Lucy and her husband Richard have adopted a baby girl - from Russia. It took two and a half years for the adoption process to be completed, but a week ago, Lucy flew out to Russia to bring 10 month old Victoria back to England… she kept an audio diary for Home Truths of those momentous days…
Lucy is 45 and Richard 34. Lucy has two sons from her previous marriage, 18 year old James and 16 year old Gus. Until a week ago, Richard and Lucy hadn’t seen their adopted daughter, Victoria. They had a 4 minute video of her as a tiny naked 3 month old, big-eyed, baby, that is all.
At midnight on the train travelling through the Moscow suburbs to the orphanage, Lucy wondered what the future held, "How soon will Victoria think of us Mummy and Daddy. Will she love us on sight or will it take a bit of time? And how’s she going to react to this huge transistion - poor little thing."
At the orphanage, Richard and Lucy see the little girl they're adopting for the first time, "Sitting on this little wooden seat on the ground, with a little wooden tray in front of it was this tiny little girl, with a little bit of fluffy brown hair and big blue eyes… I’m just so thrilled. She’s such a sweet pea, and she’s going to be my daughter… it’s lovely and Richard’s happy too.."
A few days later, and after a long and noisy interchange in the Russian court, Richard and Lucy are told by the judge, "the adoption has been made legal and you are Victoria’s parents." The couple then returned home for two weeks, after which Lucy travelled back to the orphanage alone to pick up her daughter. The journey was more daunting without Richard, but Lucy collected her daughter without any real problems. However, it wasn't long before the bureaucratic delays began again and after several frustrating days, Lucy felt near the end of her tether. Was she ever going to leave Moscow? Suddenly, in a matter of hours,her visa was cleared and she and her daughter were on their way home.
Victoria settled in quickly, "She’s absolutely delightful," says Lucy, "and so good - maybe because she’s come from an orphanage and has been very regimented." James and Gus, Lucy's sons, are also besotted with their baby sister. "I feel as close to her as I remember feeling to my own children," says Lucy, "I sometimes wonder whether she'll like me - but we've bonded well - it feels like forever…"
The decision to adopt a baby from overseas was partly influenced by the fact that Richard is adopted himself. "I’ve always thought of adoption as quite natural… and we had nothing but encouragement about inter-country adoption. Russia has an awful lot of orphanages and an awful lot of children in them…"
Russia has a tough legal system, in which the original birth certificate is destroyed and a new one issued declaring the adopting parents, in the eyes of Russian law, as the birth parents. "There's no way Victoria's mother could contact us," says Lucy, "although I'd be perfectly happy for Victoria to get in touch with her birth parents if she could or wanted to…"
