Intimate Wars (30 page)

Of course I'd thought about this unborn child before, but I would only allow myself fleeting encounters with the fantasy of being a mother. I imagined a small, intense girl walking beside me on the beach, the whitecaps moving in horizontal lines while our footprints made matching patterns in the sand. But I would quickly put these thoughts away, forgetting
her for months at a time. After all, I was busy with the reality I had chosen, and it had never included a child.

Now, at age fifty-eight, I allowed myself to think about what had always seemed impossible. I wanted a child. I wanted a daughter.

At first, this intense desire would come in waves and beat at the shores of my heart and then subside, leaving me with only a memory of the storm. I tried to be realistic, going over exactly how I would have to change my life in order to incorporate a child. For so long I couldn't imagine making these changes. Then the desire took hold of me with such a compelling force that I felt like I had succumbed to a tsunami. It was a moment of grace, an epiphany, a gift. It was the culmination of so much of my life, a setting free. I was going to adopt a little girl.

I reasoned I probably had at least twenty years left. If I lived to seventy-eight, then she would be twenty-five years old, the age that I was when my father died. Would the years that I had left be enough to give her a good foundation? Would I be able to integrate her into a life built totally around my own rhythms? How would it feel to be a mother? Would I like her? Would I love her
?
How would it feel for her? Would she like me, love me?

I had known many of love's faces. I had been consumed by passion, loved tenderly, possessively, and selfishly. But I had never loved unconditionally, the way parental love is described. And it came to me that the little girl I would adopt had not experienced limitless love either. Perhaps she had not experienced love at all—only its pale shadow through her caretakers. Strangers to this reality, we would have to find our way together. I found this thought strangely comforting, as if I would be adopting a comrade-in-arms.

My only experience with human adoption had been at Choices. Occasionally I'd receive adoption requests with photos of happy and seemingly well-adjusted white families desperate to have a child, and willing to pay for one. I could not imagine asking a woman to keep a pregnancy she did not want for $10,000 or a million dollars. It would be akin to asking her to set a price on her freedom or on her free will. I wanted to adopt someone already born, waiting, alone, unwanted and abandoned.

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?”