I initially thought of adopting a Chinese girl, since the Chinese were notorious for one-child-only policies, sex selection abortions, and ubiquitous female infanticide. But in truth, I was not confident that I could deal with raising a child of a different race, with all the added complications that brings. I thought I could minimize the challenges by having a child with my heritage in common. Since Russia was so much a part of me, it seemed natural to go there.
I knew that taking a child out of a foreign orphanage was a huge risk. AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome—I’d heard the tragic stories of adoptions gone horribly wrong. I wanted a child I could raise, but not an infant. There could be too many potential medical problems that wouldn’t have manifested themselves in the early stages of development, and I knew I could not take on the responsibility of a special needs child. After much research and many discussions with Mahin, I decided that a three-year-old would be the best fit.
I began the adoption proceedings.
ONE YEAR LATER my plane to Russia lurched in the icy darkness. Anxiety engulfed me as I looked at the white whirlwind outside my window. Now, by adopting, was I admitting that something was missing? Had I fallen into that essentialist hole of thinking that no matter what a woman does, she will not be a complete woman until she has a child? Was this the actualization of all my becoming—or a final existential crisis of meaning?
Hurtling through the sky to meet my little girl, I forced my thoughts to stop racing. I knew the answers. The decision to adopt her had come as organically as the decision to create Patient Power, to build Choices, to expand to Russia, to breathe freely and live my life as a fully realized individual. These acts were all results of a process of decision making of which I was hardly conscious. The fact that I was fifty-eight? Well, it had taken me that long to be ready. I was ready.
The day after my arrival in Moscow, I drove to Children’s Home Number 13, where my little girl was a numbered and filed ward of the Russian state. She was three years and two months old. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her birth date was September 26, 2001. Her name was Irena, which, I was told, meant “peace” in Russian. That was all I knew about her when I pulled up in front of the orphanage.
For the adoption to proceed on schedule, I had to make a decision by the end of the week. After that, I’d return to New York for two or three months until Irena was available for official adoption. I, who had made so many decisions in so many crisis situations, found myself humbled. As with abortion, this was a lifelong, irrevocable decision. Whatever the intended or unintended consequences were, I had to live with them permanently. This child would live with them, too. I was making a decision that would not only change my life forever, but hers. The power and audacity of it all took my breath away.
I opened the door and heat rushed at me. The smells were wet and institutional, like a New York City public hospital. Inside, I was met with pure Russian bureaucracy: filling out papers, waiting, and filling out more papers. After what seemed an endless amount of time, the director finally approached me. “Would you like to have tea or immediately proceed to meet Irena?”
I turned and saw a part of her for the first time. She was peeking out from behind an adult arm, wearing two of those classic crunched bows people put on top of the heads of little girls. She was crying and rubbing her eyes with her fists.
“Irenitchka, go say hello to Mama,” the director told her. She came over to me and put her little thin arms around my neck. There was hardly any weight to her touch. I held her tight against me as she whimpered, “Ma Ma Ma Ma.”
Had they told her that her mother finally had come to get her? What would they tell her if I didn’t want to adopt her after all? Did she have any idea of how high the stakes were? In her own child’s way was she attempting to be the best little girl she could so she would be chosen? My heart froze at the thought of her potential level of performance anxiety.
She already had a life, a reference group to which she was attached. Was this her family? Would she miss them? There were approximately twenty children in her group with only one other girl. I learned that it was not unusual for parents to put their children in orphanages because they could not afford to feed them—another casualty of the breakup of the Soviet Union. These were the children who were not aborted between the twelfth and the fifteenth or the thirty-fifth abortion. They called every caretaker Mama. Most would likely never be adopted. Would it have been better for them to be aborted? I knew their future: bleak prostitution for many of the girls, drunken unemployment for the boys.
When I walked with Irena into the playroom the other children crowded near me, tried to sit on my lap, called me Mama, looked up at me with wanting eyes. Irena blocked them, already proprietary. I stroked her thin hair in those two big bows. I saw that she was practically bald in the back of her head. They told me it was because she moved her head back and forth on her pillow at night, a typical orphanage self-soothing behavior pattern to help her sleep.
She went to the couch, stood on it, and lifted up the curtain, pointing outside and saying, “Sobaka. Sobaka.” Dog. I saw a small mutt who seemed to live there. I laughed and took out a photo of my dog Pushkin, saying, “This is my Sobaka.” Irena looked at the picture and then turned again to the window to show me hers. “Sobaka doggie,” I said. She repeated it. I had created a common word—a common world.
I SPENT THE WEEK visiting Irena every day until the time came to decide. Her caretakers told me how much more engaged and responsive she had become since meeting me.
I could see it in her eyes. Now that she had found me, she was probably wondering if I would keep her. I tried to imagine her three-year-old consciousness. What must it be like to be so helpless, so powerless? Even though all children experience powerlessness in different degrees, hers was so absolute.
This child, abandoned at birth—unwanted. Her skin was too dry, speech too delayed, her mother too young and too poor. Was Irena the result of the mother’s first real love, a one-night stand, a rape or a trick? What act of desperation led her mother to abandon the premature baby girl in the hospital where she would spend the first two months of her life in the intensive care unit?
“Do you want to proceed with this referral?” the director asked.
Others were in the room, but I felt alone. “Yes, I want to proceed. Yes. I do.” I felt dizzy with the decision. I changed my life and embraced my fate.
The director asked me what name she was to be called. At this moment I felt a sense of possession: this is my child, and I must give her a name. I had come to Russia with the idea of naming my daughter Sasha. I spontaneously combined Sasha and Irena and said, “Sasharina.” It sounded magical and musical and flexible. The caretakers found the name beautiful. I had created something new that would become part of our legend.
On the last day of my trip, as I said goodbye for now, I gave Sasharina my picture. “Ya vernoos,” I told her. I will return. She surprised all of us when she held the picture out with both hands and placed it against her heart. Then she kissed it. I was profoundly moved by this expression. No tribute in the past or in the future could ever equal this one. I thought, “This is how love begins.”
BACK HOME, thoughts of becoming a mother crowded out the obsessive worry about liquidating pensions and investments to keep Choices going during what was becoming a very difficult financial bind. However anxious I was, I believed in my ability to turn it all around. I had a daughter now. I had someone who gave me more than myself to survive for.
I called family and friends and caught them up on the details of the trip. Some listened in wide-eyed amazement, while others expressed anxiety about their losing priority in my orbit and my being too old. To my dismay my twenty-year friendship with Phyllis ended. It became obvious that she did not have the desire or will to deal with my having a child. It was deeply disappointing, but I couldn’t dwell on it. Like marriage, divorce, and death, having children restructures one’s relationships.
Other friends
were supportive. The sculptor Linda Stein invited me to a political gathering for History in Action, a listserv for Second and Third Wave feminists. I walked into her loft in Soho and recognized a young journalist, Jennifer Baumgardner, who had done direct action work on the abortion issue. She was visibly pregnant, and I made my way over to her to share my “pregnancy.” Later that evening I surprised myself (and everyone there who knew me) even more. When Linda got up in front of the room to welcome everyone, she asked me to come up and say something. In the past, I would have thanked her and presented some political issue or action for everyone to think about. This time, I began with the words, “I have just returned from Siberia . . . I am a mother.”
Yet I had to laugh at my current version of motherhood. Before I left Omsk, I had made arrangements to speak with Sasha a couple of times a week over the phone. It was the only way I could think of to keep some kind of connection with her. Now, I found myself standing in my kitchen at 3 a.m. saying, “Sasha, sobaka-doggie” and “Ya vernoos.” Sasha didn’t respond to this. The only thing I heard back was the sound of screaming children and then silence as the calls dropped.
I called my attorney and changed my will to include my daughter. And of course I went shopping for everything that I thought she and I might need. The consumer landscape of motherhood was all encompassing—clothing, toys, DVDs, sheets, furniture—an endless sea of colorful inanimate objects.
The director of the orphanage had mentioned that the building needed new flooring in the main room and new curtains in another. I arranged to take care of this, thinking of Sasha’s friends who would be left behind. The time passed with preparations and my labors of love. In these small and big ways, my life changed.
WHEN I RETURNED to Russia to get Sasharina, I entered the orphanage purposefully. I stuck my head into the door of the playroom and stretched my neck to look for her. I saw a little blonde head turning to look for me, then her face, filled with recognition. Her eyes shouted, “You have returned!” Sasha rushed to meet me as I opened my arms wide. I felt every part of her smiling as I swept her up into my arms and held her tight against me.
The audience of caretakers watched as the other children gathered around us. My arms were not wide enough to hold all the need, and my heart broke a little with the attempt to stretch it. The orphanage receded as our car pulled away and we watched as the kids outside ran toward the car, waving to us, their figures fading in the snow. Sasha sat quietly. I thought how utterly small and vulnerable she was. I put my arm around her and she leaned against me.
I brought Sasha up to our hotel room, alone together for the first time. She immediately morphed into a whirling dervish, running through the rooms, jumping on and off the bed, turning light switches on and off. I tried to lay her down on the bed and the pillows started flying. She was scared. I was overwhelmed, frustrated, tired, and getting angry. I managed to place a call to Mahin. “What do I do?”
She said, “Just hold her.”
I realized that Sasha was having an acute anxiety attack. Whatever could her three-year-old mind make of all this? She had been taken away from all the security and familiarity she had ever known, barraged with new sights, sounds, and terrifying large spaces with this woman who spoke strange words and tried to hold her. It must have been some kind of nightmare.
I went into the bedroom with her, closed the door, and turned off the lights. We lay down on the bed and I held her next to me. She screamed and thrashed. She tried to push me away. “Shh . . . it’s alright,” I told her. “Sasha, shh—try and sleep. I won’t hurt you.”
She finally fell asleep, exhausted.
The last night we were in Moscow, I took Sasha to Red Square. It was snowing lightly. The cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral rose to the black sky in fantastic shapes and colors like snow cones. We basked in the moment, and I knew that one day I would be back here with her.
She was wild again in the airport. We were late for our flight. I found a cart, lifted Sasha, put her in the pullout where pocketbooks are usually kept, placed the luggage on the bottom, and began to run. Racing through the airport to get to the gate, she put her arms out like a bird and made flying motions, screaming with delight. I passed escalators, reading signage at warp speed as I yelled, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” My chest felt like it was going to explode. I had to make this flight to New York.
Finally, we arrived at the security section for our gate. I tried to catch my breath, but Sasha ran in and out through the metal detectors. I followed her, setting off the alarms with my metal hip. I stopped to reorganize our bags, and when I looked up, Sasha was gone. I looked around and saw an older woman leaning over her. She brought Sasha over to me and asked, “Is this your daughter?”
“Yes,” I said as I tried to hold onto Sasha.
“She says she doesn’t have a mother.”
I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach and struggled to gain control. It was too much to explain, so I simply thanked the woman for catching her.
FEBRUARY 15, 2006. It was our family’s anniversary—two years from the day Sasha came to New York with me. I took her out to dinner and sang “Happy Anniversary” to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” which was her favorite song (birthdays were not celebrated in the orphanage). Mahin sat next to her and told her the story of her homecoming. There would come a day when she would ask for a more complete story, for me to tell her where she came from and why she was here. I would tell her as much as I knew.
As I put Sasha to bed later that night, she smiled. “I know who you are,” she said.
“Who am I?”
“You are my mother.”
“Yes. And you are my daughter.”
She laughed. After two years, she was beginning to trust this, and so was I. We had found each other. I was Sasha’s home, and she was mine.
My mother and Murray, her companion for thirty-five years now, formed part of our home, too, when they came to visit me shortly after I adopted Sasha. My mother had been going blind for the last three years with macular degeneration, and I could gauge the level of her declining sight by the nuances of her critique of me. “Your ass is too wide,” she used to say. “Your breasts are showing. Why are you wearing flat shoes? You should dye your hair blonde again.” Now she just touched me and told me how much she loved me, her frail hands embracing me while her clouded eyes searched my face. Oddly, I missed the criticism. This new expression of love felt somehow inauthentic.
But watching my mother get to know and love Sasha, I felt my love for her change. For the first time I experienced the joy of family and a true sense of being home. I thought of the moment I’d brought Sasha home to meet my mother. I’d slowed the car, wanting to freeze the moment of anticipation, to hold it forever. Sasha ran across the lawn as my mother watched from the window . . . and then she was in my mother’s arms, my mother, my daughter, then me. My mother had always had problems giving and receiving, but here was a gift that was defined by the giving. With Sasha there were no boundaries, and now the boundaries to my love for my mother also dissolved. I watched the light in my mother’s eyes as she held Sasha tightly and kissed her with passionate force, laughing loudly at Sasha’s funny antics and mothering her in a way I did not remember experiencing myself.
She became ill with Alzheimer’s. She was afraid she would be put away, and no amount of reassurance would convince her otherwise. When she began to die, I went to stay with her in Florida. In the pain and struggle of her oncoming death, I found more warmth and intensity than ever before. I was her daughter, her sister, her mother, and her friend. As I held her in my arms, her childishness became a bittersweet burden. I diapered her, fed her, gave her medication, soothed her when she cried out, kissed her all over. I sensed memories of the time I existed within her body. I was holding her in her hospital bed at home when she began to turn into a corpse, her beloved Chopin waltzes and nocturnes playing on the CD player. It was the most intimate and loving interaction I ever had with her.
&
nbsp; A FEW DAYS LATER, I sat in my house on the bay, eagerly awaiting the sunrise. I wrote as I looked for the light of dawn. I was no longer afraid of death. I said yes to life because that is all we know. And living with Sasha made the whole experience bigger, almost epic, and at the same time intimate, sacred, and precious.
Sasha would carry me into the future. I was a mother, and all the philosophical questions of my life were now played out in the smallest of places. I knew there would be no lack of battles for her to fight in the generational struggle for women’s rights. As my ancestors had done for me, I would instill in her a sense of romance in revolution. I would teach her that it is never purely a cerebral or theoretical process, although analysis can give it form and direction. Revolution at its core is driven by love.
I took Sasha with me to Choices sometimes. Outside the entrance, we’d see dependable Sister Dorothy, still standing outside the front doors handing out rosaries and pink plastic fetuses in rain or shine after all these years. We would nod “good mornings” when we saw each other, but we never really entered into conversation until she found out that I had adopted a child. She began to give me children’s books, little Bible stories that I accepted but did not use. Aware of my love of philosophy, she even gave me a copy of “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,” the famous treatise in which Kierkegaard writes of the responsibility of single-minded spiritual seeking, offering clues to the nature of the good while insisting that each of us find it for ourselves. Though I never forgot that she was the enemy of everything I held sacred, I was touched by her gesture.
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