When unconditional love fails to heal the pain of abandoned children
When they got on the plane the following day, Alexandria wouldn't let Roxanne hold her or change her, so Clarke took charge instead.
Then, with the flight more than half-way across the Atlantic, the US shut down its airspace in response to that day's attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon.
The Lopers' flight was diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, where, together with the other 37 jumbo jets diverted to that tiny community, they were kept on board for hours while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police worked out a system to identify putative terrorists on any of the aircraft.
While thousands of passengers sat in the three dozen planes, Newfoundlanders set out to make the Good Samaritan look like a slacker. They furnished community centres and school halls with mattresses, pillows and bedclothes from their own homes. They worked out cooking rotas to cope with the thousands of sudden guests.
As the first passengers were allowed off some of the planes, they gave individuals lifts from the community centres where they would be based for the duration to their houses so they could have a shower. The "Newfies" even rustled up Kosher food for a group of Hasidic Jews among the payload.
Days passed. Roxanne Loper had an especially miserable time. Whenever she touched her new daughter, the child screamed the place down. To be hated by your own toddler is shocking. To be hated vociferously in front of hundreds of strangers is humiliating.
Roxanne must have played back in her head the sequence of events leading to this stand-off. The years of trying vainly for a baby. The months of trawling the internet looking at foreign babies up for adoption. The day when they both fell for one of those little faces: Alexandria, then only a few months old.
The Lopers went through hoops to adopt her, only to be told she had gone to another family. They regrouped and adopted three-month old Samantha instead. That worked out so well, they began to consider adopting a sibling for her.
As Roxanne revisited the internet sites, she spotted a face she knew. It was several months older, but unmistakable: Alexandria was back. Roxanne felt fate wanted Clarke and herself to be the child's parents and didn't worry when the adoption authorities wouldn't say why the now two-year-old child had ended up back in an orphanage with 80 other children under four years of age.
The adoption went through. Alexandria 'made strange' with Roxanne, but neither parent initially worried about that. Now, in the middle of Gander, Roxanne must have wondered why Alexandria had been rejected by the first adoptive parents, what the experience had done to the child's capacity to make relationships and whether the warmth, commitment and love Roxanne and Clarke had in abundance for their new daughter would be enough.
Michael Dorris, on the other hand, had no doubt that his love for his newly-adopted son would suffice. Dorris was an academic, single at the time of the adoption, although he later married fellow writer Louise Erdrich. He was Native American Indian by birth, as was the toddler he adopted. The three-year-old was obviously delighted to meet his new father, giving him an enthusiastic hug and holding his hand as they set off together.
As time went on, Dorris got used to the approving smiles of strangers watching father and son in restaurants and buses. He found it more difficult to get used to the fact that while his little boy was enthusiastic in his agreement to everything, including toilet-training, he never delivered. On anything.
School pre-entry tests later revealed that the child was way behind on almost every measure of development.
EVENTUALLY, Dorris was forced to face one aspect of the truth. His son, coming from one of the reservations where, historically, alcohol has been a huge destructive presence, had been born to an alcoholic mother and suffered Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the womb.
The syndrome would limit every aspect of his development. He would continue to greet perfect strangers with the un-judging affection with which he had greeted Dorris. He would continue to be slower than other children at mastering apparently simple tasks. He would have an inborn propensity to addiction. Concepts like truth and private property would evade him.
Dorris accepted the diagnosis immediately, the prognosis slowly. There is, in all of us, a conviction that our unique personal fount of love for our own children will solve problems insoluble in other families. A decade-and-a-half later, when his now adult son was barely literate, unskilled and yet still optimistic, Dorris wrote an elegiac account of their life - The Broken Cord. The son was dead within months, mown down by a car as he wandered a motorway, out of his head on drugs. Dorris himself committed suicide in a motel a few years later.
The Dorris and Loper adoptions share crucial commonalities, including the relatively advanced age of the babies when adopted, and the rather more serious issue of unjustified optimism: the belief that through warmth, love and patience, adoptive parents will overcome the emotional deficit of a child who has not bonded with anyone in its early years. That unjustified optimism (arguably best explored in Susan Merrell's novel of a failed adoption, A Member of the Family) is derived from a view of bonding as a soft, desirable but inessential factor in child development.
Without surgery, a child born with a cleft palate will always have a cleft palate, with all the attendant miseries and relationship-barriers. We accept that, but, because bonding is invisible and intangible, we refuse to accept that a toddler grievously damaged by its absence during the first nine months will always have that deficit.
This grievous optimism is exacerbated by an outdated view of parents as pivotally potent in the forming of the personality, intelligence and mental health of children. In fact, as the work of Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker suggests, 50% of how any child turns out is determined by their genes, and the bulk of the remainder by their peers. Parents are not as important as we would like to believe, and even the most loving adoptive parents cannot repair the irreparable.
This week, hundreds of people around Ireland, looking at his baffled face in colour photographs, ached to get their loving hands on the abandoned Tristan in the belief that their unconditional love could rectify all the consequences of those first tragic three years. That belief is admirable - and as unrealistic as the conviction that shouting English very loudly and with great enthusiasm at a Frenchman will make him understand what you're saying. It won't.
Our instinctive conviction that the unstinting love of parents can overcome hardwired problems in older adopted children is dangerous - not least to the children.
