Born from My Heart
Part III:
A PAPER TRAIL LEADS THE WAY HOME
With our decision to focus on China came the long, long stage of international adoption known as the "paper chase." Months˘sometimes years˘of paperwork is inherent in international adoption. Fingerprints, interviews, home studies, agency meetings, workshops on becoming a multiracial family, Internet support groups, waiting families' workshops, FBI checks, notarized marriage, birth certificates and divorce documents˘documents and more documents˘a terribly long, drawn-out period. China adoptions have the added paperwork of requiring that every notarized document, including each birth certificate, divorce decree or marriage certificate, be re-notarized by the secretary of state of the state in which the event took place. I was born in Pennsylvania; John was born in North Dakota; he was divorced in Minnesota; and we were married in South Carolina. Oh, the paperwork!
And then, nine months after we sent our dossier to China and eighteen months after we had begun the process with our agency, we got the call.
On the last day of 2003, John and I received word that we had been referred a healthy two-year-old girl from Guangxi Province, China. We reviewed lengthy referral information and medical reports on this child and spoke at length with our social worker and with an international adoption medical expert. Then John and I, alone in our home, sat in front of our computer and opened two photographs of our little girl. I lost my breath. Tears streamed down my face. She was stunning. There she was! It was real. Now traveling to China and bringing our daughter home could not come soon enough.
Our journey to China in itself was a wondrous experience that we shared with five other families. After several days touring Beijing, we traveled to Nanning, Guangxi Province, in southwest China. There, in a giant room full of tears and new emotions, we met Eleanor "Ellie" Yechun Norton. Around us other new families were meeting their children for the first time. For the children, the moments were disruptive of their routines and often confusing. For the parents, the moments were a culmination of years of emotional expectations.
When we had received our referral, we learned that Ellie had been with one foster family for nearly two years. The more we learned about her experience, the more blessed we felt. She had been in a home where she was loved and cared for as a member of the household. Three days after Ellie was placed with us, John and I visited the home of Ellie's foster family. It was a deeply emotional time. They could not have been more welcoming and wonderful. I took as many pictures as I could and had the video running constantly, trying to absorb all the stories and images that I knew would be part of Ellie's story.
Caitie, now a sophomore in high school, and John's sister, Laurie Norton, were able to join us for the latter part of the trip in Guangzhou, allowing the new sisters, Ellie and Caitie, to begin to bond. Each family has their own story of the days of first becoming a family. Not only to do our children have their unspoken experiences from their months and lives before we became families, but the reality is that they have months and years of adjustment ahead. The importance of support from family, friends and groups is a refrain common to every adoption story.
My family was and is tremendously important. My sisters, since day one, have been fabulous. One sister, Joan Horlbeck, a lifelong educator, founded a Montessori school in Charlotte, N.C., so she understands very well the developmental stages of children and has helped guide me with wonderful information. My other, Ellie Horlbeck Thompson '81, has on-the-ground experience, with three daughters under the age of 12. She has helped put panicky moments of how-on-earth-can-I-do-this in perspective. Combined, I felt I had the wisdom of the ages!
During our long wait, I attended monthly international waiting families sessions at our agency. Parents who were waiting for children from China, Russia, Guatemala, Columbia and other countries gathered to share ideas on how to make the wait less agonizing. The meetings were very constructive and helped shorten the wait tremendously. In addition, our adoption agency required that we participate in numerous workshops and meetings to help prepare us for the countless issues we would face in becoming both a multi-racial and an adoptive family.
Embracing new experiences
Cynthia '68*, divorced and mother to one son, Homer˜himself an African American child adopted domestically at the age of four months˜found herself having a conversation with the then 10-year-old Homer about siblings. Cynthia recalled fondly the importance of siblings in her own life and she knew that it was an experience she wanted for her son. She had maintained contact with the group Americans for African Adoption and was well aware of the many children in need of stable homes. As a single mother working as an architect in Biddeford Pool, Maine, Cynthia made a momentous decision. She learned of two children needing a home and, in a process that took three long years, Cynthia adopted two biological siblings˜Mestawot, 12, and Tamer, 10˜from war-torn Ethiopia.
Two of eight biological siblings, Mestawot and Tamer joined Cynthia and Homer in Maine. Suddenly the household was one busy place with three budding teenagers. One of the biggest challenges Mestawot and Tamer faced, Cynthia said, was the adjustment to being siblings themselves. They had resided in different facilities in Ethiopia and had not really known each other. Their family story, like so many others in Ethiopia, is horrific. But they have embraced their new home and their new experiences with open arms.
"What professional and personal successes I have had were possible because many people shared their knowledge and passions with me˜be it art, architecture, sailing or cooking," Cynthia said. "Others helped me persevere when things were hard. Having been the recipient of much from others, part of my desire to become an adoptive parent was to pass some of that along."
Cynthia remains astounded at her children's resourcefulness; she says they have no fear. They jumped into all the opportunities presented to them. They swim. They ski. One is even the field hockey team captain at school. Mestawot and Tamer, now ages 16 and 14, maintain contact with several other Maine-based Ethiopian children whom they see on occasion.
"I once got a fortune cookie that said: 'You will enjoy the pleasures of life and will share them.' I can't think of a better fortune," Cynthia said of her experience. "And it's true what they say about it being the hardest, and most rewarding job you'll ever do!"
Everything I thought it would be
At the age of 10, Elizabeth '86* knew she wanted to adopt a child. When adulthood came and marriage didn't, the organized planner laid out a five-year plan for her busy Manhattan-based life. She purchased a home in the suburbs of New York, bought a car, and in 2001 began the process of international adoption.
Her decision to focus on Vietnam was natural. Her father had served at a radio station in Saigon during the Vietnam War and for years she had listened as he had spoken fondly of the culture and people of Vietnam. He had maintained friendships with people there since the war.
Adoption in Vietnam requires two trips to the country. Elizabeth, a senior vice president with an advertising agency in Manhattan, had just returned from visiting family in Seattle for the holidays in December 2002 when she received word that she was to be mother of a two-month-old infant girl. In early January 2003 she made her first trip and met her new daughter, Olivia. One week later she was required to leave Vietnam˜and Olivia˜and return five weeks later to reclaim her new daughter and take her home. It is a difficult procedure but one that is common to the process in several countries.
Elizabeth returned to Vietnam on Valentine's Day, this time with her parents and two of her sisters. It was a difficult time. Olivia was extremely ill and not eating or sleeping well. Elizabeth herself was ill. Her family's presence and support were tremendously important during this time. A week after returning to the U.S., Olivia was hospitalized for two weeks with a bronchial infection. It was an exhausting time for mother and daughter. Today, 2-year-old Olivia is healthy and attending a preschool in Pelham. Elizabeth's work hours have decreased from 15 a day to 8.5, all to make sure her daughter is well cared for. The days are full and fly by, she said.
"It's all worth it," Elizabeth said. "I look at my daughter every day. She is bubbly, happy, smart and beautiful. It is everything I thought it would be˜and more."
Elizabeth tries to incorporate aspects of Vietnam into Olivia's life. She is thoughtful of Olivia's cultural past and her personal history. "I think of her birth mother every day," Elizabeth reflects. Today, mother and daughter listen to music, read stories, and have prints and dolls around the house, all from Vietnam, and Elizabeth hopes Olivia will learn Vietnamese (finding a teacher has been difficult). Ultimately, Elizabeth plans to take her daughter to Vietnam when she returns to adopt a sister for Olivia.
I can parent
In April 2003 a group from the Wheaton Class of 1975 gathered at a small hotel in New York City. Under the guise of acknowledging our 50th birthdays, about 25 classmates shared stories and wine and caught up with each other. John and I had just submitted our dossier to China the month before. I was bursting with excitement and wanted to share my news but felt that it was way too early. It was like being three weeks pregnant but not wanting to speak too soon for fear something might not happen the way you wanted it to.
Laura and Nancy '75* were exchanging stories and, in one remarkable moment learned that they both had daughters from the same orphanage at Ma'ashan. The girls had been there at the same time!
Nancy is a single mom and the chief marketing officer of an international law firm in New York City. Nancy, always interested in parenting, realized through her affection for the daughter of classmate Joan Lavine '75 that she could parent and love a child who was not her biological offspring.
"I realized I could love a child deeply," Nancy said of Joan's daughter, Marlee, whom she had known since birth. "I could parent this child."
Once adoption became a serious choice for Nancy, she made it her goal to find a healthy baby girl. The China program was a perfect fit.
In July 1998 Nancy traveled to Hefei, Anhui Province, China, with nine other families. Like Laura, they were not allowed to travel to the orphanage, so the children traveled to them and were brought individually to the new parents. It was at this time that Megan met her new mother.
Today the "Chinese sisters"˜the 10 children adopted that day in 1998˜stay in touch through their American families. Many of them, like Nancy, live in the New York City area and take part in the city's thriving Chinese cultural community. Now a second-grader, Megan is becoming increasingly curious about her background, and wistful about meeting her birth family. Nancy remains very sensitive to her daughter's inquiries, yet knows that there is essentially no chance that Megan's birth parents will ever be identified. She understands the grief inherent in this loss; her own father died when she was very young and she knows how hard it is for a child to accept this kind of permanent loss.
"I speak with Megan about all the gifts that God did give her and try to focus on those," Nancy said, while acknowledging her sense of loss and frustration. Nancy hopes that someday there will be a DNA bank to facilitate family connections among the China-born children so that biological siblings might be able to find each other and, perhaps, their relatives still living in China. Today she focuses on her own gift.
"There is nothing more I could have wanted. I have been so lucky that this particular child is my daughter."
Both sides of the table
Jill '92* understands well the importance of support throughout the adoption process. She has been on both sides of the table˜first as social worker, with an M.S.W. from the University of Connecticut, working with adoption agencies, and then as a parent of two children born in Russia.
Jill met her husband, Joe, in 1992 when they both were working at Connecticut College. They married in 1993 and both wanted to become parents as soon as possible. But they soon learned that biology wasn't on their side and they'd have to make other decisions regarding children. During this time, Jill's father passed away, and a small insurance policy he left her opened the doors for the young couple to pursue adoption.
Jill and Joe looked at domestic adoption but there were "too many variables we could not control," Jill said. They turned to international adoption. They were too young for the China program and the Vietnam one had just opened, but they qualified for Russia. In December 1996 Jill and Joe submitted their application; by March 1997 they were traveling from Chicago to Kaliningrad, Russia, on the Baltic Sea, to meet their new daughter, Hannah Elena, born a year earlier. Jill recalls that it was a very challenging time for the family. Hannah, who at 6 months had looked healthy and strong in the video they had seen, now was terribly frail at 12 months; she weighed only 18 pounds and had very little hair. Jill saw how desperately Hannah needed to be in her new home. The three of them returned home and Hannah quickly grew into an athletic, active girl who loves school.
Five years later Jill and Joe decided that the joys of parenthood and Hannah's need for a sibling far outweighed the difficulty of the process. In spring 2002 they traveled to Nizhny Novgorod, three hours east of Moscow, on an overnight train to meet their new son. At this point, adoption in Russia required two trips. So they returned home without their new child to await the legalities that were under way in Russia before returning. When they returned to the U.S., the adoption took a nightmarish turn; the child's birth parents returned to reclaim him.
"Getting the call that we had lost our referral," Jill explained, "...it was awful. But it was all meant to be."
Jill's training in social work, combined with the professionalism of the adoption officials involved, helped her overcome the feelings of grief and loss. A new referral was expedited, and in June of that same year six-month-old James "Jamie" Ruslan joined the family.
Today both Hannah and Jamie are healthy and thriving in the family's new rural Maine home. While Russian cultural resources are limited there, the family finds significant ways to keep their children connected to their heritage. Jill is linked to the support network Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption (FRUA), and she has Russian books and toys in the home and talks to her children about the land of their birth. Still, their efforts are sometimes not enough.
"I wish adoption was more mainstream," Jill said with a hint of frustration. People's perceptions of adoption and adopted children sometimes can be insensitive and inaccurate. There is often communicated, Jill said, a sense that "adopted children are not our real children," even among medical professionals and teachers.
But with Hannah and Jamie in their lives, Jill and Joe "feel deeply blessed in so many ways. We are so deeply thankful."
My whole life would change
For single mom Jeannine '82*, having a network of support was a major component that drew her to consider adoption from China. When she traveled to Jiangxi Province in September 2003 to meet then 13-month-old Elizabeth, she went with a built-in support system: 24 other families on exactly the same mission.
"It was very important to me as a single person," she said of her support network, which includes her groups of single adoptive parents back home in Needham, Mass. To meet with people going through the same process, she said, was "very reassuring."
"I was very nervous about how my whole life would change," she continued. "I am not a seat-of-the-pants type of person. The transition has gone more smoothly than I expected, turning my life only halfway upside down!"
Again and again, Jeannine returns to the importance of community. In addition to staying in touch with a number of the families with whom she traveled to China, she also founded a group of single parents of adoptive children from China. They began to form before their children joined their families, meeting at each other's homes every month. "We talked non-stop," she said. "Once the kids arrived, we began to spend all our time chasing the kids around with little time to talk!" Jeannine also participates in the local FCC chapter and took her vacation this year in Martha's Vineyard with two other single mothers and their children.
"This journey has taught me to be more flexible and to put my work in perspective," Jeannine added. "I am very happy I adopted Elizabeth from China and have welcomed the opportunity to learn about another culture. I had some concerns about identity issues Elizabeth might face in the future, but I have received so much encouragement from the Chinese community in Needham that I don't worry as much about it now. They have been so helpful."
Part IV:
THE INEVITABLE MISUNDERSTANDINGS
his generation of internationally adopted children benefit from the groundbreaking experiences of a generation of Korean-born adoptees who are now adults. The latter are acting as tremendous mentors to the younger generation and their families. Having grown up in a period of assimilation, they provide great insight into what was right and what was wrong in their upbringing. Many believe that self-identity is at the root of strengthening our children.
Culture camps for children of many nations, learning Mandarin, Russian or Vietnamese, or developing relationships with other children with similar stories all help develop a strong identity.
Our social worker is a Korean adoptee in her 30s. She grew up in a German Lutheran Caucasian family in Minnesota. Last summer she attended a conference in Seoul, South Korea, of Korean adoptees from around the world. In a session she attended with peers, the group discussed at length the progress of today's young adoptees. They were especially struck by the sense of identity that, in particular, the "China girls" are developing. This was noteworthy in contrast to their own experience of assimilation, where there was little discussion or even recognition of the country or culture of their birth.
In spite of the foundation we give our children, the reality is that they are confronted by tremendous insensitivity. "Questions from the grocery line," a routine painfully familiar to many adoptive families, illustrates the immense challenges our families face daily.
Laura is always frustrated, for example, when people say, "Aren't you wonderful to adopt her." Within earshot of her daughter, one person told Laura that "it is so terrible what the mothers do in those countries." A cashier once pointed to her daughter and asked Laura "if she was expensive." Nancy was asked "Where did you get her?" as if she was being asked where she found a new coat. Another person once asked whether her daughter "knew she is adopted." Karen was asked if she was "going to buy another one."
Typical comments come from other children as well as adults: My mom says you were an orphan. Can you speak your language? Is he your real brother? What is it like to be adopted? How do you know what you'll look like when you grow up? Why didn't your real mother keep you? As Jill observed, "The questions are more out of ignorance than malice." Still, they can be intrusive, hurtful and harmful.
Taking the cue from many adult adoptees, organizations are developing creative tools to "manage" these kinds of inquiries. The Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.) in Silver Spring, Md., has programs for children and teachers, since many questions happen in the classroom. I recently observed a workshop of girls from China ages 7 to 11. The girls role-played, asking each other the kinds of intrusive questions they might confront. The tool they were given revolves around the acronym WISE UP. The children could choose any response they felt like. The could walk away (W), say "It's private" (I), share some information (S), or educate the person on some aspect of adoption (E). These kinds of programs help empower our children to deal with questions that are a far too common part of their lives.
Epilogue
In the end, this really is our children's story. It is their journey and we, as parents, participate solely as their guides, praying that we are giving them the best foundation we possibly can. Our children˜Ellie, Megan, Olivia, Elizabeth, Mestawot, Tamer, Homer, Isabelle, Eliza, Hannah and Jamie˜are resourceful, kind, beautiful, happy, smart, social, healthy, tough, strong, amazing and wonderful, and we cannot imagine our lives without the profound joy they bring. It is both our desire to parent and our deep love for our children that we have chosen this path.
Looking back at the whole process, I feel a great sense of wonder that it all took place and, more importantly, that it all happened the way it was supposed to. Some mighty hand must have helped in this journey. All those with whom I spoke share this same sense of awe. Nancy often asks herself, "How am I so lucky that God gave me this child?" Elizabeth wistfully "looks at my daughter and I can't believe she is my child. It is everything it could be and more." Jill remains deeply thankful. "Faith is a huge part of this," Jill observes. "With major obstacles, it can be hard. But it all works out as it is meant to be." "Something in this whole process says that you are meant to be a family," says Cynthia. "You have to have trust that it will all work out. It is like being blind in a whole complicated system that takes forever, but you have to have wisdom and trust that it will work out."
At the end of each day, as Ellie goes to bed, we quietly pause to reflect on the day's events. We give blessings in a simple way with the time-honored child's prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep..." After listing all the family members, friends and canine companions she can think of, we conclude by honoring the lesser known, but nonetheless tremendously important, people in Ellie's early life. "God bless the family that gave life to Ellie," we say. "And God bless the family that loved her like their very own until we could be a family forever and ever. Amen." For ever and ever.
Yes, as we tread new ground in what often feels like uncharted waters, we stumble a bit and occasionally bruise ourselves. But, even with all the challenges, I have no doubt that we will continue to pick ourselves up, move forward and succeed. We possess the timeless strength and heart of family. For ever and ever.
*Surnames have been omitted at the request of the families. -Ed.
Barbara Horlbeck is a consultant currently residing with her family in Baltimore, Md. She serves as vice president of Families with Children from China (FCC)ˆMaryland. She is also secretary/treasurer of Wheaton Class of 1975.
