Mom, Daughter Ponder a Mystery: Why Me?

The question came while I was massaging the strawberry-scented children’s shampoo on my daughter’s wet scalp.

“Why did you pick me?”

I should have been prepared. About a week before, also in the tub, Anjelica had asked me the lead-up question: “Why didn’t you pick Yulia?”

Sooner or later, many children ask their parents where they come from. In Anjelica’s case, when the questions came last fall, it had been barely two months since I adopted her from Ukraine, and I could see she wasn’t quite yet always comfortable calling me “Mama.”

But she’s a smart kid, turned 7 in September, and she knew I was her new family, for better or worse, the one she had waited for almost all her life. Now she was asking: Why not any of the other kids they trotted out for me, her orphanage mates?

When delicate questions come, keep answers short and simple, the experts say. Don’t give children more information than they need.

So I told her I hadn’t taken Yulia, the skinny, tongue-tied, redheaded 6-year-old, because she wasn’t ready to leave yet. And I took you, I said, because you were ready--for new languages, a new country, a new home.

How true all this was, I’m not sure. But it was enough for Anjelica, and when I helped her climb out of the tub, she asked for her big white bath towel and nothing else.

While the question for now seems out of her mind, it has never left mine. I have wrestled with the “whys” from the day I sat down--knees weak, so nervous I wanted to throw up--in the orphanage director’s cramped office as one child after the other was presented to me and made to recite a little poem--the girls with cheap white bows in their hair, the boys in reasonably clean T-shirts.

Why did I choose this child? Why not a younger child, or a calmer child, like sweet Micola, who shyly played with his toy cars? Why did I choose to choose at all?

Indeed, the choosing began long before that day in late July, when, after months of sometimes seemingly unending red tape, I finally managed to marshal enough documents and official stamps to pass muster before Ukraine’s official central adoption agency and be allowed to “choose” my child.

(Like several other former communist countries, Ukraine refashioned its adoption laws to curb abuses that multiplied after many Westerners rushed to adopt East European children in the 1990s.)

The first choice, of course, was whether adoption was a way to have a family. That was the fruit of many years of thought and feeling, of revisiting one of life’s roads you took long ago and may have forgotten why.

In many ways, that choice seemed easy compared with other, wrenching ones that lay ahead.

The months-long task of trying to win approval to adopt, without the help of an adoption agency and while living in Italy, was mind-numbing enough. I stacked up documents from U.S. and Italian authorities attesting to my lack of criminal record or transmissible disease, and to my having a job, home and mental state to guarantee a child’s well-being.

Then I had to choose the country of my future daughter or son.

Europe, where I live, seemed a more natural choice than Asia or Latin America or even my native United States. The granddaughter of Polish immigrants to New York, I chose Poland.

A vision was growing sharper of myself, walking hand-in-hand with some sweet Polish toddler. I felt so sure this was the right choice.

But that choice was not completely to be mine.

Unlike Ukraine, Poland prefers to choose your child for you. A country of conservative Catholic traditions, Poland gives lowest priority to the unmarried. Most of the children offered to singles are older or have serious physical or emotional problems--children most people don’t want to adopt.

Having the child chosen for you has psychological advantages, said the social worker who interviewed me several times. Choosing the child yourself can come back to haunt you. Years later will you ask if you made a mistake in taking that child? Or will your child hate you for having been chosen to live in this family and not in some other one?

A little more than a year into my wait I was told there was a 7-year-old, healthy, bright girl in eastern Poland, not far from my maternal grandfather’s birthplace. It turned out the child had a sister, almost 11. Would I take both?

To make up my mind, I spent a few days in a tiny “guest” cabin with the two girls on the grounds of their orphanage in the woods near the border with Belarus. The older girl was so desperate for a mother she tried speaking Italian to impress me; the younger was so emotionally damaged she looked no one in the eye. It was just the girls, myself and my looming decision.

I never felt more alone in my life.

The orphanage director told me one-third of parents say yes on their first “match,” another one-third say “no,” and the rest ask for time to decide.

I went back to Rome with 15 days and what turned out to be 15 largely sleepless nights to make up my mind. In my heart I knew this was not the family for me--I wanted a child no older than 7, and here was a family including a near-adolescent! But I felt bad, almost selfish, about leaving them there.

A friend knew a psychiatrist who had researched adoptive families. I went to talk with him. He was blunt, almost cruel: The probability of taking such older siblings and forming a family that responds to your dreams is extremely slim, he warned me.

I decided to try Ukraine, a much poorer country than Poland, and therefore one with many more children--and choices--available for adoption.

Alcoholism of a parent is a common reason many children wind up in orphanages in the former Soviet Union. So is plain poverty, in many cases worsened after the removal of the Soviet safety net of social services. One boy I met lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was 4. She died because she couldn’t afford the medicine and nutritious food she needed. His father, like so many others whose children wind up in orphanages, was unknown.

And so, 14 months after I said no to the Polish girls, and after being given about five minutes in Ukraine’s central adoption office to look at a batch of not very sharp photographs of smiling children in native costumes, I found myself on an overnight train from Kiev speeding to an orphanage near the Romanian border where I was told there were several “cute, healthy, smart” children in the age range I preferred, 3 to 6.

The first child I met, Anzhela, was indeed quite cute and bright and eager to please. But an alarm bell went off in my head. I remembered reading on some Web site the advice of one couple adopting from Ukraine: Don’t fall for the “too” cute children. Better to take an almost sullen one, they said. A less eager-to-please manner might indicate a less insecure or emotionally more honest child.

I decided to try to get a little rapport going. With my skeletal Polish, a Slavic language whose vocabulary is often close to Ukrainian, I asked Anzhela what she liked to do. “Draw.”

I asked her to show me her coloring pads. Before I could study her drawings, they brought in Marianna, funny and sarcastic beyond her 5 years. But she had a 9-year-old brother, an aggressive boy. Then came Yulia, who lost her tongue in front of these foreign-speaking guests. Then Micola, who just wanted to go out and play on this sunny, hot day. Seeing I was still unsure, they brought in yet another child, Svitlana, Anzhela’s very sad best friend.

So which child will you take?

I begged for more time, another day. “Spend tomorrow with Yulia,” I was told. The director looked at my bare arms. “She’s skinny, like you.”

When I left the orphanage for the evening, I ran into a young Italian couple who had to choose whether to take a heartbreakingly beautiful 4-year-old girl who, just a week before, had stopped speaking and stopped letting herself be held or even touched. They were too anguished to chat.

My own lacerating choice loomed. I sat until darkness came in a public garden near my modest hotel and tried to imagine Yulia as my daughter. Was it the right choice for me? Was it the right choice for her?

Was she too far behind in development, too emotionally scarred to go live in a house with one parent, a mom whose job as a journalist would too often mean not being there to read a bedtime story or take a Sunday “bonding” stroll?

The next morning, after a long time playing with Yulia, I didn’t feel what I had hoped when it came down to choosing. My translator, whose own girl had died a few months earlier of leukemia, took me aside and said: “Yulia’s talking like a 2-year-old, not a 6-year-old.”

I went outside to clear my head and called the Ukrainian-speaking acquaintance who had helped with the document-gathering and travel logistics. “Come and get me,” I begged. “I don’t have what it takes to decide.”

I couldn’t believe I had come this far only to leave childless. But it had been nearly four years since I had started gathering documents and having my soul picked at by psychologists and my bank account chipped away by thousands of dollars for travel, translators and other costs. I was wearing down fast, and soon those hard-won documents would start expiring.

It was now or never, and at that moment I thought it would be never.

But my helper was tied up with business and couldn’t come for several hours. “Why don’t you spend time with Anzhela, the first one?” he said. “Something about her reminded me of my own daughter.”

So I went back inside the orphanage, and after about 10 minutes watching Anzhela play in delight with Svitlana, I knew. There was so much joy for life in Anzhela; I knew I wanted to give her a chance of having a real childhood.

I later learned that shortly after I said no to the Polish girls, they went to live in France, where a mother, father, siblings and a big house in the countryside awaited them.

The Italians turned down the speechless girl. An American couple who came the following week took her.

Yulia started swinging furiously on a rusted swing and turned her head away from me when I came back to take Anzhela.

I don’t know if Marianna, Micola and Svitlana are still waiting for families.

Anzhela, renamed Anjelica to make it easier on Anglo and Latin ears, and her new mother still have lots of questions. And a lifetime to try to answer them.

*

U.S. State Department: travel.state.gov/adopt.html

To go directly to the country that interests you, inserting its name in the address. For example:

travel.state.gov/adoption_ukraine.html

Immigration and Naturalization Service: www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/howdoi/forophan.htm

Eastern European Adoption Coalition Inc.: eeadopt.org