Luda Merino was born in Kochenevo, Russia, on March 27, 2001. The first months of her life were spent alone in the hospital, then in an orphanage. When she was three years old, her Spanish mother adopted her. Since then, he has lived in Madrid. She has long dedicated herself to raising awareness of the early trauma of adoptees. He first did it on social networks and in the media, and now he has just published an autobiographical book, You wouldn’t understand (Penguin, 2024).
Throughout the interview, by videoconference from her home, she shows memories and photographs that she keeps from her entire adoption process: a model of the noisy plane in which she traveled from Russia, the books that his mother bought to make everything go well. . and photographs that show significant moments in his life, such as his arrival in Spain with a frightened face surrounded by his family. “As soon as I arrived, everyone wanted to meet me and I didn’t understand anything,” he jokes.
The reason we wrote this book, as stated in the opening pages, was the need to find first-person accounts of adoption. Why hasn’t something like this been written until now?
When I was little and a teenager, my mother had some pretty good books on adoption, written by psychologists and experts in the field, which gave a series of tips on how to act with your adopted children. But I wasn’t looking for a guide for parents on what to do with an adopted child, because the child was me. So I would always look for the parts where the boys and the girls had a voice, and that’s how I started to understand what was happening to me. When I reached adolescence, I needed more answers, to find people like me that I could relate to, and there weren’t any at that time. That’s why I decided to write what I would have liked to read when I was 15.
Should we listen to boys and girls who have been adopted? Is this a story to be created?
Fortunately, this is starting to change, as the boom The adoption in Spain took place between 1995 and 2005, so now these children have grown up and are starting to tell their experiences. The most beautiful thing that happens to me with this book is that adopted people, or people who have adopted boys and girls, write to me to tell me that thanks to my story, they understand things about their own life.
His mother writes in the letter that closes the book: “I say your book because you are the protagonist, even though I am an important part of your story. » Should we change our adult-centered approach to view adoption as a measure to protect children, and not as a means of satisfying the desire for motherhood or fatherhood?
In fact, this is already the case, adoption already functions as a measure to protect children, which is more difficult for society to change the way it approaches it. Some parents who want to adopt do so for selfish reasons, because they want to become parents. I’m not judging it or saying it’s necessarily bad, but it is and it shouldn’t be. Boys and girls have the right to found a family, says the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the state must provide them with a family. The protagonists of the whole process should be boys and girls, not parents.
In 2022 a Twitter feed his on the dissociation of pain after adoption. She explained that she never cried when she was little and that this was a consequence of her crying not being addressed in her early years. Was that one of the seeds of the book?
I published this thread as a curiosity, but I never calculated the impact it would have, with five million views and dozens of comments. It was crazy. Following this, many media outlets called me and the subject began to be discussed. In fact, I didn’t even know that what was happening to me had a name, it’s called pain dissociation, and in fact, before this thread, I had only found one article where I discovered the name of what was happening to me. . Many people have written to me, I particularly remember the family of an adopted baby who was stuck against a lamp, had been badly burned and was not crying. In my case, my mother checked me every day in the shower to see if I had hurt myself because I never complained. Thank God I didn’t get appendicitis, because that’s where I stayed…
What does this dissociation of pain consist of?
Dissociation is a disconnection of the brain from what is happening outside or in your own body. There are many variations, the one I had is pain dissociation, which involves blocking physical pain, sometimes emotional pain, but also other discomforts like cold or fatigue. When a baby cries and no one cares for him, he eventually stops crying because he learns that it is of no use to him. Your brain shuts down when you feel pain.
The first block of the book is devoted to trauma, particularly the fear of abandonment, dissociation and attachment. What is the famous “backpack” that adopted people wear made of? Is it always loaded with bad things?
Not necessarily. For example, this dissociation from pain that we were talking about is dangerous when you don’t know you’re suffering from it, because you might get a burn or have a broken leg without realizing it. But when you know it, you learn to use it to your advantage. For example, at school, in physical education, I always got the best grades on stress tests because I was able to disconnect from fatigue and pain when I needed to. Another thing I’ve benefited from is the fact that I’m not able to focus my gaze, because I haven’t learned it. Babies learn to look by imitating their parents or attachment figures, and since I didn’t have them, when they talked to me, I looked away or even turned my back. So I became a very observant girl, because I was always looking at the environment, and that, for example, did me a lot of good when I was drawing. Since I have other shitty things, like abandonment trauma, I try to enjoy other “weird” things I have that aren’t necessarily bad.
This abandonment trauma comes from before the adoption process, and you always clarify it. Why are adopted people afraid of being abandoned again?
This is something completely irrational. You know that your mother (the adopter), your family and your friends are not going to leave you, but your mind believes that it can happen to you again because it has happened before. I always point out that my traumas do not come from the adoption process itself, but from before, from the fact that my biological mother abandoned me from my birth and from my first years in the hospital and the orphanage. . The only traumatic thing about the adoption process itself is that the child is separated from everything they know. I have an anecdote from when I arrived from Russia, when my mother put me on a super noisy plane – I still know today that it was one of the loudest and most moving ones. a lot -, and also without speaking Russian, that’s the only thing I understood, I gave him a hell of a time… he couldn’t stop crying and screaming. I had to be reassured by a Russian-speaking passenger so that we could take off.
Another chapter is devoted to the myths that exist about the adoption process. That it is expensive, that a biological child is more loved than an adopted child, that children can be returned… Which are the most harmful and the most urgent to ban?
There is no doubt that adopted children can be returned, because it is linked to this fear of abandonment. This happened to me when I was little and it’s something I’ve already forgiven my mother for. I was seven or eight years old and I had one of my tantrums. I made so much damage that my mother didn’t know what to do. She was always very competent, but situations often overwhelmed her. So he grabbed the landline in the living room and said to me: “Luda, I’ll call Russia and I’ll answer you right away.” Of course I believed it and started crying. She noticed this and immediately apologized; Years later, he learned that it was a phrase that should never be said to an adopted child. We are not Amazon parcels.
Concerning schooling, which in your case was very problematic, what would be the keys of the educational community towards adopted people?
The least teachers can do is try to understand the situation of adopted children and seek advice. I’m not saying they need to know everything about the adoption processes, but they should at least be a little careful and listen to the parents. This happened to me at all levels of education: many people didn’t understand my idiosyncrasies, for example that I usually needed to hug teachers due to lack of affection. There was everything, but some people were very unhappy with it.
In another chapter, he acknowledges that he’s going to end up in several puddles, but he doesn’t hesitate to do so. Why do you position yourself in favor of the adoption of diverse families, homosexual couples for example?
I think it is necessary to continue to explain that all types of families can adopt, provided they have the conditions to do so. The reason is simple: if same-sex couples or singles can adopt, there will be more families available to adopt boys and girls. And that has to do with what we’re talking about, which is changing focus, because that means looking at adoption as a family for a child. The more families, the better: single mothers and fathers, gays, lesbians… it doesn’t matter, as long as they are stable people. If the answer is yes, if you are suitable, why not?
You always use dark humor to raise awareness about adoption. Because?
Humor helps me let go, to release tensions in dramatic themes. Ultimately, I talk about things that itch inside, and making the joke that my birth mother didn’t know what a condom was, for example, helps me relax.
