When Life Two Started

Heidi Solomon was standing at the kitchen counter of her suburban Cleveland home, slicing cheese to make a sandwich for her ten-year-old son. It was an ordinary April afternoon -- as ordinary as any in the three tumultuous years since she and her husband, Rick, had adopted Daniel. "I don't want that," the boy snapped. Heidi, a slender woman barely taller than Daniel at five feet, didn't respond. Her son's hostility, she knew, had nothing to do with her.

Photographed by Andy Goodwin

Giving up wasn't an option for Heidi Solomon. "I loved him," she says of her adopted son.

Daniel had spent the first years of his life in an orphanage that was more like a prison than a home for parentless children. Though he was affectionate when the Solomons adopted him, his behavior had deteriorated over time and lately grown even worse. He smashed toys, assaulted other kids, and was expelled from school and briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Still, Heidi wasn't prepared for what happened next. With a snarl, Daniel snatched a six-inch steak knife from the counter and held it near her throat.

Until his adoption, Daniel -- born Florin-Daniel Bica -- had never owned a pair of shoes, never been read to, never gotten a hug. He didn't even know he had parents. A single window offered the only glimpse of the world beyond the orphanage room he shared with dozens of others. "At night, you could see the lights of the city," the boy, now 18, remembers. "I'd wonder what all that was."

Then, one October day in 1996, a strange man led him from the orphanage and into a waiting car. "I had no idea what was going on," says Daniel. "It felt like a dream." Soon he was in an airport, and the man was urging him to say hello to a man and woman. Heidi burst into tears at the sight of the boy in the blue windbreaker. He waved shyly. "That's when Life Two started," Daniel says with a smile.

Heidi had committed herself to adopting a child when she was all of 15 years old. She made the decision after moving to Maryland to train as a gymnast for three years. During that time, she lived in seven different households and often felt more like an imposition than a guest. When she returned home to Ohio, she realized the importance of family -- and something else: "I decided I didn't want to have my own biological children, because there are so many out there who need help."

She became a special-education teacher, working with gang members and emotionally disturbed children. In her spare time, she volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters. Rick, who has a marketing job with a vending-machine company, wasn't so keen on adoption, but he accepted it as part of the package when he married Heidi.

Soon after they wed, in 1994, the couple began the process of adopting from overseas. Flipping through an agency catalog one evening, Heidi stopped cold at a picture of a smiling child with caramel skin and coal-black hair. "He just popped out at me," she says. "I said to Rick, 'This is our son.'"

At the time, the boy was living in an austere orphanage in Beclean, Romania. Adult staff fed and cleaned the children and occasionally beat them with sticks; otherwise, they left them to their own devices.

Rage Took Over

For the first six months at his new home in Ohio, Daniel seemed to adapt well. Fascinated by the unfamiliar world, he loved talking on the phone and, with his new mother, learning to swim. There were trouble spots: He threw occasional tantrums and had a hard time sleeping alone. Though he quickly picked up several English words, he still struggled to communicate when he entered the first grade at the local public school.

Then, on the day he turned eight, something snapped. It was during a birthday party his parents threw for him -- the first one he'd ever had -- that Daniel fully realized someone had brought him into the world and then abandoned him. The thought filled him with an explosive fury.

"I got this idea that Heidi and Rick had left me for seven years, then picked me up and tried to act like nothing had happened," Daniel says. They explained many times that they weren't his biological parents, but Daniel was unconvinced. "I didn't care what they said or did," he says. "Rage just took over."

He would erupt in hours-long tantrums, throwing anything he could get his hands on and gouging holes in walls throughout the house. Eventually Heidi and Rick moved everything except a mattress out of his bedroom. But the outbursts got worse. When Daniel turned ten, his parents gave him a puppy, which the boy promptly tried to strangle. The following month, he was sent home from synagogue in a police car after he charged a bunch of kids with a shovel.

The Solomons called in therapists; Daniel bit one in the stomach, leaving a three-inch gash. Three separate times that same year, he was committed involuntarily to a psychiatric hospital, once after threatening his school principal with a shard of glass. The institutionalizations seemed only to fuel his anger. "Before, he'd get frustrated and it would escalate," says Heidi. "But after being in the hospital, he became deliberately violent."

Heidi was Daniel's favorite target. He head-butted her, then smiled when he saw he'd caused a black eye. He swung a golf club at her. More than once when Rick wasn't home, Heidi called the police for protection.

Perhaps the only person Daniel hated as much as Heidi was himself. He talked often about suicide and made several clumsy attempts, jumping from windows or trees.

The family began to crack under the strain. Rick talked about leaving. Heidi was consumed by guilt. "I remember reading in the newspaper about a family of three dying in a fire and thinking, That should be us -- we cause so much chaos," she says.

Mental-health professionals, friends and relatives told Heidi there was no hope, that Daniel would never love her and that she should give up on him. But she wasn't going to back out. "Though he hated me, I didn't take it personally," she says. "I knew it was because of what had happened to him. And I knew he needed a family. He's my son. I never questioned that."

On the day Daniel pulled the knife on her, Heidi, trained to deal with

her potentially violent students, deliberately showed no emotion. She knocked the weapon out of her son's hand, and he backed away. The crisis was over. Only later did Heidi allow herself to think about what might have happened -- and what might lie ahead. Daniel was a scrawny ten-year-old, but he was growing bigger. She knew they couldn't go on like this.

Drastic Measures

By then, several psychotropic medications had been prescribed for Daniel. Some were useless; others seemed to help stabilize his wildly shifting moods. None of them, though, could treat his most serious diagnosis -- reactive attachment disorder, a condition that prevents the sufferer from bonding with others.

"An attachment-disordered child believes, I am bad, unwanted, worthless and unlovable," wrote psychotherapists Terry Levy and Michael Orlans in a medical journal article Heidi found online. The result, the authors continued, is a profound sense of alienation that leads to anger and violence. In short, Daniel was unable to love. While the disorder is rare, it is routinely found in abused children, including the thousands adopted in the United States every year from warehouse-style Eastern European orphanages.

In recent years, under enormous pressure from Western governments and with help from several nonprofit organizations, Romania has taken steps to improve the care of its abandoned children. Though conditions in some institutions are still appalling, Romanian Children's Relief, a U.S.-based group that works in the region, has helped close many of the worst and place their occupants with foster families or in group homes. The orphanage where Daniel lived now caters to teens and has been modernized to resemble a college dormitory.

Those changes came too late to help Daniel, and treating attachment disorder can be not only difficult but also controversial. Some versions of attachment therapy, as it is called, involve physical restraint. In 2000 a ten-year-old girl was smothered to death in Colorado by two therapists, now in prison, who wrapped her in a flannel sheet as part of a "rebirthing" meant to cure her.

But by the summer of 1999, Heidi was ready for drastic measures. She contacted Ronald Federici, a Virginia neuropsychologist who recommended a gentler but nonetheless demanding treatment. For two solid months, Heidi would stay within three feet of Daniel at all times. He wasn't to ask for anything, only to accept the food and clothes she handed him. Most important, her son was required to make appropriate eye contact every time the two interacted. The idea was to re-create a version of the mother-baby bond they had never developed.

"For the first few weeks, I absolutely hated my mom as much as you can hate a person," Daniel says. Eventually he began to change. He came to understand that Heidi and Rick weren't his biological parents, and somehow the intense togetherness made the awareness sink in more deeply. His anger dissipated. After eight weeks, his violent outbursts had stopped and he'd quit trying to hurt himself or anyone else.

Still, Daniel's churning emotions surfaced in different ways. He turned to more passive-aggressive behavior: He ate dinner as slowly as possible and began stealing things. Compared with what Heidi and Rick had been through, however, this seemed manageable. So the couple did something even Rick has called insane: They adopted another Eastern European orphan boy. Two-year-old Alexander Joseph -- A.J. -- arrived from Ukraine to join the family when Daniel was 12.

Instantly, Daniel became jealous. He began playing with matches and, at one point, threatened to kill himself. In desperation, Heidi and Rick tried another kind of attachment therapy. Every evening, they sat Daniel, by now a good-sized 13-year-old, on one of their laps. They fed him ice cream and didn't let him go until he'd made eye contact and talked to them. There was no breakthrough moment, but over months of the ritual, coupled with intensive professional therapy, Daniel underwent a transformation.

He began to appreciate how much his parents had done for him and to realize they loved him. He started to open up, stopped stealing and made a few friends. And his relationship

with A.J., who struggled with his own behavioral problems -- including hyperactivity and a mild version of attachment disorder -- improved. Daniel began to take pride in being an older brother, even babysitting A.J. at times.

With Heidi's encouragement, Daniel also began to help others. He became a leader in his temple's youth group, built homes with Habitat for Humanity and began training as a volunteer firefighter. Two years ago, to everyone's astonishment, he received his synagogue's award for most outstanding high school student. He accepted the award in a speech to some 300 people. In it, Daniel told of his early life in the orphanage and thanked Heidi and Rick for everything. Then, his voice choking with emotion, he spoke the words his parents feared they would never hear from him: "I love you."

"It was, hands down, the most amazing moment of my life," says Heidi.

Daniel's struggles aren't over. He's still in therapy. And while he is perfectly articulate in conversation, he has trouble reading and writing. Nonetheless, he's on track to graduate from high school this summer. College isn't a realistic option, but Daniel has other plans: He hopes to become a professional firefighter. He's learned firsthand what it means to give -- even risk -- everything for someone else. Now he wants to be the one to put that lesson into practice..