I know that all of these posts are backwards so that to
start with the beginning of the story, you have to go all the way back to the
beginning of the posts. What I have wanted to write about is my daughter. Of
all the things that happened to me while I was in the group, the story of my
daughter is the one I most want to tell right now.
My new husband and I dreamed of adopting a baby from China
or maybe Korea. I have two nieces from Korea – my brother and sister-in-law
adopted them as infants (only 6 weeks old) and they are both beautiful, bright,
lovely women today.
When Sharon heard that we were interested in adopting, she
immediately took charge of the situation. She told us not to adopt from an
Asian country but to adopt from Eastern Europe so the baby would have brown
hair and brown eyes and we could say that she was our natural child. Pass her
off as our natural child? Why and how? Sharon said that my husband’s sons would
never accept our daughter if they thought she was adopted. Only if they thought
she was their blood sister, would they accept her as part of the family. Our
families would not accept her either. I didn’t really believe it but I felt
like I had just stepped from a world where nothing was going right for me at
all into a fairy tale that I desperately wanted to hold on to so I went along
with the story.
Sharon told us that we should not see anyone in our
families for at least a year. I said that I would be going to visit my brother
and she told me to pretend that I was pregnant while I was there.
I spent the weekend with one hand on my back (oh, my aching
back!) and the other hand on my stomach (my dear sweet little baby was inside
me of course.) My sister-in-law made me a maternity outfit. It was a
performance and I have never been a particularly good actress but they believed
it. After the weekend, I spoke to Sharon on the phone and she said that she had
never told me to pretend to my brother that I was pregnant. There was no
arguing with her. Why would I have put on that particularly difficult charade
except under her instruction? I was totally confused and angry at having been led into a sham of a charade. She then told me to tell them that I had another
miscarriage. Another performance…
I remember being at CR one weekend shortly thereafter and I
told Sharon that I did not think it was possible to pretend that a child was my
natural born child for her whole life. She laughed and told me it had been done
many times before and that she would have one of the women who had done it,
talk to me. I have no idea how many children whose parents were in “school”
were adopted and never told about it. I had a long talk with L that weekend that
had two daughters who had been adopted (one of them was the child of another
woman I knew in the group and I don’t know where the other one came from). Both
of her daughters, now in their 30’s, still have no idea that they were adopted
although many of their friends seem to know the truth. We talked for a long
time. I was convinced that she could do it but not convinced that I would be
able to do it.
I looked around at adoption agencies and about the rules
that different countries had for adoption. I had heard horror stories about
Romanian orphanages. For Russia, there was no requirement that the parents had
to be married for any particular length of time so we picked Russia. That
started a year of paperwork, interviews, getting copies of birth certificates
and marriage certificates apostilled, fingerprinting, etc. We picked a social
worker and walked her through my home in NY even though we knew that we would
not live there (I was already on my way to selling my NY home and buying a
house in Boston as I had been told to do.) We needed health certificates as
well and I went to my doctor and told him what I was planning to do. He begged
me not to adopt from Russia. He told me that he had known several families that
did adopt from Russia and ended up with severely handicapped children that had
torn the families apart and ended in divorce in each case he knew about. I
turned my back on his advice and as a matter of fact, I never spoke to him again.
This was my happy ending, my dream come true, I was finally going to have my
little baby girl and it was going to end happily ever after. I refused to see
it any other way. I was also afraid that if I opposed anything that Sharon had
suggested (instructed) that she could pull the plug on everything and my
happily ever after would disappear down the drain.
I sold my house in New York and bought one in Boston. I
don’t think that if I had not been in school I ever would have done that. My
rational mind told me that you keep your place for a few years to make sure it
all works out and if it doesn’t then you have someplace to go back to. That
simply wasn’t going to be a possibility. Not only was I really actually in love
with my husband (which is not always true for many of Sharon’s “arranged
marriages”) but I felt that I had the added insurance that my husband was also
in “school”. I felt that the situation guaranteed a few things. Since “school”
required that everyone make at least $60,000. a year, then we would be fine
financially and also that we had would be helped and guided by our teachers so
it was bound to work out. Selling my house in NY is one of my biggest regrets of my life considering what has happened to the NY real estate market since then. I bought
a house in Boston but my husband also kept the apartment he had been living in.
He was totally cash poor due to paying child support so I ended up paying for
the apartment as well. He needed to keep the apartment because he took the boys
every weekend and he needed someplace to take them. Sharon had told us not to
tell the boys or his ex-wife anything about our daughter or me until our
daughter was with us. Secrets.
I was alone in Boston. I knew no one and Sharon prohibited
me from having any contact with my family or friends. I was not working. Sharon
did concede to “giving” me one friend in Boston – a woman who was also an
architect and had a daughter who would be roughly my daughter’s age. All
through that year, I commuted between Boston and New York. I was not allowed to
attend classes in Boston until our daughter came so I was permitted to attend
only one class a week in NY. I was leading a double life. I found it hard to
make other friends when I couldn’t talk to them honestly and tell them the
truth of my life. Smoke and mirrors and secrets. Always secrets…
Finally, we took the long trip to Russia. We had to stay for
about one month to comply with the government requirements for adoption. We
spent a week in St. Petersburg, some time in Moscow and in Perm, on the edge of
Siberia, where our daughter was born.
We returned to the United States with our daughter on May
1, 2000. It was the beginning of another major journey, one that still
continues.
