Parenting

Adopting a child abroad was the best decision of our lives


It would be a long road to finally adopting our beautiful son (Picture: Karen Sloam)

I was at work when my husband and I received an email showing photos of a four-month-old blonde-haired boy in a yellow baby outfit with red shoes on his feet. I immediately cried and fell in love.

We placed the photos on our sofa until the day we brought our son Max home to England from St Petersburg, Russia.

We’d come to the decision to adopt a child internationally after applying to be adoptive parents in the UK and suffering a major blow.

After a lengthy process, we were told a little girl had been matched with us. But at the last minute, the decision was made for her to be placed with a family who lived in the same borough she was from.

I will never forget my husband’s words asking, ‘How much do you want to keep her with us?’

We were absolutely heart-broken at the time and almost gave up in our adoption journey.

That was when we decided to try adopting a child from overseas. We chose Russia because both of our ancestors were from there and we felt a closeness to the country.

Unfortunately, it would be a long road to finally adopting our beautiful son.

A year before we officially adopted Max, we went to Russia for the first time (Picture: Karen Sloam)

We had to wait a few years to even apply for overseas adoption because my husband’s mother had been married three times, so the authorities wanted us to have been together for at least six years to make sure our marriage was set in concrete.

We were devastated, angry and frustrated, but if we wanted a child we knew we had no choice but to follow the rules. 

When we had finally waited enough time, we had to go through the same long process to adopt overseas that we already done in England.

We were assigned another social worker, who had to do a completely new case study on us – including a bulky file-worth of paperwork and notarisation for everything. This took a whole year to sort out.

It was a frustrating time for us but we just kept thinking about the end goal to motivate us to keep going.

A year before we officially adopted Max, we went to Russia for the first time to hand in all of our paperwork to the adoption agency.

During this visit, we were shown a book of children waiting to be adopted and Max was one of them. We learned that he’d been abandoned in the hospital where he was born by his birth mother and his father had never been known.

At the time, we had no idea we were learning about our future son.

Max stayed at the orphanage from the time he was five days old and he would be there until we took him home.

Our final trip to Russia lasted three weeks (Picture: Karen Sloam)

We went back to Russia around six months later to finally meet him.

From the moment nine-month-old Max was placed on my lap, tears flowed with happiness and my husband and I both immediately felt like parents. The day is forever etched in our minds as one of the best of our lives.

We had to wait a further eight months before we could return to Russia and finally bring him home. This was because we had to complete a pile of paperwork, get various documents signed and wait for the embassy to give us the thumbs up that everything was in order.

Our final trip to Russia lasted three weeks.

During this time, we spent the first week running backwards and forwards to the embassy and buying clothes for our new child.

For the remaining two weeks, we were able to visit Max and take him outside where we could play with him. We also had to go to court to get the paperwork to legally take Max out of the country.

The days before everything was finalised, he seemed very quiet and scared, and he kept running to the door of the hotel room like he wanted to go out. I don’t think he knew what was going on.

Throughout this time, we were so excited. We kept saying, ‘We have our son’ through streams of happy tears.

Now, at age 15, we’ve spoken to Max several times about his adoption journey (Picture: Karen Sloam)

Taking Max home was like a dramatic scene from a film at the airport. We had to show all of our paperwork and it was a nervous wait, where we stared at our new little bundle of joy and he innocently peered back up at us.

We breathed the biggest sigh of relief when the flight attendant told us we could go through and board the plane. We had done it.

After starting our journey of adoption in 2002, we were finally bringing a child home in 2007 and we were so thankful.

As soon as Max set foot inside our house it was filled with happiness and laughter. We still had a social worker who came every four to five months over the first three years to check on him but everything progressed beautifully.

Simple things like seeing how much he loved his food would bring the biggest smiles to our faces.

Now, at age 15, we’ve spoken to Max several times about his adoption journey and all about what happened to him. At the moment, he says he has no interest in going back to Russia to see the country he was born in.

I do believe he’ll one day go back – perhaps with us or even with a family of his own – to learn about his Russian culture, but the decision is ultimately in his hands.

We’re just happy we get to look into our amazing boy’s eyes every night and tell him how blessed we are to have him in our lives.

Do you have a story that you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing james.besanvalle@metro.co.uk.

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