Chapter Two

Meeting In Person  

“We ought never to bear a grudge against people,

ought never to judge them by some memory of an unkind action

for we do not know all the good that at other moments

their hearts may have sincerely desired and realized.”

Marcel Proust

    The weekend of May 2, I traveled to the Cleveland area to attend a family function, the First Communion of my goddaughter. Prior to leaving, I had called Denise Hubbard and asked if I could stop by her home to review my documents and meet with her personally. Happily, she granted my request and I was able to meet her family at their home in Medina. 

    The Hubbard family lived in a modest home on beautiful acreage. I met her three sons and husband on my way in. 

    Denise greeted me pleasantly and I got to meet her daughter Emily who was happily running around prior to her nap. Finally, Denise put Emily down for her nap and we began to talk shop.

     She was very pleasant to me, and I was very excited to finally meet her and view some videos. She was dressed in a long-sleeved BBAS logo shirt.  

    While we met, her cell phone rang a few times and the mailman delivered a Sunday Express Mail delivery package. She opened it to show me a fellow BBAS client’s paperwork and some photos of the family, who looked excited.

    I commented on how neat and clean the dossier was that the family had sent.  She replied that some families sent her very dirty paperwork – “ketchup stains and everything,” she said. 

    I wondered too if that family was as excited as Daniel and I were about our up coming child. She also took the time out to say that some of the women who adopt “just sit back and wait for their babies to come home.”

    At that time, I asked her a few questions about her business and how she placed children. I asked her about the race issue in adoption, one thing that really galled me that few people seemed to talk about publicly. 

    She told me that she had clients who had asked specifically for referrals with “blonde hair and blue eyes.” To those clients she claimed to say she could not guarantee that. I had to agree, for we weren’t adopting from Russia because of race.

     We also discussed a few things about Russian adoption. I asked if BBAS was part of the Frank Foundation; they were not, she said.

    I wondered then, how Denise had come to adopt Emily. It was she who told me that they had been taken by a “large agency” in Ohio for a failed Russian adoption and had lost approximately $8,000 with the “large agency.”

    She didn’t need to mention names – it had to be EAC.  It was known at that time that they charged from $25,000 to $30,000 per adoption, which was on the high end of things.

    Sarcastically I asked her, “Oh, do you mean EAC?” Denise vigorously shook her head up and down yes; she claimed that she was in litigation with EAC for the $8,000 and was very dismayed at how they handled their business by swindling prospective adoptive parents. 

    Building Blocks, she assured me, was nothing like EAC. No gifts and no bribes.

    She then asked if I would like to see videos of referrals that had already been accepted by families. It was the first time I had ever seen referral videos before, so I was curious as to how the children appeared.

    The videos, shown on her large-screen TV set, were children of various ages. The older children were shown singing and dancing in a group; Denise said that they always sang the one song.  

    The next part of the video would have the child being asked questions in Russian – “how old are you?’ “What is your name?” It was like an interrogation to highlight the fact that the kids had brains in their heads. 

    I then asked her if the children, the older ones especially, knew why they were being videotaped. She said that they did. I could imagine that to these children, these videotapes were the physical line between heaven and hell, salvation and damnation to a life in the Internat (the Russian system that, nominally at least, takes care of older orphans).

    Of one little boy in particular Denise said, “Definitely FAS” and another of another little girl in the background who was dancing and singing with the group, Denise had said she was interested in adopting out; however, the girl was not available because her biological mother would not relinquish rights. She felt that she was very adoptable due to her willingness to cooperate and the fact that she hadn’t been in the orphanage system for that long of a time.

    There was one interesting video of a boy who appeared to be about a year and a half old — maybe older. He was shown with his fat caregiver — something Denise commented on. 

    She said, “I would just love to take the fat off of those women and feed it to those kids!”  I had to agree. The fat was literally hanging off of the caregiver’s arms in quite a Russian fashion.

    The boy, who I was told had been adopted by a BBAS family, was shown sitting on a couch, moving his head back and forth. 

    In one scene, the heavy caregiver is speaking to him. He appeared not to be interested in following the caregiver’s instructions. He lay on the floor and whined.

    Denise explained to me that the parents had this particular videotape reviewed by a physician who specialized in doing international adoptions. The physician allegedly told the family that the boy was autistic, for he was moving his head back and forth on the couch.  

    The parents ignored the doctor’s advice; Denise said that the child was in no way autistic, but had an ear infection the day the video was shot.  “Today, “ she said, “he is in a loving home and has no health problems whatsoever.”

     The videos of the babies were comical. They rolled and rolled all over the table upon which they were lying. I was stunned by the fact that the babies were stripped of their pajamas, right down to their bare essentials. 

    I asked Denise if that was to show the sex of the baby. I noted the closeups that the cameraperson made on the baby’s faces — to show any signs of FAS, explained Denise.  

    “When you watch this video, the baby almost falls off the stand they have him on.  You just want to rush up to the screen and catch him before he falls off!” And indeed, he almost did roll off the table — right into his caregiver’s arms.

     After she showed me the videos, I asked her if she could review my file to absolutely make sure that our documents were in order. She got up and grabbed my file and looked over the documents. 

    “Case” it said on the outside. From her actions, I believe that it was the first time that she had looked at it. 

    She pulled out the photos of our house and the rooms in our home. One room we have was set up for a little girl (we had never gotten around to de-feminizing it, and even today with its cutesy pink-and-white décor it does double duty as our guest room and computer room). Denise said, “Oh, what a perfect room for your little girl!”

     “Oh no!”  I said vehemently.  “We don’t want a girl!  We definitely want a little boy!”

     Then she came to the notarized, certified and apostilled homestudy. She paused, looked at the letterhead and said, “This has to be redone on a licensed, state agency letterhead. If I send this one, the judge may request you get the home study redone.”

     Even though it had been in their literature that the home study had to be done on home study agency letterhead, we had not been reminded of this prior to us sending the home study to BBAS. Her review was the first time I had been informed verbally. 

    But more importantly, a document as critical to our adoption as our homestudy had sat for approximately two weeks without anyone bothering to review it  Thankfully, I was informed then. She also informed me that our financial documents had to be redone — notarized, certified and apostilled.

     Things were not looking good. And this was going to prove to be a costly delay, more so in terms of fate than of economics. Would there be no end to this inane paperwork that already seemed to have taken over our lives for some imperious judge in Russia?

     I left Medina that afternoon and headed home towards my parents’ house in western New York.  Even on my way home I was so sure of myself and our adoption that nothing was going to deter me, even the updated homestudy.  Nothing.  And with that in mind, we entered the summer of 1999.

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