well... for one... I can believe it.
There was a background check done and if it was correctly done then there are no known violent incidents in this woman's past.
I do not know, and may never figure out, WHY people go into the process of adoption SO naive. ESPECIALLY the adoption of older children. It is NOT like having your own child. You DON'T carry this child for nine months, love him before he is ever born, and bring home a helpless infant who is literally a blank slate that bonded with your voice from inside the womb months before.
These children are abandoned, and often neglected by the orphanages where they end up living. Even when the care in the orphanage is loving and warm, can you imagine a small child, abandoned by the person with which they bonded, now forced to share any new affection with literally scores of "siblings"?
These settings are where the seeds are sewn for serious pathology. And unwitting childless couples, desperate to have a child of their own, speaking a language the child doesn't even recognize, become the unsuspecting recipients of a nightmare that doesn't end. They think they will take home Bif and Buffy and everyone will fall right in step with the Ozzy and Harriet wholesome American family.
The first two or three days they write off any problems to "adjustment". It's the most secure, yet overused "buzz word" they have. And progress usually IS made in bonding and blending these highly qualified, would-be adoptees of neglected (at the very least ) children, with their new charges. But true bonding rarely happens... despite all attempts. And instead of family harmony these heroic saviors of the American Dream end up living with an already well developed, highly functioning sociopath... age 6.
The reality looks NOTHING like the fantasy looked. This total stranger they now call "son" may "adjust" by stomping on the head of the family cat while they count their blessings that they did not have an infant in the home they brought this child to. And after a awhile his refusal to bond with his new mother causes her to feel hopeless and rejected. And those feeling turn more and more toward anger with each day that shows no improvement in the "adjust" category. The mother resents the child further for disolving her dream of a happy home, and destroying the material things she holds dear. She lashes out and resorts to corporal punishment hoping this will break his mean spirited will... but the son only gets more combative as HIS violent reactions to HER violence also intensify.
In the end both are hysterical with anger and resentment, but she is bigger. And what started as an unrealistic fantasy ends as an unimaginable tragedy. Not an evil woman... a woman driven to the edge and out of control. And not the sterotypical helpless child... a child tormented by an anti-social personality created years further back than he can even remember.
