A few months
ago, in an office near Guatemala City, a woman known as a searcher spread out a
large map across her coffee table. The map was dotted with about 250 tiny,
hand-drawn circles, each one representing a place where the searcher had
tracked down a birth mother who had placed a child for adoption. Sometimes she
found a birth mother after knocking on a few doors in Guatemala City. In other
cases, she traveled for three or four days to remote indigenous areas in
Guatemala or farther afield to Nicaragua, Honduras or El Salvador.
I heard
about the searcher, who because of the sensitivity of her work asked me to
identify her by the first initial of her name, S., more than a year ago on an
adoption listserve. That is when I began scouting to find my own daughter’s
birth mother. One reason my husband and I chose to adopt from Guatemala more
than three years ago was that we knew families who had met their children’s
birth mothers at the adoption finalization and had a continuing exchange of
photos and letters and, in some cases, made occasional visits to them in
Guatemala.
In our
situation, though, the potential for an open adoption proved to be more
complicated. Before we went to Guatemala to adopt our daughter Lucia, we told
our agency we hoped to meet her Guatemalan mother. But it was never clear that
she was given the option of meeting us. An agency representative in Guatemala
did tell us that the birth mother wanted us to send photos of Lucia. But months
after we mailed them, the photos sat in the representative’s office. The birth
mother had moved, and no one, it seemed, knew how to find her.
Like a
growing number of parents, I was inclined toward some form of open adoption in
part because of the experiences of adoptees born into closed, secretive domestic
adoptions in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as those adopted internationally. Many
of these adoptees say they yearn for more information about their genes and
their birth families: What does my birth mother look like? Do I have biological
brothers or sisters? Why was I placed for adoption? I knew too that adoptees
like Lucia, whose ethnicity and skin color are different from their parents’,
may crave seeing themselves reflected in blood relatives.
Some of
these issues have diminished in domestic infant adoptions, where today a vast
majority of adoptive and birth families have had contact with one another,
according to Adam Pertman, author of “Adoption Nation: How the Adoption
Revolution Is Transforming America” and executive director of the Evan B.
Donaldson Adoption Institute, an education, research and public-policy
organization. And there is increasing evidence that openness is a good thing.
In a 20-year
longitudinal study of domestic adoptions, Harold Grotevant and Ruth McRoy,
professors at the University
of Minnesota and University of Texas at Austin, respectively, found
that birth mothers in open adoptions experienced less adoption-related grief
than those in closed adoptions. And all of the adopted teenagers in the study
who had continuing, in-person contact with their birth families wanted those
relationships to continue.
For many
reasons, though, creating openness at the outset of an international adoption
is often difficult — and sometimes impossible. In part it’s because birth
mothers typically face great stigma, and while there are increasingly
exceptions, many adoption agencies offer little or no help for parents who want
to initiate these relationships. Instead, searching for birth families 2 or 10
or even 30 years after the fact has become an imperfect alternative.
As I
contemplated whether to search, I scoured listserves dedicated to adoptive
parents who had searched or were considering doing so. They debated when to do
it: while your child is an infant or a toddler and when a relationship with a
birth mother has a chance to become a natural part of your child’s life? Or
later, when your child is old enough to express whether she has any interest in
finding her birth family?
Meanwhile, I
knew that some adoptees argue that parents shouldn’t search at all; the
decision should be left to adoptees, when they become adults. “There is so
little we have control over in the process of adoption; searching is one of
them,” says Susan Soon-keum Cox, vice president for public policy and external
affairs at Holt International Children’s Services, who was adopted from South
Korea in the 1950s. Cox was in her 30s before she searched for her birth
family. As it turned out, her birth mother died just before the search, but Cox
eventually met two half-brothers whom she sees when she goes to South Korea for
work and corresponds with by e-mail a couple of times a year with the help of a
translator. Until the search, her brothers never knew of Cox’s existence.
“Imagine how that made them feel,” Cox says. “But can we have a conversation
about that? Never. We are very fond of each other, but it’s polite.” Being in
touch with her birth family, she says, “is a great blessing in my life, but it
is also emotional. It’s not just the search, but the day after and the day
after and how you navigate the complexities of the relationships.”
While Cox found
her birth family after placing a single newspaper ad, searches are often much
more difficult. In indigenous regions of Guatemala, for instance, after decades
of government violence and discrimination, as well as increasing controversy
about placing children for foreign adoption, outsiders are sometimes unwelcome
and information is not easy to unearth. And if searching is difficult now, I,
like many parents, feared it would only grow more so as time went on, and our
fragile trail of leads ran cold. Worse, there might be no birth mother left to
find: indigenous women, like Lucia’s birth mother, have shortened life
expectancies because of poor health care and other problems. By doing nothing,
in other words, I might be making a decision for Lucia.
That idea,
along with the image of Lucia’s birth mother longing for photographs, tipped it
for me last year. When Lucia hadn’t yet turned 2, my husband and I sent our
paperwork to S., the searcher in Guatemala. I enclosed a packet of photographs
of Lucia and a letter telling her birth mother that Lucia was safe and healthy
and deeply loved. I also wrote that we would be happy to send pictures
regularly — if that was something she wanted.
My hope, in
part, was to gather bits of Lucia’s first chapter of life: photographs (in
addition to the two tiny photos we have of her birth mother — one an ID picture
and another from the DNA test she and Lucia underwent for the adoption), some
medical history, perhaps insight into her Guatemalan mother’s and father’s
personalities, as well as the circumstances around Lucia’s adoption. My other
motivation for searching was to try to create a pathway for continuing contact,
so that Lucia could have the option of a relationship later on. In all of this,
I was making an educated guess, based on earlier generations of adoptees, that
Lucia would, in fact, be curious. But it was also entirely possible she
wouldn’t want to know. It was possible she would wish I had left the
information unturned.
In some
cases, searching not only doesn’t answer questions; it also raises ones that
parents and children aren’t prepared for. That’s what happened to a New Jersey
mother named Cece. For the past few years, Cece’s 11-year-old daughter,
Elizabeth, has periodically released Mylar balloons into the sky to China with
messages to her birth mother. “I love you,” one of them read, “and I want you
to know I’m happy. My parents love me.” But one evening two years ago,
Elizabeth emerged from an adoption therapy group telling her mother that many
of the kids there — most of whom were adopted in the United States — had met
their birth mothers. She desperately wanted to meet hers, too; she begged her
mother to search. Through a network of contacts, Cece, who asked me to use her
and her daughter’s middle names, found someone in China to place an ad, with
Elizabeth’s birth date and a baby photo, in the newspaper of the province where
Elizabeth was abandoned. “I had this image we would have this wonderful
relationship, and if they needed help, of course we would,” Cece says. Instead,
a man came forward claiming to be her birth father and explaining that he had
had an affair with the birth mother, resulting in Elizabeth. The birth mother,
he said, died less than a year earlier. Then the story grew more tangled. After
the man agreed to a DNA test, the results showed that he was not the father.
Upset by the news, he stopped responding to Cece’s searcher. Was he a fraud
hoping to extract money from Cece? Or had the birth mother had another lover?
Or was there a different story altogether?
Cece
eventually came to feel that she was glad she searched, in part because her
willingness to do it seemed to comfort Elizabeth. But immediately after the DNA
results, when Cece was struggling with what to tell her daughter, she wondered
whether scouting for Elizabeth’s origins was a bad decision. “I wished I had
never done it,” she told me at the time, “and we could be happily sending
balloons up and feeling hopeful and good.”
In an essay
called “Walking Down the Village Path,” which has circulated on adoption Web
sites, Jane Liedtke, the founder and C.E.O. of Our Chinese Daughters
Foundation, warns that even nosing around for details of a child’s roots —
whether it’s visiting an orphanage or the spot where a child was abandoned —
can uncover information that parents never anticipated or wanted. “It’s not
another sightseeing stop on an itinerary,” Liedtke writes. “This is not a walk
for curiosity seekers. This is not an entitlement as an adoptive parent. . . .
This is a life we’re talking about — your child’s life.” As Jane Brown, an
adoption social worker in Scottsdale, Ariz., puts it, once you open the box,
“you can’t always seal it back up.”
While my
husband
and I wanted as open an adoption as possible, some parents are drawn to
international adoption for the opposite reason. Not only is an “unknown” birth
mother unlikely to reclaim her child across oceans (in fact, disruptions of
U.S. adoptions are also rare once the adoption is legally finalized), but she
can also seem like less of an emotional danger — as if physical distance
creates psychological distance.
But in the
last decade — in addition to search services for adult adoptees — an industry
has sprung up catering to adoptive parents who do want contact. Virtually every
country from which children have been adopted has at least a couple of
searchers and in some cases more than a dozen, with fees ranging from a few
hundred dollars to $2,000 or more per search. In Guatemala alone, more than 350
parent-driven searches have taken place since the late 1990s, and parents have
initiated at least 2,000 searches in former Soviet bloc countries.
Even in
China, the country where it is probably hardest to search because children are
typically anonymously abandoned, there is talk in the adoption community of
starting a voluntary DNA database of children adopted from China. The database
would, among other things, help connect adopted birth siblings to one another
and perhaps one day link children to their birth parents.
But do birth
mothers want to be found? Though many parents told me adoption agencies
discouraged them from looking for birth parents, saying, among other things,
that they could put birth mothers at risk, searchers I spoke to in India,
Guatemala and Russia offered a different perspective. Tony Carruthers and his
five colleagues have performed more than 600 searches in Russia. He says that
they never initiate contact with the birth mother by phone or letter. (He had
heard about two cases when search letters read by birth mothers’ family members
— who didn’t know of the adoption — resulted in the woman’s being beaten or
thrown out of the house.) “We have never compromised a birth mother,” he says.
And in S.’s eight years and 261 successful cases, she knew of only one time a
birth mother was harmed; her husband mistook the searcher for someone connected
to her ex-boyfriend and beat her.
When S. does
show up bearing news and photographs of a child a mother hasn’t seen in 2 or 8
or 20 years, she says, women have varying responses — shame, happiness, pain
and, often, relief. “Many say there hasn’t been a day they haven’t thought
about their child,” she says. Only 8 out of the 261 birth families S. has found
wanted no further contact with adoptive parents, usually because the birth
mother’s family or new husband didn’t know an adoption had taken place.
When Marcy,
a Chicago-area mother, hired S. to search three years ago, she had no idea how
her son’s birth mother would react. Like many adoptive parents, Marcy wanted to
meet the woman at the time of the adoption. But despite requests to her agency
and to the Guatemalan lawyer assigned to the case, the two women were never
connected.
Meanwhile,
the birth mother, Alma, had been wondering what had become of her son, or even
whether he was alive. For years, rumors have circulated in Guatemala that some
adopted children are harvested for organs, and a neighbor told Alma that her
son was probably dead.
Then S.
brought her Marcy’s letter about her son Reed: “I am writing for several
reasons,” the letter began. “First, so you know that he is well and very much
loved. Second, to make sure that you and your family are well, and third, to
know if you would like to stay in contact with our family. . . . We think that
as Reed grows up, he will want to know more about his family in Guatemala,
including where his personality and his talents come from. We consider you part
of our family, even though we have never met.” Included in the package were
several photos of Reed, who was 2 at the time, with a head of soft, dark hair
and gleeful eyes with lashes that practically curl onto themselves. “When I saw
the pictures,” Alma told me by telephone through an interpreter, “I started to
cry. I could see that he was very loved. And it really filled my heart with
happiness.” A year later, Marcy and her husband traveled to Guatemala, where
they were adopting another child, and spent six hours with Alma, her mother and
two of Alma’s children. The two women talked about their children and looked at
a photo album Marcy had brought of Reed, who, Alma said, looked just like his
birth father. As Marcy told me: “There was that initial big feeling of, This is
the person who brought your child into the world. But there was nothing about
that day that was awkward for me. We came to trust each other in a new way
after that.”
Following
the visit, the two families began e-mailing or talking every couple of months
with the help of a cellphone that Marcy bought Alma and a network of friends
and professionals to translate.
Not all
relationships go so smoothly, though, and several searchers told me they are
frustrated by adoptive parents who vanish after the initial contact. In some
cases the parents, or their children, are uneasy with the facts a search
uncovers — adoption corruption or alcoholism or a birth mother who abused her
child. But other parents simply get what they need and don’t want more. “We get
phone calls from birth mothers begging for some more photos or news of the
child, but the adoptive parents do not respond,” says one searcher in Russia.
Even with
the best of intentions, parents on both sides often struggle to bridge the
enormous gulfs that are inherent in most international adoptions. “Usually they
are very quiet,” S. says describing birth mothers during their meetings with
adoptive families. “I need to keep reminding the birth mother that she’s
entitled to ask questions.” S. recounted a recent reunion between a birth
mother and her 12-year-old daughter. The girl sang her a song and talked about
her ambition to be a singer. Then the girl asked her birth mother what she
dreamed of being when she was a young girl. Confused by the question, she told
her daughter she dreamed about her two weeks before the visit. “I had to
explain to the girl that the birth mother couldn’t answer a question like
that,” S. told me. “People here at that socioeconomic level don’t really think
in terms of dreams and ambitions.”
One
recurring theme
among adoptive families searching for birth families is money. I thought about
this before ever contacting S. What would I do if Lucia’s birth mother asked
for help? Would I say yes, but only under certain circumstances? Or would I
simply offer to help, regardless of whether she asked? Also, was it possible
that my money could encourage another woman in the community to relinquish her
child in hopes of receiving financial support from an adoptive family one day?
If I said no, how would I answer Lucia if she asked why I hadn’t helped support
her birth mother?
“Some birth
mothers would never accept any money from adoptive families,” S. says. “And
adoptive families can say no if birth families ask. But if we’re talking about
what they need, money is what they need.” When one family gave a birth
mother whom S. had found $200, she bought a TV set with it, infuriating the
adoptive family. “But to her it was a gift she could spend however she wanted,”
S says. “And if she spent it on two months of food, after two months she’d have
nothing left.”
S. says she
works with about 100 families who provide support to birth families, usually by
paying for the education of other children in the family. (Public school in
Guatemala, which costs about $5 for enrollment and another $150 annually for
school supplies and uniforms, is out of reach for many birth families.) Also,
at least a half-dozen adoptive families are now building houses for birth
families in Guatemala, including Marcy and her husband, who recently completed
a house for Alma. For years, Alma, her mother and children have lived in a one-room
house with a dirt floor and no running water or electricity. Next month, they
will move into a new, concrete one-bedroom, one-bathroom home.
Not
surprisingly, though, money can also sour relationships, as it did for years
for Belle and her daughter’s birth mother, who met when Belle first adopted her
daughter in Guatemala. It wasn’t long after that that Belle, who asked me to
use her nickname, learned that her daughter’s birth mother had ambitions of
finishing her high-school equivalency — an aspiration in stark contrast to
those of many Guatemalan birth mothers, who are illiterate or read only at a
first- or second-grade level. When she asked if Belle would help out, Belle
said yes: Here was a chance to put more than Band-Aid on a family’s poverty; here
was a chance to change a life.
Belle hired
S. to handle the logistics of paying the school tuition. But less than 24 hours
after S. put down the deposit, the director of the school telephoned S. and
told her the birth mother had returned to withdraw the money. “I remember my
heart just falling,” Belle told me in the living room of the house near Boston
where she lives with her husband and two children. “This image we had of a
wonderful determined woman who was our daughter’s mother who we hoped to help,
and this idealistic and hopeful story took a very bad turn.” Belle was angry
and bereft not only at the loss of trust but also at the loss of her image of
the birth mother of her 9-month-old daughter. “It was wonderful to think of our
daughter’s birth mother in this certain way,” Belle said. Letting go of that,
she said, was one of the challenges and risks of having the relationship.
It took
Belle four months to write a letter to the birth mother. The first version
included the phrase “we forgive you.” “But that felt like a terrible thing to
say because of the power dynamics between us,” Belle says. Finally she wrote
that she simply wanted to remain connected. When S. went to deliver the letter,
the birth mother had moved. Until then, Belle hoped that her daughter would
eventually have a relationship with her birth mother. Instead, it seemed Belle
would be left with only a painful story to share with her.
Then three
years later, after Belle’s sustained efforts to find the birth mother and with
the help of a Guatemalan adoption lawyer, the two women did reconnect. Neither
mentioned what had happened, and initially they kept any talk of money out of
their letters and e-mail messages.
But when the
birth mother later requested money for an emergency, Belle and her husband
decided to help, this time without strings attached. Now they send about $1,000
a year for housing costs, food or whatever else she and her family need.
“People who live in desperate poverty often have to hustle, and I didn’t want
her to have to hustle us,” says Belle, who has worked with poor communities for
years. “I wasn’t comfortable with trying to control this woman’s choices while
trying to build a real relationship.”
This
summer, in New York,
as a woman named Mary and I sat watching her 7-year-old daughter, Bekele, in a
double-dutch jump-roping class, she told me the story of Bekele’s adoption. In
2003, Mary adopted Bekele, then 4, from an Ethiopian orphanage, seven years
after Mary’s oldest daughter, Chengyun, arrived from China. (Mary asked me to
use her and her daughters’ middle names.) Though Bekele barely spoke English at
first, soon words were spilling out of her mouth. As it turned out, she had a
lot to say. She told Mary about her memories of life in Ethiopia — the day a
lizard crawled down her shirt, how she cried at the orphanage. And then one day
she told Mary she had an older sister, Temame, in Ethiopia, whom she was
worried about. She also said her mother took her to the orphanage when she was
3, which Mary would later learn followed the death of Bekele’s father. Now
Bekele wanted to find her Ethiopian family, 7,000 miles away.
Mary, a warm
and easygoing woman who resembles an earthy Carly Simon, hired a searcher in
August 2005. Several months later he called Mary with his report. Temame, who
was 13, was alive. So was her mother, though she was ill with AIDS. The
searcher also explained that since Bekele’s father’s death, the family had
plunged into deep poverty.
A few weeks
later, Mary arranged with a translator to talk to Bekele’s birth mother by
phone. She already had some hint of what might unfold. The searcher had told
Mary that the mother wanted Mary to adopt Temame. Mary was a single mother
living on a teacher’s salary; her oldest daughter’s college tuition was
looming; she wasn’t planning on adopting again. And there was the overwhelming
unknown of adding a teenager to the family — a teenager who would be leaving
both her mother and her country. Mary explored alternative possibilities with
the searcher: Were there relatives in Ethiopia who could raise Temame so that
she could stay in her country? Could Mary pay for her education at an Ethiopian
boarding school?
During that
first phone conversation with Bekele’s birth mother, Mary told her about how
well Bekele was doing in school and how much she loved her. But Bekele’s
Ethiopian mother kept turning the conversation to her other daughter. Finally
she said, “Will you adopt Temame?” The question hung in the air. Looking back
on that moment, Mary says she had an image of a woman in a sinking boat handing
her a child. “You don’t say, Sorry, it’s not a convenient time right now,” she
says, though in the coming weeks Mary would wonder how well her own boat would
hold up. But when the question was asked, Mary went on instinct: “It would be
my honor,” she said.
In the next
months, Mary would have an adoption agency representative and others talk to
Temame and her mother to try to make sure the family understood what the
adoption would mean for them. Mary would talk to her own daughters about the
prospect of another sister: Bekele was overjoyed at the idea of reuniting;
Chenyung, who knew that another child would diminish her mother’s time, was
unhappy.
It has now
been nearly four months since Temame became part of Mary’s family, and it is
still too early to say how it will all play out. But when I spoke to Mary this
month, she was optimistic. Temame is in eighth grade learning English, making
friends and staying in touch with her mother in Ethiopia. Chenyung is
adjusting, too, and finds ways to get the one-on-one time she needs with her
mother. It is Bekele, Mary says, who struggles the most with sharing her mother
with an added daughter in the house. All the dynamics, of course, could be
turned on their head in the coming months and years. “I thought that whatever
road it took us down, we’d figure out how to handle it,” Mary says, looking
back on her decision to search. She adds with a small laugh: “I obviously had
no idea how emotional and complicated it would become.”
Such
instances of “found” siblings — whether they are loved and with their families
or languishing in orphanages — aren’t altogether uncommon. And I knew it wasn’t
entirely far-fetched to imagine that if we found Lucia’s birth mother we might
be confronted with a similar predicament. What if Lucia’s birth mother was
pregnant and wanted us to adopt another child? We had no plans to adopt again
(Lucia is our second child), particularly from Guatemala. Though we had
concrete reasons to believe our daughter’s adoption was legal, there have been
increasing reports of payments to birth mothers and other corrupt practices.
But if we could be certain everything was ethically aboveboard, would we adopt
Lucia’s biological sibling? Or would this instead be a chance to support Lucia’s
birth mother, financially or in other ways, so that she would keep her child?
Then again, poverty isn’t at the root of all adoptions. If there were other
circumstances at play, what would be best for that child? And what would be
right for my own family?
The most
disturbing
search situation may be the one that reveals that a child was stolen. When
Desiree Smolin and her husband, David, adopted their daughters, Manjula and
Bhagya, from India, they quickly learned something was amiss. Within six weeks
of arriving in the U.S., the adolescent girls, who were clearly angry and
traumatized, said that they were stolen from their parents. During that first
year, the Smolins, who also have five sons, weren’t sure what to believe; other
adoptive parents told the Smolins that the girls were probably fabricating the
story as a way of dealing with their relinquishment; that older children were
unlikely to be stolen; and that looking for a birth mother could put the
woman’s life at risk. The Smolins say they repeatedly pushed their agency to
investigate the adoption. Then they found an advocate in India who offered to
search. Within a few months, she had located the birth family and confirmed the
girls’ alarming story. As it turned out, the girls’ mother had been duped into
placing them in an orphanage for education, and the girls were then slated for
adoption. And though both daughters, now in their late teens and early 20s,
have returned to see their Indian family, neither one feels that India is home
any longer. For their part, Desiree and David Smolin have become outspoken
adoption-reform advocates.
Desiree
argues that searching can be one way to expose corruption. And in some cases,
she says, parents have a moral imperative to do it. She notes a case earlier
this year in which Samoan parents were tricked into placing their children for
adoption. Writing on an adoption listserve and later in an e-mail message to
me, she said: “If you are an adoptive parent of a Samoan child adopted through
this agency and you see the press reports of Samoan parents crying and begging
for the return of their children — do you not have an obligation to both the
child and first parents to birth-search and re-establish contact?”
Several
weeks after
I sent the photos of Lucia and a letter to the birth mother last year, S. sent
me a long e-mail message, describing her efforts to find Lucia’s Guatemalan
mother, including the various addresses she had visited. In 314 searches, S.
has located 261 birth families. We were unfortunately in the minority; she
could not find Lucia’s. “I will keep the search open,” she wrote, “for as long
as I keep doing this job.” In two cases, she told me recently, she found birth
mothers long after her initial search for them.
While I
didn’t count on it, it was certainly possible we would find Lucia’s birth
family sometime in the future. For now, I would wonder how much Lucia would or
wouldn’t care. Searching by adoptive parents remains too new to know anything
significant yet about adoptees’ reactions to these searches and the
relationships that sometimes unfold. In any case, their responses, like
adoptees’ life experiences, are unlikely to be monolithic.
At the
least, my husband and I could tell Lucia we did everything we could to find her
birth mother. While it wasn’t my motivation for searching, the act of doing so
was a way — not the best or the only way — of telling our daughter that we
recognized her past. She has a first chapter and a heritage that doesn’t
include us. As adoptive parents, my husband and I do believe that love matters
most. But we know that blood matters, too. And if one day Lucia searches for
her blood connection, we will encourage her. But before she heads out the door,
I’ll probably have words of advice: Think hard about whom and what you may — or
may not — find.