Learning To Love
A former Romanian orphan finds it hard to express emotional closeness.
For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital. The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born on June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious: his right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.
In films of the period documenting orphan care there, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns with casual indifference and sticking each one at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies. The women don’t coo or sing to them.
In his hospital, in the Southern Carpathian mountain town of Sighetu Marmaţiei, Izidor would have been fed by a bottle propped against the crib bars. Well past the age when children begin tasting solid food, he and his age-mates remained on their backs, sucking a watery gruel from bottles. Without proper care or physical therapy, the baby’s leg muscles wasted.
At age three, he was deemed ‘deficient’ and transferred to a Cămin Spital Pentru Copii Deficienţi, a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children. The cement fortress emitted no sounds of children playing, though as many as 500 lived inside at one time. Izidor was served nearly inedible, watered-down food at long tables where naked children on benches banged their tin bowls. He grew up in overcrowded rooms where his fellow orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked.
Izidor was destined to spend the rest of his childhood in this building. Odds were high that he would die in childhood, malnourished, unloved.
Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who’d ruled Romania for 24 years, was executed on Christmas Day, 1989. The following year, the outside world discovered his network of ‘child gulags’, in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children and teens were being raised.
Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on childless people, and celebrated women who gave birth to ten or more children. Parents who couldn’t handle another baby might call their new arrival ‘Ceauşescu’s child’, as in “Let him raise it”.
To house a generation of unwanted or unaf fordable chi ldren, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures. At age three, abandoned children were sor ted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food and some schooling in case de copii or children’s homes. ‘Deficient’ children, even those with such treatable issues as crossed eyes or cleft lip, wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămin Spitale.
After the Romanian revolution, children in unspeakable conditions – skeletal, splashing in urine on the floor, caked with faeces – were discovered and filmed by foreign news programmes, including 20/ 20 in the US which broadcast Shame of a Nation in 1990.
DANNY RUCKEL, a computer programmer, and his wife, Marlys, lived with their three young daughters in San Diego in the early 1990s. They thought it would be nice to add a boy to the mix, and heard about a local independent filmmaker, John Upton, who was arranging adoptions of Romanian orphans. Marlys called and said they wanted to adopt a baby boy. “There’s thousands of kids there,” Upton replied. “That’ll be easy.”
Undone by Shame of a Nation, Upton had flown to Romania and made his way to the worst place on the show, the Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children in Sighetu Marmaţiei. He went back a few times. On one visit, he filmed a bunch of kids for prospective adoptive parents. His video would not show children packed together naked “like little reptiles in an aquarium”, as he’d described them, but as people, wearing clothes and speaking.
By then, donations had started to come in. The staff skimmed the best
items, but on that day, in deference to the American, nannies put donated sweaters on the kids. Upton and his Romanian assistant found it slow-going. Some children didn’t speak at all, and others were unable to stand up. When asked the children’s names and ages, the nannies shrugged.
At the end of a wooden bench sat a boy the size of a seven year old – at age ten, Izidor weighed about 22 kilograms. He knew about Americans from the TV show
Dallas. On Sunday nights, kids, nannies and workers gathered to watch Dallas on a donated TV. When rumours flew up the stairs that day that an American had arrived, the reaction inside the orphanage was, Almighty God, someone from the land of the giant houses!
Izidor knew the information the nannies didn’t. John Upton would ask a child, “How old are you?” and the child would say, “I don’t know,” and the nanny would say, “I don’t know,” and Izidor would yell, “He’s 14!” He’d ask about another child, “What’s his last name?” and Izidor would yell, “Dumka!”
“Izidor knows the children here better than the staff,” Upton grouses in one of the tapes. He lifts Izidor into his lap and asks if he’d like to go to America. Izidor says that he would.
BACK IN SAN DIEGO, Upton told the Ruckels about the bright boy of about seven. “We’d wanted to adopt a baby,” Marlys says. “Then we saw John’s video and fell in love with Izidor.”
In May 1991, Marlys f lew to Romania. Just before travelling, she learned that Izidor was almost 11, but she was undaunted. She travelled with a new friend, Debbie Principe,
who had been matched with a little blond live wire named Ciprian.
In the director’s off ice, Marlys waited to meet Izidor. “When Izidor entered,” she says, “all I saw was him, like everything else was fuzzy. He was as beautiful as I’d imagined. Our translator asked him which of the visitors in the office he hoped would be his new mother, and he pointed to me!”
Izidor had a question: “Where will I live? Is it like Dallas?”
“Well ... no, we live in a condo, like an apartment,” Marlys said. “But you’ll have three sisters. You’ll love them.”
This did not strike Izidor as an interesting trade-off. He dryly replied to the translator: “We will see.”
That night, Marlys rejoiced about what an angel Izidor was. Debbie laughed, and told Marlys, “He struck me more like a cool operator, a savvy politician type. He was much more on top of things than Chippy.” Ciprian had spent the time in the office rummaging wildly through desk drawers and everyone’s pockets.
“No, he’s an innocent. He’s adorable,” Marlys said. “Did you see him pick me to be his mother?”
Years later, in Abandoned for Life, the memoir Izidor self-published at age 22, he explained that moment:
“Marlys was the tall American and Debbie was the short American ... ‘Roxana, which one is going to be my new mother?’ I asked the translator. “‘The tall American,’ she replied. “When I picked Marlys, she began to cry, filled with joy that I had picked her.”
In October 1991, Izidor and Ciprian flew with Romanian escorts to San Diego. The boys’ new families awaited them at the airport. Izidor gazed around the terminal with satisfaction. “Where is my bedroom?” he asked. When Marlys told him they were in an airport, not his new home, Izidor was taken aback. Though she’d explained that the Ruckels did not live like the Ewings in Dallas, he hadn’t believed her.
In the car, when Danny tried to click a seat belt across Izidor’s waist, he bucked and yelled, fearing he was being straitjacketed.
Marlys homeschooled the girls, but Izidor insisted on starting at the local school, where he quickly learned English. His canny ability to read the room put him in good stead with the teachers, but at home, he seemed constantly irritated. Suddenly insulted, he’d storm off to his room and tear things apart.
“He shredded books, posters,
SUDDENLY INSULTED, IZIDOR WOULD STORM OFF TO HIS ROOM AND TEAR THINGS APART
family pictures,” Marlys tells me. “If I had to leave for an hour, by the time I got home, everyone would be upset: ‘He did this; he did that.’ He didn’t like the girls.”
Marlys and Danny had hoped to expand the family fun and happiness by bringing in another child. But the newest family member almost never laughed. He didn’t like to be touched. He was vigilant, hurt, proud.
“By about 14, he was angry about everything,” she tells me. “He decided he’d grow up and become the American president. When he found out that wouldn’t be possible because of his foreign birth, he said, ‘Fine, I’ll go back to Romania.’
“That’s when that started – his goal of returning to Romania. We thought it was a good thing for him to have a goal, so we said, ‘Sure, get a job, save your money, and when you’re 18, you can move back to Romania.’” Izidor worked every day after school at a fast-food restaurant.
“Those were rough years. I was walking on eggshells, trying not to set him off,” Marlys says. “The girls were so over it. It was me they were mad at. They’d say, ‘All you do is try to fix him!’”
Danny and Marlys tried taking him to therapy, but he refused to go back.
“He’d say: ‘I’m fine when nobody’s in the house,’” Marlys says.
“We’d say: ‘ But Izidor, it’s our house.’”
When banished to his room, for rudeness or cursing or being mean to the girls, Izidor would stomp up the stairs and blast Romanian music or bang on his door from the inside with his fists or a shoe.
ONE NIGHT when Izidor was 16, Marlys and Danny felt so scared by Izidor’s outburst that they called the police. “I’m going to kill you!” he’d screamed at them. After an officer escorted Izidor to the police car, he insisted that his parents “abused” him.
“Great,” said Marlys. “Did he happen to mention how we abuse him?”
Back in the car, the officer asked: “How do your parents abuse you?”
“I work and they take all my money,” Izidor yelled. In the house, the officer searched Izidor’s room, and found his savings-account book.
“We can’t take him,” the officer told the Ruckels. “He’s angry, but there’s nothing wrong here. I’d suggest you lock your bedroom doors tonight.”
The next morning Marlys and Danny offered Izidor a ride to school and then drove him straight to a psychiatric hospital instead. “We couldn’t
IZIDOR MOVED IN WITH SOME GUYS HE KNEW; THEIR INDIFFERENCE SUITED HIM
afford it, but we took a tour and it scared him,” Marlys tells me. “He said, ‘Don’t leave me here! I’ll follow your rules.’
“Back in the car, we said:
‘ Listen, Izidor, you don’t have to love us, but you have to be safe and we have to be safe. You can live at home, work, and go to school until you’re 18. We love you.’ But, you know, the sappy stuff didn’t work with him.”
Living by the rules didn’t last long. One night Izidor stayed out until 2am, and found the house locked. He banged on the door. Marlys opened it a crack. “Your things are in the garage,” she told him.
Izidor would never again live at home. He moved in with some guys he knew; their indif ference suited him. “He’d get drunk in the middle of the night and call us, and his friends would get on the line to say vulgar things about our daughters,” Marlys says. “Admittedly, it was finally peaceful in our house, but I worried about him.”
On Izidor’s 18th birthday, Marlys baked a cake and wrapped his gift, a photo album documenting their life together: his first day in America, his first dental appointment, his first job. She took the presents to the house where she’d heard her son was staying. The person who answered the door agreed to deliver them when Izidor got back.
“In the middle of the night,” Marlys says, “we heard a car squealing around the cul-de-sac, then a loud thud against the front door and the car squealing away. I went down and opened the door. It was the photo album.”
IN THE DECADE after the fall of Ceaușescu, the new Romanian government welcomed Western child-development experts to help and study the tens of thousands of children still warehoused in state care. Researchers hoped to answer some long-standing questions, such as: if an institutionalised child is transferred into a family setting, can he or she recoup undeveloped capacities? Implicitly, poignantly: can a person unloved in childhood learn to love?
In 2000, Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of paediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and two colleagues launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP). It would become the first-ever randomised controlled trial to measure the impact of early institutionalisation on brain and behavioural development and to examine high-quality foster care as an alternative.
They worked with 136 children, ages six months to twoand- a- half years, from six Bucharest leagãne, baby institutions. None was a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children; they were somewhat better supplied and staffed. By design, 68 would continue to receive ‘care as usual’, while the other 68 would be placed with foster families recruited and trained by BEIP. Local kids made up a third group.
“Our coders, unaware of any child’s background, assessed 100 per cent of the community kids as having fully developed attachment relationships with their mothers,” says Charles H. Zeanah, a child-psychiatry professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine. “That was true of three per cent of the institutionalised kids.”
Thirteen per cent displayed no attachment behaviours, such as seeking comfort for distress from a carer
or exhibiting anxiety when separated from a carer. “These children had no idea that an adult could make them feel better,” Zeneah told me. “Imagine how that must feel – to be miserable and not even know that another human being could help.”
As early as 2003, it was evident that the foster-care children were making progress. Glimmering through the data was a sensitive period of 24 months during which it was crucial for a child to establish an attachment relationship with a caregiver.
“Timing is critical,” the researchers wrote. Brain plasticity wasn’t “unlimited”, they warned. “Earlier is better.” After the researchers announced their results, the Romanian government banned the institutionalisation of children under the age of two.
Meanwhile, the study continued. At age three and a half, the portion of children who displayed secure attachments climbed to nearly 50 per cent among the foster-care kids, but to only 18 per cent among those who remained institutionalised.
Unattached children see threats everywhere, an idea borne out in brain studies. Flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, the amygdala – the main part of the brain dealing with fear and emotion
– seemingly worked overtime in the still-institutionalised children.
Nelson cautions that the door doesn’t “slam shut” for children left in institutions beyond 24 months of age. “But the longer you wait to get children into a family,” he says, “the harder it is to get them back on an even keel.”
IN A RENTAL CAR, I drive slowly around the semicircles and cul-desacs of Izidor’s subdivision in Denver until I see him step out of the shadow of a 418-square-metre house with a polite half-wave. It’s 2019 and he sublets a room here, as do others, including some families.
At 39, Izidor is an elegant, wiry man with mournful eyes. His manner is alert and tentative. A general manager for a fast-food restaurant, he works 60-to-65-hour weeks.
“Every time we got into another fight,” Izidor remembers, “I wanted one of them to say: ‘Izidor, we wish we had never adopted you and we are going to send you back to the hospital.’ But they didn’t say it.”
Unable to process his family’s affection, he just wanted to know where he stood. It was simpler in the orphanage, where either you were being beaten or you weren’t. “I responded better
“THESE CHILDREN HAD NO IDEA THAT AN ADULT COULD MAKE THEM FEEL BETTER”
to being smacked around,” Izidor tells me. “In America, they had ‘rules’ and ‘consequences.’ So much talk. I hated ‘Let’s talk about this.’
“As a child, I’d never heard words like ‘ You are special’ or ‘ You’re our kid.’ Later, if your adoption parents tell you words like that, you feel, OK,
whatever, thanks. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you want from me, or what I’m supposed to do for you.”
Once, when he was about eight, Izidor had a happy day. A kind nanny named Onisa had started working at the hospital. “She loved to sing and often taught us some of her music,” Izidor writes in his memoir.
One day, she intervened when another nanny was striking Izidor with a broomstick. To cheer him up, Onisa promised that someday she’d take him home for an overnight visit. Sceptical that such an extraordinary event would ever happen, Izidor thanked her for the nice idea.
A few weeks later, on a snowy winter day, Onisa dressed Izidor in warm clothes and shoes, and led him out the front door and through the orphanage gate. She took the small boy, who swayed with a deep, tilting limp, into the town. “It was my first time ever going out into the world,” he tells me now. He looked in astonishment at the cars and houses and shops.
“When I stepped into Onisa’s apartment,” he writes, “I could not believe how beautiful it was; the walls were covered with dark rugs and there was a picture of the Last Supper on one of them. The carpets on the floor were red.”
Onisa’s children arrived home from school, and Izidor learned that it was the start of their Christmas holiday. He feasted alongside Onisa’s family at their friends’ dinner table that night, tasting Romanian specialties for the first time, including sarmale (stuffed cabbage), potato goulash with thick noodles and yellow sponge cake.
On the living-room floor after dinner, the child of that household let Izidor play with his toys. Izidor followed the boy’s lead and drove little trains across the rug.
The next morning, Onisa asked Izidor if he wanted to go to work with her or to stay with her children. Not wanting to be parted from her, he chose work.
“I got dressed as fast as I could, and we headed out the door,” he remembers. “When we were near her work, I realised that her work was at the hospital, my hospital, and I began to cry ... Somehow I thought I was going to be
IZIDOR HAS RE-CREATED THE SETTING FROM THE HAPPIEST NIGHT IN HIS CHILDHOOD
part of Onisa’s family now.” Through his own stupidity, he had let the most wonderful spot on Earth – Onisa’s apartment – slip away. He sobbed until the other nannies threatened to slap him.
TODAY IN HIS BEDROOM
Izidor has re- created the setting from the happiest night in his childhood. “You see this?” he says, picking up a tapestry woven with burgundy roses on a dark, leafy background. “This is almost identical to Onisa’s. I bought it in Romania for that reason!”
For Izidor, these possessions signify peace. “It was the first time I slept in a real home. For many years I thought, Why can’t I have a home like that?”
Now he does. But he knows there are missing parts.
In 2001, at age 20, Izidor felt an urgent desire to return to Romania. Short on cash, he wrote to TV shows, pitching the story of a Romanian orphan making his first trip back to his home country. One took him up on it, and on March 25, 2001, a film crew met him at the Los Angeles airport. So did the Ruckels.
“I thought, This is it. I’ll never see him again,” Marlys says. She hugged and kissed him and told him, “You’ll always be our son and we’ll always love you.”
Izidor showed the Ruckels two family photographs in his wallet. “In case I do decide to stay there, I’ll have something to remember you by,” he said. Marlys was chilled by the ease with which Izidor seemed to be exiting their lives.
In Romania, the producers took Izidor to visit his old orphanage, where he was feted like a returning prince, and then they revealed that they’d found his birth family three hours away. They drove through a snowy landscape and pulled over in
a field. Wearing a white button-down shirt, a tie and dress pants, Izidor limped across the soggy, uneven ground to a one-room shack. He was shaking. A narrow-faced man emerged from the hut and strode towards him. They passed each other.
“Ce mai faci?” – How are you? – the man mumbled as he walked by.
“Bun,” Izidor muttered. Good. That was Izidor’s father. Two young women then hurried from the hut and greeted Izidor with kisses on each cheek; these were his sisters.
Finally a short, black-haired woman not yet 50 identified herself as Maria – his mother – and reached out to hug him. Suddenly angry, Izidor swerved past her. How can I greet someone I barely know? he remembers thinking.
She began to wail, “Fiul
meu! Fiul meu!” My son! My son! The family offered Izidor the best seat in the house, a stool.
“Why was I put in the hospital?” he asked.
“You were six weeks old when you got sick,” Maria said. “We took you to the doctor to see what was wrong. Your grandparents checked on you a few weeks later, but then there was something wrong with your right leg. We asked the doctor to fix your leg, but no one would help us. So we took you to a hospital in Sighetu Marmaţiei, and that’s where we left you.”
“Why did no one visit me for 11 years?”
“Your father was out of work. I was taking care of the other children. We couldn’t afford to come see you.”
“Do you know that living in the Cămin Spital was like living in hell?”
“My heart,” cried Maria. “You must understand that we’re poor people; we were moving from one place to another.”
Agitated, Izidor got up and went outside. His Romanian family invited him to look at pictures of his older siblings who’d left home, and he presented them with his photo album: here was a grinning Izidor poolside, wearing medals from a swimming competition; here were the Ruckels at
the beach; here they were at a picnic. When the TV cameras were off, Izidor tells me, Maria asked whether the Ruckels had hurt him or taught him to beg. He assured her neither was true.
“You look thin,” Maria went on. “Move in with us. I will take care of you.” She pressed him for details about his jobs and wages and asked if he’d like to build the family a new house. After three hours, Izidor was exhausted and eager to leave.
“He called me from Bucharest,” Marlys says, “and said, ‘I have to come home. Get me out of here. These people are awful.’”
A few weeks later he was back in Temecula, a Southern California town where the Ruckels, who have adopted five children from foster care in recent years, now live.
Friends told him there were jobs in Denver, so he moved there. Danny and Marlys visit him there and have gone on trips to Romania with him. It’s harder for him to come home to California, Marlys says. “Thanksgiving, Christmas – they’re too much for him.”
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIST Ron Federici was another of the first wave of child- development experts to visit the institutions for the ‘unsalvageables’, and he has become one of the world’s top specialists caring for post-institutionalised children adopted into Western homes.
“In the early years, everybody had starry eyes,” Federici says. “They thought loving, caring families could heal these kids. I warned them: these kids are going to push you to breaking point. Get trained to work with special-needs children. Instead of ‘I love you’, just tell them, ‘You are safe’.”
But most new or prospective parents couldn’t bear to hear it.
Federici and his wife adopted eight children from brutal institutions themselves: three from Russia and five from Romania. In his clinical practice in Virginia, Federici has seen 9000 young people, close to a third of them from Romania. Tracking his patients across the decades, he has found that about 20 per cent are able to live independently.
The most successful parents, he believes, were able to focus on imparting basic living skills and appropriate behaviours.
“The Ruckels are a good example – they hung on, and he’s doing OK.”
Within his own family, Federici and his wife have become the permanent legal guardians for four of his Romanian children, who are now all adults.
HE CALLED FROM BUCHAREST AND SAID: “I HAVE TO COME HOME. THESE PEOPLE ARE AWFUL”
Two work, under supervision, for a foundation he established in Bucharest; two others live with their parents. The fifth is a stirring example of the fortunate 20 per cent – he’s an emergency department doctor. Both of his adult sons who haven’t left home are cognitively impaired, but they have jobs and are pleasant to be around, according to Federici. “They’re happy!” he exclaims. “They’ve figured out ways, not to overcome what happened to them – you can’t really overcome – but to adapt to it and not take other people hostage.”
BY ANY MEASURE, IZIDOR – living independently – is a success story among the survivors of Ceauşescu’s institutions. “Do you imagine ever having a family?” I ask.
“You mean of my own? No. I have known since I was 15 that I would not have a family. Seeing all my friends in dumb relationships, with jealousy and control and depression – I thought, Really? All that for a relationship? No.”
He says he doesn’t miss what he never knew, what he doesn’t even perceive. He focuses on the tasks before him and does his best to act the way humans expect other humans to act.
“I’m not a person who can be intimate,” Izidor says. “It’s hard on a person’s parents, because they show you love and you can’t return it.”
Sometimes, Izidor has feelings. Two years after the Ruckels kicked him out, Izidor was getting a haircut from a stylist who knew the family. “Did you hear what happened?” she asked. “Your mother and sisters were in a terrible car accident yesterday. They’re in the hospital.” Izidor tore out of there, bought three dozen red roses, and showed up at the hospital.
“We were in our vehicle coming out of Costco,” Marlys recalls, “and a guy hit us really hard. After a few hours at the hospital, we were released. I didn’t call Izidor to tell him. We weren’t speaking. But he found out, and I guess at the hospital he said, ‘I’m here to see the Ruckel family,’ and they said, ‘They’re not here anymore,’ which he took to mean ‘They’re dead’.”
Izidor raced from the hospital to the house – the house he’d been boycotting, the family he hated.
He assumed Danny Ruckel wasn’t going to let him in without negotiation. “What are your intentions?” he would ask. “Do you promise to be decent to us?” Izidor would promise. Danny would allow Izidor to enter the living room and face everyone, to stand there with his eyes wet with tears. Izidor would lay the f lowers
“I HAVE KNOWN SINCE I WAS 15 THAT I WOULD NOT HAVE A FAMILY,” IZIDOR SAYS
in his mother’s arms and say, with a greater attempt at earnestness than they’d ever heard before, “These are for all of you. I love you.” It would mark a turning point. From that day on, something would be softer in him, regarding the Ruckels.
But first, Izidor was obliged to approach the heavy wooden door, the door he’d slammed behind him a hundred times, the door he’d battered and kicked when he was locked out.
He knocked and stood on the front step, head hanging, heart pounding, unsure whether he’d be admitted. I abandoned them, I neglected them,
I put them through hell, he thought. And then they opened the door.