I was born Stanislava Andreyevna Kurenkova, but my chosen name is Naomi Shafadov. I found out I was adopted when I was 5 years old. My parents sat me down one evening in the kitchen and told me they weren’t my birth parents and they adopted me when I was 3 years old from Moscow, Russia. Being 5 years old I didn’t really understand what they were telling me at the time, because to me, they were my birth parents, and I had denied that they weren’t for the next few years. But when I turned 14 years old, I started to doubt and question everything about my life once I found my adoption papers in my parents’ closet one day. I had no desire to look for my documents in the first place, or even learn about my family, until my mom asked me if I ever wanted to meet my birth parents and siblings, to which I simply replied, “No, why would I need to?” Yet something must’ve influenced my brain and body to desire. That day, when I started flipping through the various documents written in Russian and translated into English, I suddenly felt like I no longer knew who I was. 

Adoption in Russia has always been a somewhat complicated procedure but wanting to unseal your adoption records is more difficult. Normally, when you search “how to unseal my adoption records” the websites that show up belong to the government of each province and US county, but when you add “Russia” to the end of your search, the only websites that appear are from various companies claiming they can help you reunite with your family. I found it kind of sketchy that there was no government website with factual information about Russian adoptions, but I would later come to understand that it’s because Russia doesn’t have the best relationship with Canada. I’m not dismissing the possibility that the claims these websites are making about reuniting you with your “long-lost family” may be true, but it almost feels too good to be true when a random company makes a claim like this…it also feels like a legal issue waiting to happen. 

In 2016, I decided to use a genealogy website like ancestry.com to find my family, considering how overly advertised they are everywhere you go; However, I don’t have any information on any family members besides the names of my parents and siblings, as well as my siblings’ birthdays. I should probably mention that one of the documents also stated that we may have different fathers, so my search for my genealogy would have most likely come up blank anyways…Phew…I didn’t have to waste 20 dollars on empty promises.

I consider myself to be a very emotional person – at least that’s what it says when you search Libra qualities – so when I stumbled upon the court judgement that deprived my birth mother of her parental rights, I was disappointed and angry. When a parent’s parental rights are terminated its typically for a few reasons: severe abuse, failure to support a child financially, the child(ren)’s safety, etc. In the case of my birth mother, it was all of the above: she drank in front of me and my siblings, brought strangers over and drank and smoked in front of us, and often left us alone in the apartment for several days. Five-star parent, amirite? I also found out the neighbours had cared for us during those times and made sure we were fed, but it got to the point where they feared for our safety and health, and they decided to call the police. So, in a sense, I’ve had three sets of parents throughout my life…Cool!

Most people are able to remember their childhood vividly, but I have no recollection of my life before I was adopted; any information I do have was repeated and observed by my (adoptive) parents, who saw how I lived in the orphanage, and the court judgement. So, naturally, reading everything in these documents about my so-called life made me feel angry that my own mother no longer wanted to care for her children whom she (voluntarily) brought into this world (I put “voluntarily” in brackets to emphasize that no one forced her to have children). I have been curious about whether there is some psychological reason as to why my brain has erased the first three years of my life, and I’ve come to this conclusion: infantile amnesia. Apparently, it’s actually quite common for people to not remember much of their childhood, and it isn’t always tied to trauma. Rather, infantile amnesia is linked to a lack of emotional significance, cognitive growth, and the good ol’ “memory is temporary” defence. In my case, I probably didn’t understand what was going on when my mom was busy getting it on with random strangers (excuse my tone) whom one of which could be my birth father, or when she left me and my siblings alone for days without food. I’d like to think my brain was actually protecting my mental health and sanity from being scarred with images of my mom exploring her sexuality. 

Being adopted can be a beautiful growth experience for some children, but for others, like myself, it is a torturous ride filled with self-doubt and hatred towards yourself and loved ones. From ages 14 to 18 I blamed myself for my birth parents not wanting me, making myself believe that there had to be something wrong with me. I started questioning everything I was doing in my daily life, whether it was with school or my personal relationships, and as a result I distanced myself from those I loved. I felt guilty that my adoptive parents spent their hard-earned money on someone like me, so I tried to prove to them that I was worthy of their love by maintaining good grades throughout high school and helping at home as much as I could. I overworked myself in order to feel wanted by my parents, who never once told me they were ashamed of me or that I was a mistake.

During the first year I spent with my “new” family, I didn’t want to be anywhere near my adoptive mom because I feared she would abandon me too, which made me develop a closer bond to my adoptive father and brother. I have no recollection of this year as well, besides what my parents told me, where I would scream whenever my mom came near me, and so I became independent when it came to dressing myself and feeding myself. I believe part of that independence stemmed from my abandonment issues, as a coping/survival mechanism I developed from being alone for several days. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “her adoptive mother had nothing to do with how her birth mother affected her emotionally”, but you should try to understand that since my birth father wasn’t in the picture, I only had my mother to rely on for love and nurturing, and when she left me, I grew sour at the thought of another woman taking care of me. 

In my second year of university, I took a Child and Youth course called Child Abuse and Neglect as I have always felt empathetic towards children in abuse cases, especially those I read about on the news and multiple crime documentaries. While this course was triggering at times for me, I managed to complete it because I knew it was a learning experience I needed to take in order to break that protective shell I had built throughout most of my life. It almost felt like a weekly therapy session where I got to reflect on myself and find the courage to forgive my birth mother for abandoning me. I also found it very easy to be open about being adopted and talking about the neglect I experienced as a child in this class because I felt heard by my professor and classmates, who listened and sympathized with me. In my fourth year, I decided that I wanted to sign up for a creative writing class, not only to learn how to write works that were both fiction and non-fiction, but also how to strengthen my existing works. When I enrolled into ENG517, I was afraid that my work wouldn’t be good enough compared to my peers because I never had the courage to showcase my writing to anyone. But there was one story that made me proud to share my work while also influencing me on a technical and creative level, “Between Two Worlds” by Anais Granofsky. Her vulnerability while writing this piece helped me in creating my final portfolio, this essay, as she showed me that it’s okay to overshare parts of your life you would only tell your best friend, as a way to reflect on and learn from your experiences growing up, whether they were positive or negative.

All of these experiences made me want to work towards being the best mother for my future children, but the person I have to thank the most for this realization is my mom, for teaching me to be kind, caring, and loving to others. She is one of my best friends and my biggest role model, and I wouldn’t trade her for the world. The golden question I still get asked continuously is “Are you interested in reconnecting with any of your family members?” and my answer will always be “I’m not sure.” I’m not sure if I will ever want to reconnect with anyone and open that old wound from when I was fourteen, but it will always be in the back of my mind as a future possibility. I have wondered if my siblings have ever wanted to meet me or if they’ve thought about me, and if my birth parents would’ve been proud of the woman I am today. But I don’t owe them anything; I’m not grateful my parents abandoned me (and my siblings), and I definitely don’t have a reason to thank them for it, but I forgive them for making the choice to do so because it taught me that not every family is perfect, and that the family you were born into isn’t necessarily the family you deserve.