphanage. The children said
that someone killed their father.”
Svetlana, the orphanage director, had a detailed conversation with each child. They had
no recollection of anyone being killed in their presence. Svetlana said they could be
repressing their memories, but added that “they are very good children and their only
delays are due to neglect.” The orphanage, clearly one of the better places for children in
such a situation in Russia, was working actively with each child to overcome the learning
and speech delays resulting from long neglect.
The orphanage also commented on the children’s documented delays in speech
development, and TB exposure, and their opinion was that these were within the expected
scope; nothing the kids couldn’t recover from.
I asked Rose, “What did we expect? That their parents would have died together in an
auto accident?” Shame on me for not having imagined it more graphically before this
moment, but it seemed that these kids had a more typical story than we’d like to imagine.
“Let’s see what Dr. Miller says,” Rose replied.

Douglas Hardy 67
Rose had already found an exceptional doctor, Dr. Laurie Miller of the Floating Hospital
in Boston, who specialized in treating children of international adoption. She duplicated
the video and sent it to Dr. Miller.
Dr. Miller was happy with the children’s statistics – height, weight, head circumference,
general health. She agreed that they looked unusually healthy, “Honest.” Her
interpretation of the video set our rawest fears at ease.
“I see a cupid’s bows on Lara and Ivan.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The way a child’s upper lip curves in a bow shape. We don’t see that as well defined
with fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s a good sign.”
“What about Alexei? He hardly speaks at all.”
“The video is indistinct on him. I’d like to see more. Can you get another video, or close-
up pictures?” she asked. “I’d also like a Russian-speaking colleague, Dr. Vladimir, to
take a look.”
Dr. Miller said, “Remember, every problem we’ve talked about could happen in a
biological child of yours. A child is bright, verbal and progressing fine, and then she gets
to second grade and we discover she’s just not wired for basic symbolic thinking or
complex sentence structure or a logical flow of ideas. Or a little boy seems typical as an
infant, and at 18 months is clearly demonstrating autism.
“And you know what?” she added. “Thousands of parents every year hear this about their
biological children. Surprise. Tough. Look, it could happen with these three. Me, I’d take
‘em. They seem great. But Doug and Rose, hear this: There’s no way to predict how it
will turn out. You have to decide.”
We asked the Agency for a second video. A week later, we received an elaborate, 27-
minute recording of the children performing all the tasks Dr. Miller had requested, and
more. They rose from bed, stretching and yawning like players in a vaudeville
pantomime. They brushed their teeth and made up their rooms, played games, and tended
plants in the orphanage’s nursery. Adults prompted them to chat and wave. Through the
cute and corny play-acting, the children showed that they were, in fact, healthier than we
had a right to expect. These were clearly exceptional kids. As we watched I thought,
they’re responding for us. They’re waving at us. This is not a movie for just anyone – the
adults are telling Lara, Ivan and Alexei that they are performing for their next parents.
We sent the video to Drs. Miller and Vladimir, and started more intense talks with the
Agency. Vivian, a social worker assigned to our case, answered our questions. She was
English, late in middle age, capable and direct -- Dame Judi Dench with big hair. Like all
of them, she was devoted to children. She met us after work in a hotel restaurant. It had
Douglas Hardy 69
been two weeks since our first view of the children, and the Agency was interested in an
answer.
Vivian ordered tea.
“What doubts still trouble you?” she asked.
Rose replied, “We were waiting to hear from the speech specialist. The children seemed
to understand how they had lost their parents, but there were few official details. Broad
terms like ‘orphanage delays,’ seemed to cover a multitude of issues.”
“They have to do that, over there,” said Vivian. “You know, international adoption is a
political football. There’s always someone standing up in the Duma shouting about how
Russia is selling its children to the West. So the doctors over there give broad diagnoses
to make the adoption more palatable to immigration officials.
“You know this,” she said. “And you know that doesn’t mean they won’t have difficulties
at first. This particular orphanage is the best I’ve ever seen, in any country. Still, children
coming from an institutional setting are not going to be as developed verbally as children
who started life in Concord, Massachusetts.”
Rose repeated what she’d told the Agency many times, “We do not want to be considered
candidates for particularly complex placements. We’re tired of being the ‘Okay, they’re
strong, they can handle it,’ couple, as we have been for our families. Vivian, we know
this is risky business, but we don’t want to sign up for more than a challenge than
adoptive children already are. We don’t want to be exceptional.”
Vivian nodded, and then looked at me. “You look so sad,” she said.
I said, “I have three terrible doubts, and you have to hear them to understand my
expression.
“The first is that this is happening weeks, even months, earlier than you had estimated. I
was counting on a month after work ended just to prepare, to rest, to get ready. Now it
looks like we might get these children a couple of months earlier. Maybe that’s just our
tough luck, but I don’t feel prepared.”
“What else?”
“They’re so different from what we had imagined. You know: Boris and Natasha. Now it
looks like Boris and Natasha and Boris, older and maybe pretty messed up.”
Vivian asked, “Would it have been better if you had not been offered this unusual
choice?”
Douglas Hardy 71
I answered with a question of my own, “Does more comfortable mean better? That
speaks to my second doubt. In our lives, ‘comfortable’ has not always meant ‘better.’ I’m
glad for the years I spent near my father during his bout with Alzheimer’s and his final
illness. It was a good way to say good-bye. But those two years were a slow walk through
a thousand little deaths. It was not ‘comfortable.’ Thinking about these exceptional
children, with all the unknown gaps in their story, do I choose ‘comfortable?’ Is that
better than a more typical story?”
“I will tell you this,” cautioned Vivian. “You really don’t know anything about these
three children.”
I thought, meanly, “That covers your ass, lady, but doesn’t help me much.” I turned to the
subject of that question – the number! Again.
“And that’s my third worst fear,” I concluded. “I didn’t want three children. My deepest
fears say, ‘three is too many.’” I didn’t look at Rose; I could feel her gaze on me. I had to
say this aloud to Vivian to make it real to her, to Rose, and even to myself. “Three is too
many, and I said that before. And you have put these three in front of us and said,
‘They’re the best we’ve seen.’ So how am I supposed to say no?”
Vivian said, “With three, there’s always one lap too few.”
“Yes, and always one voice too many,” I said.

The conversation continued but came to no resolution. Vivian was well intentioned and
kind, but like a good therapist, she left the choices to us. We finished the discussion no
closer to a decision than we had started it.
That night, Rose and I finally crossed the threshold of that question. She was more
willing to take three than me, as long as they were healthy. These three looked healthy. I
was still full of doubts about the number. I reminded her that I always wanted to stop at
two. She reminded me that she wanted four.
I said tersely, “Well, then, I guess this sets up nicely. Three kids means you’re getting
your way.”
It was a cruel thing to say, and my remark opened up a ragged hole in Rose’s heart.
Agonized tears cascaded as she told me what I already knew: Rose is a strong woman,
and all her life she’s been confronted with the world’s hostility to strong women.
She said, “Everyone will believe we got these children because I pushed you into it.” She
said, “Whatever goes wrong to be my fault, that’s what people will say, and you’re
already setting that up.”
She was right and I was wrong. My apology caromed off her avalanche of grief, and she
cried for me to stay away. Then she cried in my arms. I was taken aback, instantly
Douglas Hardy 73
ashamed, and instantly I craved forgiveness. I realized that this sadness was bigger than
the injury I’d done to her. Here in my arms was all the grief of failure to “fulfill her
destiny as a woman.” The fact that she had stoically borne that chronic grief made it no
less painful.
Later, as Rose slept, I walked out in the early spring night. I thought, this is the most
important decision of our lives together, and I am so focused on my own fears that I
forgot we have to do this together. I thought, if we can bear this amount of truth, and
make a decision only out of honesty and love, the right decision will happen, because it
will be in the hands of God or a higher power or grace fate.
Let me say that more briefly: It’s always in the hands of God.
Rose and I were married in this belief: Put the health of the marriage, the partnership,
before personal victory, and things will work out. That night, I thought, put the health of
this family-to-be before your own fears, and things will work out. We hadn’t been
brought this far to be dropped into the abyss. It’ll be fine.
Good thing faith doesn’t ask for details.
*****
As the time to decide drew close, Rose received this email from Dr. Vladimir (the
punctuation is reproduced as it appeared in his email):
Even before sending my report to you, I would like to
share a piece of information I unexpectedly obtained
while reviewing the tape today.
You probably noticed that there is a “side discussion"
on the tape: a caregiver(s) talks to children, asks
questions, gives directions, etc. In addition, she
chats with the person who was actually making the
tape. These comments were not intended for you. I am
sure they did not suspect that their conversation was
being recorded. (Most of the comments on the tape are
positive and I made several references to them in my
report). However, one piece contains the following
information….Here is an exact translation of the
conversation:
Ivan?he is a healthy, strong boy?sex maniac (sic!-Dr.
V.)?this one?in the middle?Ivan? He urged girls to
take (to grab?-Dr. V) his penis?you know?Yes, here, it
happened here?Uncle Sasha told us. Ivan learned this
from his cousins, his sisters and brothers (cousins –

Douglas Hardy 75
Dr. V) did this stuff, he saw this, that is what Uncle
Sasha said….
Rose called me in Los Angeles, where I was working, and we talked through the
possibilities. We already knew Ivan was a rough-and-tumble little boy, and it was
probably typical child sexual play, we agreed. Just to make sure, Rose asked the Agency
to check with Svetlana. The orphanage Director, who we were beginning to respect for
her frank and hardheaded love of the children, reported that she had a charming
conversation with Ivan. She told him “not to go playing with his penis with his hands all
dirty from playing outside, because it needs to be clean to grow.”
“Not exactly progressive parenting, but it’ll do the job,” I said. “Doesn’t look like there’s
much to worry about.”
Rose asked, “Don’t you think it was bad that he showed his penis to the girls?”
“Rose, I got to tell you, every little boy does that,” I said, quickly adding, “Except me, of
course. Maybe it’s a bad sign, and maybe they believe he is a sex maniac, but what does
that mean? They’re saying all kinds of things to get these kids out of Russia. We can’t let
every little doubt kill this adoption. I could be wrong, but it just doesn’t seem like the sex
bit is a big problem. The kid is six,” I concluded.

The rest of Dr. Vladimir’s report was also reassuring. He inspected both tapes and found
nothing to worry about, beyond “the usual speech delays.”
We knew about “the usual delays.” We’d been six years in a delay of our own. It was
time to make a decision.
I have heard many adoptive parents say they fell in love with their children at first sight.
Our experience wasn’t like that. The Agency had dropped us into a sea of cross-currents
and contradictions.
How might you have responded? Imagine weighing the evidence – on one side, ominous
clues and half-information indicating something might be horribly wrong. On the other
side, experts in whom we put our trust, professionals with a wonderful track record,
giving matter-of-fact explanations of the situation and repeating the message, you’ll
never find kids this healthy again. And in the middle, balanced between joining us
forever or disappearing forever – three lovely children.
I thought of my friend Janet’s words:
You stand at the edge of a cliff. You look left and right, searching for a safe way forward.
And then, because there is no other way, you leap.
We leapt. We said yes.

Douglas Hardy 77
******
The days grew longer, and faster. Three months seemed barely enough time to prepare.
The word came from Svetlana: “They want American names.” We wrote names on Post-
It notes – family names, baby names, strong-sounding names, names that worked with
plain and hyphenated surnames – and then we played mix ‘n’ match on a wall until we
had chosen three perfect American names for each. Sarah, for Rose’s grandmother; Ben,
because it seemed to fit Ivan so well; and Alex, which was just short for Alexei. We
decided they could use their Russian first names whenever they wanted, to hold onto their
heritage just a little.
Rose bought three yellow stuffed dogs, and we posed them around the house for pictures.
We assembled a photo album for each child, in which “big dog,” “middle dog,” and
“little dog” showed off the children’s rooms, their toys, the yard, and our two cats. Rose
wrote captions on each album page: “Little dog plays with the cats;” and, “The dogs help
Papa get the mail!”
The duffels grew to the shape of sausages, overstuffed with clothes for other children at
the orphanage. Our 12-year-old niece gave us hand-me-down clothes and toys to take
along. The Agency cued us on gifts that were still hard to find in Russia. American
cigarettes for Dimitri, the orphanage translator, driver, and videographer. Office supplies
for the orphanage doctor. Beautiful scarves for the teachers. Dollars for, well, everyone.
Leslie, our sister-in-law in California, gave us three pieces of advice:
1) Get help—find people to clean, shop, and baby-sit;
2) Make time for your marriage right from the start;
3) Find sources of support outside your marriage—friends, parents’ groups, church.
It was good advice, and almost impossible to follow. Both Rose and I had built our lives
on the myth of endurance, that powerful and corrosive WASP tendency to equivocate
catastrophe, to shut up when life spins out of control. “Hardy,” she points out, means
“capable of enduring difficult conditions.” And damn, we were going to prove that if it
killed us.
*****
Delta Airlines #30 from JFK to Moscow took off at 3PM on June 30. Over Nova Scotia,
as the cabin grew dark, Rose dozed. I have always envied her ability to sleep on
overnight flights. Sleepless, I read, mostly American history. I opened my paperback,
Stephen Ambrose’s story of Lewis and Clark, two explorers on an expedition called “The
Voyage of Discovery.” They didn’t know what they’d find, just that they would be gone
for years. The book’s title was Undaunted Courage.

Douglas Hardy 79
6—NEW-DEPENDENTS DAY
[Note – as a convention, I have placed English translations of Russian in brackets.]
Medvedovsky
The next day, Dimitry picks us up in his rattling white Lada, and we drive northwest
through the crumbling plazas of Krasnodar. Out of the city, we speed north toward
Medvedovsky, Dimitry keeping up a cheerful patter, lighting one Marlboro off another. It
is the fourth of July 1998. Back home, Americans are drinking beer by the barbecue and
shooting fireworks into the fields. Later, Rose and I will come to call July 4th “New
Dependents Day.”
I ride shotgun and memorize the scene. The land here spreads north from the Caucasus,
flat as a floor. Poplars fence the road, anchoring topsoil from the prevailing wind off the
Black Sea. They shade the old men and women who sit on the dusty shoulder with their
cannonball stacks of green melons. In their lumpy, prematurely aged faces I can see they
are ethnic Russians, and I think, these black fields must have seemed like Paradise to the
northern tribes. No wonder the Swedes fought Peter the Great this far south – it’s
Russia’s garden. Even in a broken ex-Soviet backwater, a garden means survival. (True
fact, hobby gardeners: Those plum trees and backyard vegetable beds packed right up to
the walls of Russian shanties aren’t for show. They’re food. Know what you won’t find at
a Russian house? A lawn.)

Twenty miles to the south, mountains rise 15,000 feet from the plain, like a wall of snow-
covered stone pickets protecting this land from the fratricidal Babel to the south. Mt.
Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe, stands near the center of this thousand-mile
natural barrier. Even the German army paused only briefly here; they were forced north
from this plain in 1942 to grinding obliteration at Stalingrad.
This morning my mind is floating on the serene tide of inevitability. My old life is
absolutely behind me, and this strip of road leads to the new life. This hour’s ride divides
my time as surely as that mountain range to the south separates one continent from
another. I think, in one more hour I’ll be a Dad….in 30 minutes I’ll be a Dad….
“Aw, Mama, you don’t have to cry!” says Dimitry with a practiced laugh. He turns back
to look at Rose, who is snuffling and wiping her eyes. He grins and says to me, “Every
time it’s like this – the ladies cry just before.”
Rose laughs back, “I’m not crying! It’s these allergies.” She pinches her eyes. “You’ve
got about a million acres of pollen-tossing plants out here. I’m not crying.”
After an hour, we turn east onto a pockmarked dirt track (or, as we have learned to call all
dusty, corrugated secondary routes in Southern Russia, a “road”). Dimitry pulls into a
driveway and parks the Lada. “We’re here, Mom and Dad,” he says.
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The Medvedovsky Children’s Home looks more like an American junior high school,
circa 1935, than the Commie-concrete bunker I expected to see. It is three stories high, a
sturdy box of scored brick – the kind that barks the back of your hand if you walk too
close. A playground occupies one corner of the lot, and some of the play equipment (a
slide, a swing, a climbing lattice of galvanized steel pipe) stands unbroken. As we get
out of the car, five mongrel dogs emerge yapping from the playground.
Dimitry pulls yet another Marlboro and waves at the dogs. “They’re fine,” he said. He
considers the cigarette at the door of the orphanage, then slides it back in its pack. “Are
you ready to go in?” he asks.
“Yes,” says Rose, and she takes my hand. Dimitry leads us through the door into a
stairwell, predictably painted in pale green enamel. Dimitry raises his sunglasses for the
first time that day and mounts the stairs. We follow. I am no longer detached from this
moment that I have anticipated for years. I am simply Doug, climbing the stairs, literally
about to step through a door into my new life. I am completely prepared for this, already
in my next life, because the journey, I realize, began long before this day, and this
stairway is just another set of steps in that journey. Dimitry turns a buttonhook at the top
of the stairs, and stands by a closed door. He knocks and speaks a greeting in Russian.
The door to the office opens inward, and out run the three children shouting, “Mama!
Papa!”. They wrap themselves around our legs, and then lead us by the hand into the
office, where a large woman sits behind a desk. Of course we recognize Svetlana,
Director of the detsky dom.
She must have rehearsed the kids in this little dance. The encounter is clearly
choreographed to startle and delight anxious parents, and yet the children have played
their parts so expertly that it is impossible to be skeptical of the staging. (Rose tells me
later, “It was like the emotional response you have at an animal rescue shelter. If all the
dogs were sitting quietly, you might not make the right choice. But somehow there’s
always one mangy mutt that jumps up on the chain fence, yapping and wagging its tail,
ready to kiss you and go home then and there. Instead of worrying, you say, ‘Aw shucks,
this is a nice one…’”)
Svetlana beams and motions us into the room, speaking Russian too quickly for me to
understand. Dimitry follows us in, translating her greeting. She sweeps a beefy palm
toward the couch, on which sat Lara, Ivan, and Alexsei.
[Hello, dears] I say in Russian. [It’s Papa and Mama. We know who you are.]
Lara jumps from the couch, and the clap of her oversize white strap-back dress sandals on
the linoleum startles her into giggles. She checks herself with a look at Svetlana, then
grasps my fingers with one small hand, and Rose’s with the other. She leads us to the
couch.
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[We have been waiting for you] she says, her voice intimate, as if talking to a favorite
doll. [We love you.]
Svetlana speaks and Dimitry translates: “We are so glad to see you here. The children
loved the photos and video you sent of their new home in America. Please, please, sit
down. Sit with your children.”
Lara shoos her brothers to each side of the couch and we sit, and Lara crawls into Rose’s
lap, arms around her neck. I boost Alexsei onto one leg and Ivan onto another. They
squirm like….boys.
We arrange the next days of visitation with Svetlana. Dimitry alternates translating and
telling us how beautiful the children were, and how good life will be for them in
America. Finally, the big woman says, [Take them outside! It’s a beautiful day!] As we
rise, she motions for the children to come to her and speaks to each quietly. She looks
very seriously into each child’s eyes as she speaks, and I think, she’s telling them to be
good.
We go out to the scruffy lawn behind the orphanage, children holding our hands. When
Alexsei makes the universal two-handed sign to “pick me up” I oblige. Dimitry stands
nearby, and now that he is outside, making up for lost smoking time. Rose opens her bag
and asks Dimitry to tell the children that she brought along some friends. The children
peer inside the bag.

“Zabatchki!!!” they screamed. “The dogs!”
Grinning, Rose withdraws the three stuffed yellow lab dogs that guided the children
through their American home in the photo albums we sent weeks before.
“Big dog for Lara,” said Rose, handing her the largest lab. Lara buries her face in the
doll, and then holds it across her arm and strokes the honey-colored back. She actually
jumps up and down with delight.
“Middle dog for Ivan,” Rose says, handing the 7-year-old his doll.
Alexsei leans from my arms to grab the littlest dog, catches it up and hugs it to his chest.
Lara burbles “Ya lublu,” as if we couldn’t see she loves her dog already. Ivan steps back
two paces and hurls his dog high in the air, then catches it. He repeats this several times
and then, smiling, swings the dog around his head and throws it to the ground. He picks
the doll up and throws it high again.
All boy, I think. Maybe someday I’ll teach him my favorite game at his age – throwing
my stuffed animals out the second-story window, just to watch them fly.
Dimitry tells the children, [You must show your parents where you play.] To us, he says,
“You should see this place. This is a nice place.” Ivan scoots to the far corner of the lawn
Douglas Hardy 85
and we chase after him. In my arms, Alexsei bucks and struggles and then jumps down,
muttering a single word in the emphatic accent of a three-year-old. Dimitry translates,
“He says that a lot. The word means, ‘myself’.”
“So this kid wants to do it all himself,” I say as Alexsei takes off after his brother. Still
grinning, Rose says, “Noted.” Lara stays close, leaning against Rose’s hip as they walk,
still hugging her stuffed dog.
True to the video, Lara is skinny. Her knees hinge legs like a sandpiper’s. She has tiny
hips and a sunken chest, and while her hands are quick and strong, her wrists emerge like
sticks from the gathered sleeves of her dress. Her head is slightly too large for her neck
and shoulders, but her face is round and apple-cheeked and animated. She jabbers
nonstop; now to Rose, now to the dog, now in a yell to the receding Alexsei. Her hair is
held by those fried-egg clips that I now see are meant to be daisies. Bouncing along
beside Rose, she looks cartoonish and comical – Dr. Seuss draws an orphan.
Alexsei runs. He is small for his age, a little unsure of his gait, but fast and deliberate. His
face is almost a twin of Lara’s, with broad cheekbones and an impish smile. We had been
told that Alexsei could be very quiet, but on this bright, exciting day, he bursts with
energy and rudimentary Russian. He falls and picks himself up, smiling.
I had seen in the video that Ivan is built like a gymnast – short and broad, with incipient
muscles that already, at age 7, look powerful. That Purina Orphan must have done its job,
because the malnutrition he’d known was a memory now. His complexion is darker than
his siblings’, and his deep green eyes contrast with their simple blue. After only a few
minutes I can see that his attention is more interior than that of Lara or Alexsei, and more
directed. But man, can he move! He disappears at the far corner of the lawn.
There, a wide cinder path leads through a corridor of bushes about 100 feet to a wooden
dock. We can see the Kuban River beyond the dock; 200 yards wide at this point, it is
green, sluggish and serene. Rose, Lara, Dimitri and I walk the path to the dock, expecting
to find Ivan and Alexei but they are gone.
“Did you see where they went?” I ask Dimitry. He shakes his head and calls for them. I
think, “Great -- we take them outside and lose them in the first ten minutes.”
Lara squeals and runs off the path, under a green bush, and her brothers burst out of the
opposite side, running with their hands clasped. They circle a line of bushes with Lara in
pursuit, yelling.
Dimitry translates, “She’s telling them to share something. She wants to help give you a
surprise.”
Ivan runs back to us, his dog tucked under his arm and his hand still clasped tightly.
Alexsei, one hand closed and the other clutching his tiny yellow dog, catches up. Lara
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had paused, retreated under the bushes for a moment, and now she returns to us as well,
yelling [Wait for me! You can’t give Mama and Papa a present without me!]
As she arrives, Ivan opened his hands. His palms hold a dozen tiny purple-brown berries.
Alexsei opens his hands and spills a few berries as well as his dog.
“They’re currants!” says Rose. She takes some from each hand and asks me, “How do
you say thank you?”
“Spasiba,” I say “Are those ripe?”
Rose hands berries to me and Dimitry. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “This is amazing. You don’t
get these fresh back home.” She inspects the brush lining our path. “These are all currant
bushes.” Ivan and Lara chatter at her, and Lara gives her the large stuffed dog. They
disappear under the bushes again.
Dimitry says, “They’ve been eating these for a few days. An older kid showed them
where to find the ones the birds miss.”
I retrieve Alexsei’s dog, and bend to take his hand, and we walk to the river.
Gorky Park
An elaborate, two-storey carousel twirls just outside the main entrance of Gorky Park. It
is a 19th-century masterpiece of carving and mechanism, pink and aqua and gold. How it
survived through the Stalin years, when to stand out or be colorful appears to have invited
demolition, beats the hell out of me. Like the glorious theaters and palaces of the Czarist
era, perhaps this antique was too beautiful for the apparat to destroy. Perhaps it lasted
because children loved it. Even the Soviets loved the things their children loved.
Lara and Ivan rode around and around on the plunging horses, and Alexsei sat with Rose
in a cart carved like an elephant. I took videos, finally handing the camcorder to Rose so
she could shoot me chasing Lara up to the second story, where she jumped on and off
every horse. After three turns on the carousel, we walked into Gorky Park. strolling along
the embankment toward the sound of music, flowing water and children’s happy
screaming. We came upon Gorky Park’s little-kid playground, whose favorite feature is a
tall slide.
The slide is made of inflated rubber or vinyl, and has four wide, red-and-yellow ramps.
Children ascend stairs perhaps 20 feet on either side, pause on a catwalk, and then leap
out into space above the soft ramp. In a moment, they are caught by the slide’s benign
and yielding slope. Grandmothers sit on the benches nearby, watching dozens of young
children leap, scream, laugh, tumble, and get up and do it again.

Douglas Hardy 89
Our kids hesitate at first, but Rose and I climb with them to the top of the slide, and I hold
Alexsei and Rose holds Lara for the first go. Ivan needs neither prompting nor help; he
throws himself into the air and lands headfirst on the slide. Soon, all three join joyful,
near-hysterical stream of children flowing down the slides and up the stairs. Rose and I
catch our breath on a bench; I video the children’s play.
Looking at that video today, I can still only discern delight in Lara’s laughter, and a
slightly bewildered but happy abandon in Alexsei. Ivan demonstrates a physical courage
that I have never possessed. He’s reckless and fabulously free in his airborne moments.
He is free in his own world, where the body takes over and caution disappears.
The children climb and slide for half an hour. Rose sees they’re getting exhausted, so I
put away the camera and she calls them to come. I had been recording Lara, and Alexsei
had stayed close to her, but Ivan has stopped sliding. He is crouched behind the stairs,
playing with an unseen object. Rose calls him again, and leaves the bench to meet the
others. Ivan scampers toward us, happily brandishing the toy sword he has found.
“Oh, no, not that, little man,” says Rose in a cheerful singsong. She reaches for the six-
inch blade. “Douglas, tell him that’s dangerous.”
“Apasna,” I say, adding in my tourist Russian, “Haroshe malchick, eta apasna.” [Good
boy, that’s dangerous.].

Ivan whips the sword behind his back and his smile disappears. I jump to him, too fast,
and take him by the arms. He shrugs and struggles as I reach behind his back and take
hold of his hand, clasped over the sword. “Apasna,” I say, “Nyet.”
He grips the sword tightly. I squeeze his hand until the sword drops to the ground. I
snatch it up and turned away to place it in my backpack. I notice my tongue is gripped
hard between my teeth, as if I’m holding back a rebuke I hadn’t noticed. Trying to seem
unthreatening, I am literally biting my tongue.
Ivan roars. He charges me, fists balled up. Rose catches him up, smiling and trying to pet
him. His screams grow louder as she gathers him in her arms and strokes his hair. I hear
her say, “There, there. It’s all right.”
He strikes at her blindly, struggling to get away, reaching for me and the backpack. Lara
and Alexsei stand frozen around Rose. I turned in time to see, for the first time, Ivan
suddenly straighten, hands at his sides, his face to the sky. He screeches in an animal
chorus of rage, protest, anger, despair. Rose holds him and he remains drawn to his full
height even as his feet float off the ground. He is not punching or kicking her – he is
stiffly at attention in her arms, screaming to the sky. Lara begins to cry, and Alexsei
looks on in silence, his eyes transmuting to an almost blank unrecognition. This is the
first time I’ve seen that expression, the one combat veterans call the thousand-yard stare.
There is nothing in his face but….recognition. He has seen this before.

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Babuskas rush in, scolding Ivan and saying, as far as I can understand, that he is bad, and
that boys don’t cry. Rose shouts, “We have to get out of here.” She starts off with the
stiff, shrieking boy gripped against her. Tears now streak his cheeks, but his sounds still
are not weeping. They well up from someplace far deeper than childish dismay at losing a
toy. I sling the bags over my shoulder, take Lara and Alexsei by the hand, and followed.
That’s how we walk through Gorky Park – Rose slightly ahead, with the rigid and
howling child gripped to her chest, and me trying simultaneously to ascertain what is
happening, fob off the grandmothers who trail us, and comfort Ivan’s siblings.
After we returned to the apartment, Ivan’s fit lasted four hours.
*****
Valentina took Lara and Alexsei into the kitchen, and played with them through the
afternoon. They sometimes looked anxiously toward the bedroom where Ivan called out,
his voice becoming hoarse. Rose and I alternated turns clamping Ivan in a therapeutic
hold. When he escaped our arms and legs for a moment, he ran straight to the bedroom
wall, smashing his head once, and again, and again. Drawing his right forearm up to his
mouth, gripping it with his left hand like a chicken leg, he bit savagely into his skin. He
dug his fingernails into his eyes until we could wrestle him back into immobility. Finally,
toward evening he eased a little, exhausted and dehydrated.

Our agency liaison arranged a visit that night a doctor from the Filatov Institute,
Moscow’s great children’s hospital. Ivan had slipped into a spacey calm. His welts,
bruises and bite marks were clearly visible. The doctor examined him, spoke to Valentina
and us, and treated Ivan’s wounds. He drank tea with Valentina in the kitchen as we put
the children to bed.
When Rose and I returned to the kitchen, the doctor gave us a small amount of valerian, a
traditional sleep aid, “For the children if they wake up tonight, and for you.” He gathered
his bag and Valentina led him to the door.
In the door, the doctor turned back to us with a look of sympathetic sadness. He said, “I
have seen these cases before, and I have to tell you: There is still time to change this.
Don’t take these children.”
Valentina gave us dinner and we ate. We talked to Valentina who insisted that this was
nothing more than an adjustment. Like many Russians, she was compassionate toward us
but saw with unsentimental vision that we were these kids’ ticket out. We went to bed in
the children’s room, exhausted and filled with fear. Rose turned her face to the wall.
I knew it was late when I woke, because the sky outside the window was dark, and in the
weeks around Moscow’s summer solstice the sky stays dark blue until 11PM. I lay on my
cot under big windows, and stared for a while at the moon. Now it shined down on all
five of us, not full as in that November night in Berkeley but waning. I heard the
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suspiration of Rose’s quiet sobbing. I crossed the room, petted her hair, and asked,
idiotically, “What?”
Her sobs suddenly racked up her spine, and then subsided. In a voice muffled by her
pillow, Rose said, “I can’t help it, I hate her.”
“Who?”
“Tanya. Their Mom. She’s gone; I know I should feel sorry for her. But she did this to
them, and I can’t help myself. I hate her.”

7—CHILDREN’S HOME
[Note: Maya, 22 years old, is the Russian-American friend who acted as translator with
us for 6 weeks in the summer of 1998. When she is translating the children’s words into
English, their Russian speech will not be shown in brackets.]
*****
Maya returns from morning camp with the kids, irate. She places Ivan on the stairs for a
timeout. Alexei and Lara scamper into the kitchen, where I am preparing lunch. Maya
goes outside for a cigarette. I watch her pacing the driveway and think, whoo boy, here
we go again.
When Rose comes downstairs from her morning rest, Maya tells us about Ivan’s
behavior. She explains that Ivan hid from her during the pickup. She had wandered the
parking lot with parents honking at her to move her car, calling for Ivan, frightened that
he might have wandered off or hurt himself. Then Ivan jumped out from behind a wall,
where he had been watching the entire time. He had refused to wear his seat belt and
called Maya a whore.
As Ivan’s time out ends, Rose sits on the stair below him. He grows tearful, insisting he is
a bad boy and nobody likes him because he is always bad. By now, Maya has learned to
translate so quickly that Ivan’s words seemed sometimes to come in English.

Douglas Hardy 95
He says, “I am going to run away and be killed by cars. All the cars on our street should
run over me.”
Rose pulls him into her lap, petting his hair, saying, “No, you cannot do that. Why do you
want to scare us?” Teasing him gently, she said, “I love you and I need TWO boys. What
will Mama do if she only has a LITTLE boy and not a BIG boy?” She kisses his nose,
asking, “Whose nose will I kiss?” She nuzzles his hair, “Whose hair will I nuzzle?”
This diversion has worked in the past, but not now. Ivan leaps off Rose’s lap and lies on
the couch, head buried in his arms.
“I’m BAD!” he cries. “I’m SHIT. I have to die and be killed by cars!”
There are moments when nothing but the truth will cleave the wall of anger or grief that
closes a person’s heart and mind. Rose moves back to Ivan, one stair below him, and
says, “Vanya, Papa and I know why you think you are bad. We know all about you and
Lara and Alexei.”
“What do you know?” asks Ivan. He peeks up, meets her eyes briefly, then slams his face
down again.
“All about your first Mama and her drinking. All about your first Papa, that he died, and
all about the other Papas.”
Rose says, “This Papa and I know that you are good children who had bad things happen
to them.”
“Do you know what happened to my first Papa?” Ivan asks.
Rose says, “We heard three different stories about what happened to your first Papa. One
story said he died in an accident at work, and another story said he died in a car accident.
Another story said he was hit in the head by someone else.
Ivan rises from the couch. He walks calmly to the stairs and sits. He has stopped crying.
He looks at Maya, as if to ask if she is still translating, and Maya says, “Da, yes.” All
expression then leaves Ivan’s face, and in a low voice, a voice beyond emotion, he tells
this story:
“I was big, but littler than now, and Alexei was a new baby. It was late, but still daytime.
I was in bed, with Larissa. Mama was feeding Alexei in the house somewhere. Papa and
Babushka were outside in the garden, at a table. They were arguing. She wasn’t outside
with Papa and Babushka. I got out of bed and went to the window when I heard Papa and
Babushka fighting.”
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“Who’s Babushka?” Rose asks Maya.
“It means grandmother,” Maya answered. She asks Ivan, “Babushka – your Papa’s Mama
or your Mama’s Mama?”
“Mama’s Mama,” Ivan answers. “She was mean.” In the kitchen, Lara and Alexei are
silent.
“Papa left the table. Babushka yelled at him. She followed Papa and then she hit him hard
in the back of his head with a rake.”
Maya pauses, and says to Rose, “No, wait…a rake or a hoe, something like that. I don’t
know this word.” She repeats the word. Ivan holds up a hooked finger and swipes it up
and down.
“Oh, God, he means a sickle,” says Maya. She flashes a startled grimace and shakes her
head. “A sickle, like for chopping grain on a farm.”
“Go on,” says Rose.
Ivan says, “Babushka hit Papa hard again, and split his head open. He fell to the ground
and there was blood everywhere. He got up a little, and stumbled back toward the house
and fell down again, in the doorway. Mama walked in with Alexei and started screaming
at Babushka. She got towels to Papa to stop the bleeding. She screamed for Lara.”
At the sound of her Russian name, Lara moves from the kitchen to the foot of the stairs.
In her emphatic “adult” voice, Lara interjects, “That’s not right. I woke up before Mama
called me. And Papa wasn’t in the doorway. He fell on the rug by the couch.”
Maya and Rose try to quiet her, but she insists on speaking. Maya translates the
children’s back and forth rendering of the story:
Lara: “I woke up from the argument, just like you. When you went to the window I went
into the big room. I saw Babushka hit Papa. Mama tried to help Papa, but then she gave
Alexei to me and grabbed Babushka. She yelled, ‘Look what you’ve done! I’m going to
kill you! You’re drunk!’”
“They were not drunk,” say Ivan, suddenly animated, “They were drinking lemonade.”
“They were drinking vodka,” says Lara, and then corrects herself. “No, Babushka drank
vodka, and Papa drank wine.”
“What happened then?” asks Rose.

Douglas Hardy 99
Ivan says, “Babushka ran away.”
“That’s right,” agrees Lara. “Babushka knew the police would come so she ran away and
we did not see her again.” Lara continues, her voice calming to the near-robotic
monotone of Ivan. “There was a funeral after that, and lots of people came. Our brother
came, and Papa’s friends brought us lots of food. After that we started to help Mama with
Alexei and the house work.”
“Wait,” Rose touches Maya’s arm. “Tell her to repeat that. They have a brother?”
Maya and Lara speak for a moment, and then Maya explains, “She says they have a
brother who is Mama’s but not Papa’s. I think she means a half-brother. Was their mother
married before?”
“Five pregnancies before Lara,” says Rose. “That’s what the medical records said. But no
marriage noted. We never heard about a brother.”
“His name is Anton,” says Ivan. “He was my best friend. He took me riding on his
motorcycle. I’m hungry. Can I eat now?”
Maya takes him to the kitchen and I finish making lunch. Rose tells Maya to ask Lara for
the story a second time to collaborate Ivan’s version. The story remains the same, and
Lara concludes by saying, “There was a lot of blood on the rug in the house. I tried to
100The Solution Room
clean it many times. The police came too, and then some men came to take Papa for his
funeral. After that, Mama was very sad, and then Papa Tolya came to live with us.”
Ivan slides off the kitchen bench, sniveling and terrified, and runs to Lara. “Don’t tell
them about Papa Tolya!” he cries. Rose takes him back to the couch, where he curls up in
her arms. I say to Lara, “You can tell us about this Tolya later.” I already have a good
idea who Tolya was.
“Let’s go eat,” says Maya, taking Lara by the hand. She leads our daughter back to the
kitchen table, where Alexei, almost unnoticed in the drams, continues to eat in quiet
contentment…or oblivion.
After lunch, during quiet time, Maya goes for a walk. Rose and I sit on the porch steps in
the August afternoon light. Again that feeling of dissociation cloaks us, protecting us
from panic but also fogging our minds. We want so much to disbelieve the children’s
story but of course, it must be true.
Rose asks, “What do we do about this?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Tell the Agency, I suppose. Would that change anything?”
“The story changes everything,” she says. “But I still don’t know what to do.”
Douglas Hardy101
The children play easily, even tenderly, all that afternoon. They must sense our shock, or
perhaps they are simply sedated by the shock of telling their own story.
In the movies, stories of hidden horror unfold in fast, screaming monologues, as actors
take their Oscar turn. In real life, often, calm descends on a traumatized person as they
recount what they have endured. The unconscious mind seems to detach from the story,
protecting the conscious mind. This is why Ivan’s recitation of the story was so even,
almost robotic. Lara was also calm as she told of witnessing her father’s murder, but she
exhibited another common defense: trying to control the story. Lara needed to correct
Ivan’s telling, even down to revealing the existence of their half-brother. Lara was
standing firmly in her self-created role of the little mother. Later, I would realize that
even though Lara and Ivan were only a year apart in age, their coping mechanisms took
divergent paths very early, probably within days of the incident. Ivan checked out; Lara
took control.
Later, we are all sitting in the garden with Maya. Through her, I ask Lara, “We did not
hear this story from the Detsky Dom. Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Lara says, “The other kids told us that we would never be adopted if anyone found out.
So we said our Papa died in an accident. Svetlana found out it wasn’t true but she was not
angry at us, and said we could still tell the story to the other children.”
Ivan says proudly, “I taught the story to Alexei.” He adds, “We didn’t tell any of the
rest.”
I ask them both, “What is the rest?”
*******
Grandmother ran away. The children were relieved, but scared by her disappearance.
Their mother had taken a sadistic criminal named Tolya for her “protector,” a man who
abused both her and the children physically and mentally. The adults drank, despaired,
and disappeared for days at a time. At the age of five, Lara found herself taking the role
of mother to her brothers, begging food from neighbors, chewing small bits of food and
pushing them into Alexsei’s mouth, and hiding from Tolya and Tanya when their
drunken violence turned on them. Tolya stole from the family, and hid goods stolen
elsewhere in their rooms. He held all-night drinking parties. He tortured Ivan for sport;
one day he bound the 4-year-old to a wall with duct tape, arms outstretched, and casually
threw knives into the wall around Ivan’s head and body.
We were horrified, and shocked into disbelief. At one point, we decided to separate them
like accomplices in a crime. Rose and Lara remained on the stairs. I went to the front of
the house with Ivan and Alexei. Maya shuttled between us, translating. The two older
children continued with their stories, identical in every detail:

Douglas Hardy103
The children were held by Tolya’s friends and forced to watch their mother raped at
knifepoint.
Tolya threw a pot of boiling water on Tanya one night as they drunkenly fought.
Tolya and Tanya locked the children in a closet and then left for the night, and didn’t
return for several days. A neighbor heard the children’s screams the following day, and
released and fed them.
Tolya, for his amusement, splayed Ivan’s hand on a table, and then stabbed a knife
between Ivan’s fingers in a quick rhythm – the terrifying game of “five finger fillet”
made famous in the film Aliens.
The details went on and on, the children telling their story in that dreamy, unaffected
voice until they each reached the climax of their story: On their last night in the little
farmhouse where they grew up, the children witnessed yet another murder. During a
drunken party, Toyla fought with another man, then beaten him to death with a hammer.
Ivan and Lara watched from the stairs. Tolya caught sight of the children, and brought the
bloody hammer close to Ivan’s face.
“If you tell, this will happen to you,” he said.

Ivan whimpered, Lara cried. Then Tolya smiled, and grabbed Ivan by the wrist, dragging
him toward the body. The other adults in the room sat still, either from drink or fear.
Tolya wrapped five-year-old Ivan’s little hand around the hammer, and then brought the
hammer down once more, into the bloody chest of the corpse.
“There,” he snarled to the child. “Now you’ve done it too. If you tell, the police will
come and hang you.” He released Ivan, and the child ran upstairs.
Later, a neighbor saw Tolya drunkenly burying his victim in the garden. Both Lara and
Ivan said that was the night the police took them away.
The civil court took the children from their mother. They saw Tanya once more, as she
lay in a hospital dying of tuberculosis – but by then, the children were shuttling between
a triage orphanage and a local hospital. Alexsei was separated from his siblings,
recovering from pneumonia and malnutrition.
When Alexsei recovered, the children moved into the Russian orphanage system.
Russians still ascribe misfortune to fate, and adoption is rare, a victim of the ancient
belief in the bad seed. Alexsei, Ivan and Lara were destined at best to survive to age 18 in
the orphanage and, if they were smart and lucky, they might become two laborers and a
shop girl. More likely they were headed toward lives of petty crime and prostitution.
Arriving in the orphanage, the children had been told by other kids that their story was a
Douglas Hardy105
curse, that they would never again have parents and that even if they did, they would be
split up and sent to different countries. According to Lara, they were told that the only
way to escape was to concoct a fictional past.
And so they told everyone that their life had been fine, that they didn’t remember how
their father had died, and that their mother had died in the hospital. They did not mention
Tolya or his satanic abuses. They smiled and played and did as they were told. In a short
time, their adorable faces and sketchy story reached the adoption agency in New England
where Doug and Rose prepared to find their children.
******
Exhausted by the stories, we let the children play quietly through the afternoon. Rose and
I repeat the children’s stories, as if to find a clue that they are fiction.
“I know it’s real. Now it all makes sense – the secrets, the outbursts, the sexual acting
out,” she says. The fact of the stories, their clear veracity, pushes us into a dark new
world. Each story is like a beast lurking in the shadows. We had fallen into the abyss of
our children’s history, and did not know how to crawl back toward the light.
The bedtime routines go well enough until Ivan refuses to brush his teeth. In fact, his
black front teeth are so damaged from sweet tea and neglect that brushing is largely
symbolic, but ironclad routine is a critical tool in bringing these kids back to health and I
insist he brush.
“Nyet,” he says, smiling. Challenging me.
“Da,” I say. “Or no stickers.”
Ivan strides to the bookshelf and grabs his favorite book of stickers – the farm animals. I
hold out his toothbrush and said, “Swap.”
“Nyet!” he declares. He peels a sticker, a manure spreader. I take it from him, and place
the toothbrush firmly in his hand.
“Swap,” I repeat.
Ivan explodes. He charges me, flailing his fists and grabbing for the book, which I hold
above his head. He runs past me and throws himself against the hallway door. I put the
sticker book down and take his shoulders in my hands. He spins in my grasp and kicks
my shin. Then, looking evenly at me, he grabs his left wrist with his right hand, and bites
his left forearm hard with those black teeth.
I take his jaw in my left hand and squeeze gently. He’s surprised, and I take his arm away
from his mouth. Ivan begins the stiffening shake that’s his prelude to hyper-violent
Douglas Hardy107
blows, and so I clap him into a therapeutic hold2, once again, to prevent him from hurting
himself. I use my weight to force him three steps to the stair landing, and sit him hard on
his rump, facing me. He punches me in the temple. I wrap my legs around his waist,
pinning his legs under mine, and get his right arm secure under my left. He grabs my
glasses and flings them down the stairwell. I catch the arc of his left arm and slam it
against his side. He’s struggling, but secure.
Rose appears from the children’s bathroom, with Lara and Alexei following her.
“Get them away from this!” I yell, and Rose leads them to the other stairs, at the front of
the house. Ivan screams in protest. His voice is the only weapon remaining to beat back
the terror inside. Rose cries from the kitchen below, “Are you okay?”
“Let me handle this!” I call. The screaming gets worse. Ivan’s eyes are shut, and he
shrieks between deep drowning breaths. Five minutes pass, then seven. I hold on and
speak to him in Russian, my voice at first soothing, then annoyed, then enraged as his
screams draw me down into his nightmare. I outweigh this tough little boy four to one,
but the sound of his screaming moves me inexorably to the abyss. I have to stop those
screams. And then I realize that I am squeezing him around the chest and back, trying to
stop him from gasping another pint of air, trying to stop the screaming.
2
Note: In an earlier chapter I have described the mechanics and necessity of this
hold – it is used to immobilize an out-of-control child, to prevent him from hurting
himself or others.
I taste blood in my mouth.
******
Rose and I lie with our heads at the foot of the bed, so she can reach down and place her
palm on Alexei’s back when he wakes. Sometimes that’s enough to knock him out again.
If it isn’t, it will be my turn to carry him down to the rocking chair for another fifty
choruses of “The boy went over the mountain…”
We are bone-tired but alert. Rose weeps. I ruminate; I’ve stepped just one stride apart
from my own life. The day’s events unreel in my mind as I stare at the ceiling.
Today, all the clues about our children’s past fall into place: Of course the children lied
about their home life to escape the orphanage. Of course the orphanage ignored evidence
in order to get the children adopted. Of course the adoption agency promoted a vision of
these kids so sunny and optimistic that it blinded us to the evidence. And Rose and I
wanted children so much, and put so much faith in the system, that we bought into it all.
Up to this day, our family has lurched between happy clichés and screaming fights – a
sitcom in a psych ward. And today the children told the real story of their life in the
slaughterhouse, before the orphanage delivered them from evil. Now Rose and I lie
awake and staring at the ceiling, devastated by the truth our children have revealed.
Douglas Hardy109
“How will they ever recover from that?” asks Rose.
“I don’t know” I say. Then the calm that always settles over me in a true crisis steadies
my voice, and I start reasoning. “Honey, everyone knew they had a rough story. We just
didn’t know how rough. We’ll get through this.”
“Where’s Maya?”
“She went out with James. I gave her the car. I wouldn’t blame her if she doesn’t come
back.”
“God, Doug, what in the hell are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it going to be like this for the next 10 or 15 years?”
“I don’t know. Sleep tonight, if you can.” I turn to her and pet her hair, counting out ten
strokes to soothe her.
“Why didn’t the Agency know about this?”

I stare at the ceiling and think, they suspected something. I wonder, were they just trying
to get these kids out of Russia, and to hell with the consequences? For an instant, the
whole conspiracy of their mercy comes to me – the Agency knew enough to know…they
didn’t want to know more. They figured we could take it, and after all, the kids would be
in better shape than if they stayed in Russia. Better than growing up to be two thieves and
a prostitute.
It’s clear why. “Maybe they looked the other way. Maybe this is a typical story for them:
mental illness, violence, bastard children, economic collapse, alcoholism, murder,
abandonment. In a word, Russia.”
Rose sighs. She pets Alexei’s back. He sleeps.
I add, “And that’s just the part we know.”

Douglas Hardy111
POSTSCRIPT
The remaining two-thirds of The Solution Room describe the long walk to physical,
emotional and spiritual recovery for each member of the family. We learned through
adversity to save our marriage, our faith and their children’s health through years of
difficulty. We became “lay experts” in early childhood trauma and its treatment.
For all the children’s traumatized behavior, the greatest struggle for us was the long task
of letting go – of grief, disappointment, and our very identities as parents. Only when we
became willing to surrender the image that for years carried us through the struggle,
could we emerge from the labyrinth healed and whole, finally able to build the family
anew. That was a spiritual journey. The work of parenting may always be such a
journey. Ours was performed in the shadow of unspeakable evil, and coming out of that
shadow, perhaps we’re lucky enough to understand that walking in the light is a gift of
grace.
Ten years of struggle have brought us to an unexpected understanding: while we still feel
the loss of the ordinary family we never had, despair has been replaced by knowing and
embracing the wounded world with love, patience and strength. It has made us more
accepting, more aware, and more fully human. We would not have chosen to suffer, but
neither did Alexei, Ivan and Lara. For us, there are deeper and more genuine
relationships, rich involvement in communities, good work and a less frantic, more
meaningful life.
In the depths of her pain, Rose used to ask, “Why is God doing this to us?” After ten
years, she answered her own question, “God wasn’t doing this to us; God was doing this
for them.” Ultimately, the solution room is the birthplace of a renewed spirit.
<End of The Solution Room, Part 1>

Douglas Hardy113
If you have enjoyed this sample of The Solution Room, please visit and join the
discussion at TraumaNation, http://traumanation.com. TraumaNation is an online
community created by Doug Hardy to support trauma survivors, their parents and
friends. It is a clearinghouse of information, experience, and hope.
Adoption is not the only story at TraumaNation; we welcome discussions of PTSD,
survivors of combat, abuse, accident or emotional trauma, and professionals dealing
with the issues surrounding trauma. Our story begins with the adoption of three
severely traumatized children, but the wounded world is much broader than our
story. We particularly invite people to share their personal stories of trauma and
recovery.
Please write to Doug at mailto:traumation@gmail.com.

THE AUTHOR
Douglas Hardy has been a writer and editor in book, magazine and online publishing for
30 years at firms including the New York Times Co. and Random House. As Editor-in-
Chief of Monster.com and coauthor of five books, he appears frequently on radio,
television and in live presentations as an expert in employment and management issues.
The Solution Room is informed by thousands of conversations and extensive
correspondence with specialists in the treatment and education of traumatized children.
These specialists are resident in dozens of institutions, including Children’s Hospital in
Boston, McLean Hospital (known as the setting of Girl, Interrupted and America’s
premier mental health hospital), Harvard Medical School, the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Children’s Charter, Franciscan Children’s Hospital,
The Aspen Schools, the Massachusetts Departments of Education and Mental Health, and
many more. Many have offered their direct help and introductions to the organizations
where they work. Rose Hardy (a management consultant) has been a board member of
The Walker Home and School, a leading residential therapeutic school for children and
(as Beacon High School) adolescents.
Douglas and Rose are familiar with various national networks connecting the parents of
traumatized, autistic and emotionally troubled children. They have prior experience as lay
counselors to adult victims of sexual assault, alcoholism and families of Alzheimer’s
patients.

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The Solution Room

COPYRIGHT © 2010 BY DOUGLAS HARDY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

thrust into a ten-year struggle with their children’s horrific past.

threatened to consume them all.

recovery for traumatized children and their parents as well.

“normal” becomes the family’s shining and nearly impossible goal.

on the daunting, and finally triumphant, journey to healing and love.

Today, the family is strong. Lara is preparing to go to college. Alexei, a self-styled

entrepreneur and outdoorsman, is overcoming dyslexia. And Ivan, once condemned to a

have…a good life.

kids explode in what is coolly termed “disruptive behavior.”

When a child’s disruptions become extreme – attacking teachers or peers, throwing

furniture, shrieking obscenities, for example – he is removed from class. Typically, a

emotions. If the child continues to be violent, or angry or defiant, he is escorted to a small

no toys, no pencil or paper. A bench is bolted to the floor.

PROLOGUE – THE LABYRINTH

wander the labyrinth’s corridors.

their own qualities of cognitive understanding, emotional intelligence, and attachments to

friendly – a reversal of they typical child’s reserve with unknown adults.

Even as my children progressed in a remarkable path of recovery, the prediction proved

true. Trauma is tenacious, crafty and cunning, and it wants out.

run. Divorce rates of parent with traumatized children are sky-high.

and I re-imagined what it is to be a family.

of breast-beating here, or claims of superhuman recovery powers. My purpose is not to

paradoxical route to strength, recovery and unanticipated happiness.

members, as educated, ambitious and self-sufficient members of a community. Learning

indifference or hostility; working through the maze of contradictory behaviors and

vision; Rose and I remade ourselves as well as our children.

stop screaming, and the screaming has to stop.

I taste blood in my mouth.

into his eyes, my face now soft and smiling.

sweaty hair and face.

and leads her back inside.

parental detachment can erase its horror.

had nearly tipped into the abyss.

come to bed. We turn out the lights.

choruses of “The boy went over the mountain…”

“How will they ever recover from that?” asks Rose.

didn’t know how rough. We’ll get through this.”

“God, Doug, what in the hell are we going to do?”

“Is it going to be like this for the next 10 or 15 years?”

strokes to soothe her.

“Why didn’t the Agency know about this?”

abandonment. In a word, Russia.”

Rose sighs. She pets Alexei’s back. He sleeps.

I add, “And that’s just the part we know.”

outcome, and the mystery of what a “good outcome” actually is.

the children came.

just like our friends.

face and see you.”

“If that’s what we get, I pity the kid,” I said.

could manage a third.

fertility docs.) Our internist arranged for the first tests.

waiting too long to conceive?

together we started to meet a very long line of physicians.

a diminished possibility of success.

at an international convocation of infertility specialists.

or two with a little outside intervention.

inevitable. With an editor’s curiosity, I saw infertility treatments as an opportunity to

reality that This Wasn’t Working.

childbearing. Age makes the difference in the game of Assisted Reproductive

we had about a one-in-five shot.

technology he’d worked hard to advance.