‘90s FAMILY : Journey to Joy : Across the world, amid political turmoil, awaited a baby who needed only love. The Millers were happy to oblige.

“Oh my god, they’re here!”

My wife and I had endured nearly six years of anguish and had traveled halfway around the world to arrive at this moment.

We were about to become parents.

The path to Russia had been a rocky one: five emotionally, physically and financially draining years of infertility treatments followed by an attempt at a private domestic adoption that failed when the expectant young woman with whom we had worked closely for five months decided she would keep her baby.

Devastated, but still determined to bring a son or daughter into our lives, we turned to foreign adoption. We chose Russia because we were aware that there were many children available who needed homes and had heard positive stories about adoptions from that part of the world. In addition, my grandparents had come from there, giving us a familial link.

We contacted an agency in Pittsburgh, Pa., that deals exclusively with orphanages in the former Soviet Union, particularly in St. Petersburg. But we had one more twist in the road.

Shortly before we were to visit Pittsburgh, it was widely reported in the United States that Moscow had declared a moratorium on foreign adoptions in the face of growing nationalist sentiment. We were panic-stricken; Larisa Mason, the head of our agency, told us she would not match any Russian children with parents who were unwilling to deal with delays of up to two years. Katherine and I were in our early 40s, and we had already waited long enough.

But Larisa said there was another option: She had just learned about a little girl in a baby home in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet Republic on the fabled Silk Road just above Afghanistan. The child was only 7 months old, which appealed to us since we wanted an infant.

Fittingly, the baby’s Russian name was Nadezhda, which means hope. She had been born in May in Tashkent, the colorful Uzbek capital. Her biological mother was Russian; her father, Korean. And she was Jewish, as am I.

Nadezhda was, in her way, a stranger in a strange land. In a predominantly Muslim country, she was a religious, ethnic and racial minority as well as an orphan. She was also, Larisa assured us, “perfectly healthy, a beautiful child.”

Indeed, Larisa, a Russian-born dynamo who has arranged the adoptions of more than 200 children from the former Soviet Union in the past 3 1/2 years, said the head of the baby home was “falling in love” with little Nadia, as they called her.

Moreover, Uzbekistan became an independent republic with the breakup of the Soviet Union, which meant that it would not be affected by any changes in Russian law regarding international adoption.

Just after Thanksgiving, Katherine and I drove from our home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh to meet with Larisa and make a leap of faith.

Heady with excitement and anxiety, we fought back a sense of unreality. In a room filled with framed photos of happy-looking children, we stared at an out-of-focus Polaroid of an olive-skinned baby lying on her back with a pacifier in her mouth, a plastic toy at her side. We needed to confer only briefly before we told Larisa: We’ll take her.

We immediately went out and bought a little pillow for our future daughter. Holding something soft and tangible in our hands made the prospect of parenthood seem a bit more real. That afternoon, during our giddy trip home, we decided to rename her Julia Sarah.

On New Year’s Eve, we received a seven-minute video of Julia taken by a member of Larisa’s staff during a visit to Tashkent earlier that month. It was all we could do to keep from trying to climb inside the television set to hug her.

Again and again and again, we watched this incredibly alert, expressive little girl in a faraway land who, we prayed, would soon turn our lives upside-down. Our champagne and music-filled celebration with friends that evening took on an added measure of good cheer.

We soon learned from Larisa that we were among a group of parents adopting six youngsters, 7 months to 5 years, from Tashkent. Three of the other children would go to Pittsburgh and two to Dallas. We would depart in mid-March. Caretakers from the baby home in Tashkent would escort the children to meet us in Moscow.

The kids were supposed to arrive at our hotel in the Russian capital at 7 p.m. on a wintry Sunday. As we waited, I confessed to Katherine that I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the enormity of the step that we were about to take.

“I’ve been feeling that way for months,” she replied.

The President Hotel was hardly the setting in which one would imagine becoming a family. A cold, cavernous place, it is a throwback to the Soviet heyday. Protected by a security fence and a cadre of unsmiling uniformed guards, it had been a gathering place and residence for Politburo leaders. The hum of the radio receiver in our room, which we could neither turn off nor unplug, indicated that our first nights as a family would not be ours alone.

*

It was nearly 9 when Katherine gasped as she glanced out in the hallway and saw the women step out of the elevator with six little bundles. By the time I joined her, amid the pandemonium, Katherine was already holding Julia, tears streaming down her face.

Katherine had recognized her immediately, a button nose and two intent dark eyes peering out from under a pale blue hood and oversized snowsuit.

She was tiny, all of 13 1/2 pounds. Her hair had been closely cut. Her face was round and she wore a serious but calm expression despite the din of crying children around us. One of the first things we noticed was her long, curly eyelashes.

Dr. Ludmila Tyan, the head of the baby home, a pediatrician and of Korean descent herself, clearly had a soft spot for Julia. She joked to the other women that the baby looked like me.

When I asked, through a translator, how they calmed Julia when she got upset, Ludmila replied, “She doesn’t get upset.”

After greetings and arrival photographs were completed, two of the Tashkent women and Katherine went into our room to change Julia; they would take the clothes she was wearing back to Tashkent. So poor was the orphanage that Julia had on a jury-rigged diaper that appeared to be made from Baggies and paper toweling.

“This is such a good thing,” Mariana, one of the Russians supervising our group, told me. “They’d have so little future in Tashkent.”

We had been prepared for a difficult transition after reading about the wrenching grief that such a sudden separation often provokes. Experts said this was likely to be even more acute at Julia’s age (10 months, at this point) because her attachment to her primary caregiver would be particularly intense at this time.

And we’d tried to imagine the experience from her perspective. We were told that she’d barely left the baby home, even to venture outside, before her departure for Moscow. Then, in one transforming day, she was flown 1,000 miles, plunked down in a foreign city and handed over to strangers who looked, smelled and sounded entirely different than anyone she’d ever known.

Amazingly, she was composed. She stared up at us quietly, eyes wide, lips pursed. She sucked on her bottled formula with her hands clenched. She seemed to relish being held. She never cried. We were awed by her serenity.

*

We spent that first hour in our room getting acquainted. Katherine cradled her in her arms and sang lullabies and “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Julia put her fingers in Katherine’s mouth and then on her cheek as she peered up at her.

I was moved that motherhood for too long delayed was, finally, no longer motherhood denied.

Somehow, Julia seemed to sense the momentousness of it all. At one point, she reached out with her tiny fingers and took Katherine’s hand and then held out her other hand for mine--as though she was presiding over a silent ritual of our becoming a family.

Before we went to bed, Katherine and I shared our mutual discovery that Julia’s spinal column appeared to protrude crookedly from her back. I suggested we remove her pajamas to take a look. Katherine refused.

“We’re not giving her back,” she said fiercely.

“Of course not,” I replied.

“Whatever is wrong with you, we’ll get it fixed,” she quickly reassured Julia, who had finally dropped off to sleep after gamely battling to spend more time getting acquainted.

Katherine stayed up nearly the entire night listening for her breathing. When Julia awoke in the wee hours, we bounded out of bed and broke all the rules: We fed her, held her and played with her until we all fell back asleep nearly two hours later.

We faced one last bureaucratic hurdle before taking Julia home: We had to get her visa to enter the United States from the American embassy. We had previously filled out various forms for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the United States.

At this point, the adoption was legally complete. Through Larisa’s agency, the International Assistance Group, we had filed numerous documents with the authorities in Tashkent.

It was an expensive process. The cost of preparing and processing the adoption itself was about $10,000. In addition, IAG’s fee for arranging everything was $5,000. And the expense of getting Julia and ourselves to and home from Moscow was nearly $4,000.

The major potential hitch in the former Soviet Union had been that children had to be certified as having a medical problem in addition to being abandoned to be eligible for a foreign placement (when the moratorium is eventually lifted, this will no longer be the case under a recently passed law).

Often the ailment was something readily curable in the United States through routine surgery, such as a cleft palate or crossed eyes. In other cases, orphanages cite nonsensical medical problems or a common, but insignificant, condition to get past the bureaucracy.

This was so with Julia. Her medical record included references to such things as susceptibility to colds and perinatal encephalopathy, which, in Western medical terms, is a degenerative disease or disorder affecting the brain, but is used in the former Soviet Union to refer to a trauma to the head suffered by every child during a natural birth.

*

We had been told to expect Julia to be behind developmentally because of a lack of stimulation and nourishment. But we were struck that first morning by how far behind she appeared to be. She had trouble sitting up by herself. She barely crawled. She ate none of the jars of baby food that we had lugged over; she seemed accustomed only to the bottle and bread.

We also discovered that Julia hated being naked, taking a bath and visiting the doctor. She would get over the first two fears in a matter of days. But the exam was as reassuring for us as it was traumatic for her. We learned there was nothing wrong with her spinal column (or anything else) and got medicine for the one problem the American physician diagnosed: a cold.

As our little adoption group crisscrossed drab Moscow to have photographs taken, pick up forms at the American embassy and be examined, Julia was fascinated. Nestled in Katherine’s arms, she intently stared out the window of our van at the bustling traffic and buildings and people. What could possibly be going through her mind? we wondered.

The second morning brought a dramatic change. Julia smiled at us. She took more interest in the toys and books we had brought. She began to gurgle and coo. I tossed her in the air and she opened her mouth wide in wonderment. She even found the bath less ominous.

Despite a long wait in a crowded holding room, things went smoothly at the American embassy, where Julia discovered the joys of Cheerios and giving high-fives.

That afternoon, we took her to the Pushkin Museum. Tucked in snugly against my chest, she seemed as thrilled to be there with us as we were to be there with her.

Amid the Monets and Matisses, she suddenly began to make “la-del-la-del-la-del” noises at me by sticking her tongue out and wagging it against her lips. I found this absolutely captivating (as only a father could) and, laughing, responded in kind.

Before long, our unorthodox duet had drawn a crowd of baby-loving Russians. They had turned their attention from some of the world’s greatest Impressionist works to this crazy American bonding with his new Russian daughter.

Katherine and I were enthralled. We began calling Julia our “little perestroika princess.”

By our third morning, Julia was blossoming at warp speed. She loved the bath so much that I had all I could do to keep her from diving in headfirst. Her appetite increased exponentially.

And she certainly knew she was ours.

This was our getaway day. Before departing, our entire group went to Red Square. It was snowing when we climbed out of the van. In Katherine’s arms, peering out from under the furry purple hat that her grandmother had found for her in Tennessee, our darling daughter threw her arms in the air, tossed her head skyward and chortled. Her cheeks rosy and her eyes wide, she tried to pick swirling snowflakes out of the air and off Katherine’s coat. The moment was magical.

We knew well before we even got on the plane that ours was a perfect post-Soviet union. It would be a wonderful trip home.