Adoption Corner: Birth Families Matter (Spring 2010)

BIRTH FAMILIES MATTER: A STORY OF INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION

prepared by Lynn Haire
Newfoundland & Labrador Families Adopting Multiculturally (NLFAM)
Parent Liaison for the Adoption Council of Canada (ACC)

When we first adopted Olivia, she was a 2-year-old, 17-lb wisp of a little girl with big brown eyes and big round cheeks that seemed to defy the malnutrition that affected the rest of her body. She was in a room full of children in a Romanian orphanage. I can still remember the smells and sounds in the town of Arad on that October day in 1996. The sun was beating down. The taxi radio played Brian Adams’ “Run to You,” as we cruised through the streets of the ancient city. European cigarette smoke and the aromas of strong black coffee and food cooking wafted through the air. The Roma children we saw in the street begged us for spare change and we gave them money.

Early in the day we visited with the children in the orphanage where we met our little girl for the first time. We spent a few precious moments absorbing where she lived and what her first days had been like. The orphanage was sparse but the children were well loved. We tearfully left to let them have lunch and nap while we ate dinner at a restaurant and toasted the most wonderful day of our lives.

Later that night, after picking Olivia up and flying back to Bucharest, the three of us lay in a little bed in a run down apartment. I can remember having a feeling like we had won the lottery. I whispered to Cec, “they just gave us a baby….”

That night she awoke and I could feel her tracing the outline of my face with her little finger. “Mama,” she said, memorizing my face.

We returned to Newfoundland to a very excited extended family and friends who were eagerly waiting to meet our new girl. She settled in like an old shoe, as if she had never been anywhere else. As Olivia grew and developed, she began to notice our differences. She worried about not looking like us and not being born from my belly. Of course, we told a version of the birth family story that she could understand – that she came from someone else’s belly but was born in my heart. (When my second daughter, Nathalie, was born in the usual way, I explained to Olivia, “Your love fixed my belly.”)

Soon Olivia wanted to know more information about the belly she had been in and asked many questions about why she was not with her birth mom. She worried a lot about poverty as she got older and I worried that maybe I had told her too much. Maybe I had caused her to worry; maybe I had over-romanticized our adoption story. One night while I was giving her a bath she started in on her usual worry: “I wonder if my birth mom has enough to eat.” I said, “Olivia, you are just a little girl and I don’t want you to worry about grown up things.” I could see her shoulders relax as she let go of the weight she was carrying. This is heavy stuff for little kids to grapple with, but an inevitable part of any international adoptee’s development process.
Identity is a big thing in Newfoundland homes. “You look just like Nanny Rose…you have your father’s nose” was a common refrain that sent chills down my spine at family gatherings. I did have to ask that my family not play the “who do you look like” game with my daughter. It just served as a reminder that Olivia didn’t know who she looked like. As a way of compensating for this, I would point out things that Olivia did have in common with us. “You are short like me, you have a cleft in your chin like Daddy, and you like dark chocolate just like me.”

As far as culture went, Olivia didn’t really know that there was a culture that she was missing out on; it was only we, as adults, who knew that. We could enrich her life with as much Newfoundland culture as she could stand but there was another part of her that couldn’t be denied – it was her birthright. We chose a special day, St. Nicholas Day, as it is celebrated in Eastern Europe. We decided we would celebrate it as well. Since then, every year on December 5, St. Nicholas cookies have been baked and given out at school and shoes have been dutifully placed outside the kids’ bedroom doors. St. Nick always visits us and brings candy and a little gift.

Unlike adoptions from other countries, we did have some information that we were able to share with Olivia as she was growing up. I made contact through a Romanian social worker with a member of her biological family in 2001. We were able to send some presents and pictures to them. Unfortunately when I went on maternity leave with Julia our youngest child, my work computer was wiped out and my connections were lost. The social worker had retired and was not able to help us. I held the knowledge that our only link to Olivia’s family was gone for a long time. I kicked myself for not printing off all the vital information.

When Olivia got older she started to ask questions about when she was going to be able to find her birth family. I knew I had to do something. The issues of loss of her birth family and culture were starting to creep into her life. With Romania joining the European Union and the freedom to travel made available for the first time, the fear that her family had moved on was weighing heavily on me and I was concerned that we wouldn’t find them. I decided that I would ask the advice of a friend who had gone down the same road.

I was advised to join the internet mailing list for birth families:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BirthParentContact/. There I was able to get fantastic information and contact names for finding information in various countries. For every country imaginable, there were names of people who did birth family searches. I wrote a note to the list and before I could blink I was hooked up with a person who was willing and able to do a search for Olivia’s birth family. It did cost us money as we had to pay him for his services but it was well spent.

I told Daniel, our searcher, about the information that was on our homestudy and he proceeded to do the search. I was very nervous during that time. I thought for sure that he would come up empty-handed, as we had learned that the family had moved residence back when we did the search previously. It turned out that her relative had changed last names due to marriage, so he had to go through every person with the same first name in that town. I can’t believe he was successful in finding them.

Daniel went to visit the family for us in the little town of Siria on the Romanian/Hungarian border. He brought presents and food to them and explained that he had been asked to come and visit with them on behalf of Olivia and her family in Canada. He was able to make the virtual connection between the birth family and us. Although we didn’t meet them in person, the connection was re-established on that day. He brought them a letter from Olivia, expressing how happy she was to have found them and he was able to send us digital pictures and video of the birth family via the magic of the internet.

This was a very emotional reunion for her family and for her. There are no words to really describe such an experience. Many tears were shed on that initial day and the days following. My husband will admit that he had feelings of worry that if she connected with her family that in some way we would lose a piece of her. I think this is a normal feeling for adoptive families. We love our children so much it is difficult to think of sharing that love. But it is because of that love that I knew what we were doing was right for our child.

Other things we worried about were acceptance from the family, the poverty level of the family: what would be expected of us and what would be expected of her. I watched a birth family reunion documentary recently where the extended biological family was asking the adoptee to support the birth mother because they thought she was a wealthy American. The adoptee felt overwhelmed and resentful; I didn’t want this to be our outcome.

We haven’t had that experience at all. The family is just happy to have found Olivia and anything we do for them is because we want to and not because it was asked of us.

Olivia is an aunt to two adorable little girls, Manuela and Irena. We have pictures of her family and one picture in particular of Manuela hugging a little teddy bear that Auntie Olivia sent to her. It’s a little bear that Olivia won for selling the most brownie cookies at Girl Guides. I mentioned to Olivia that Manuela had the same big cheeks and asked how that made her feel. “Great!” was the answer that came back. For her, having this little girl on the other side of the world with brown eyes and big cheeks means an awful lot.

I think we have done our best for her. She can take what we’ve given her into her adulthood and make decisions that she is comfortable making. I do know that we will be visiting Romania at some point before Olivia goes off to college. We are all looking forward to this trip. I think it will be eye-opening for us all, and hopefully we will be able to visit the building that housed the orphanage where our journey began.