A Birthday Card to Alison's First Parents

How blessed we all feel today on Alison's fourth birthday. Just four years ago, as you labored in the hospital, we did not know about you and your baby. But we longed so to find our second child. When she was born in Russia, thousands of miles from our home in New York, God spoke to us through several friends. They told us countries in the former Soviet Union had recently opened for foreigners to adopt children. We learned these babies and children are among thousands who live in orphanages and boarding schools, placed by parents who cannot care for them, due to various economic and political pressures.

We had not considered international adoption before, mostly because we wanted to repeat the successful independent domestic process we had used in 1989 to adopt our son. However, in the cold and darkness of January 1994, when your daughter had grown for six months in your womb, and you were wondering how you could ever continue your daily struggle to find food and clothing and basics for your three children and a new baby too, we were reeling from the last of many challenges experienced during a two-year odyssey of searching for our second child.

We had to return a baby we had named Jamie, who had lived with us for two weeks, whom we had grown to love and had planned to adopt, to his sixteen-year-old birthmother. Losing Jamie was like ripping out a piece of our hearts. The three of us (my husband, our four-year-old son, Michael, and I) mourned our loss in a strange limbo. In the absence of funeral or formal prayers, we cried our tears and moved through our emotions.

The process was especially hard on Michael who had difficulty understanding how, through a series of lawyer's blunders and a birthmother's confusion and inability to recognize and articulate her needs, we never adopted Jamie. That was why Jamie could be claimed by his birthmother and returned to her, while Michael had been adopted and could never leave our family.

At the end of April, in Russia, when the nights were still frosty but the days sunny and promised the warmth of spring, you labored mightily and gave birth to your daughter. After several days, while you stared at the new buds forming on the trees outside the window, you left your newborn baby at the maternity hospital, where you knew she would be fed, cared for, kept warm and dry. As we mourned in New York, you grieved in Nizhiny Tagil. And as the buds turned to leaves, you searched your heart and knew, after several months, you could not care for this child, and you had to do what was best for her. In the warmth and promise of summer, you both wrote and signed papers that said you wished your daughter could be adopted. You wanted her to have a good life with a family who loved her and who could care for her. In August, your baby was moved to the orphanage where she would wait for her family to adopt her.

During this time, the arrival of spring began to lift the despair of losing Jamie from us. When adoption from Russia was mentioned to us by several trusted friends, we were interested. Our research soon told us this was a viable route to legal adoption, and we soon found an agency we liked. On June 15, 1994, as the leaves darkened and the fruit began to form in the orchard, we decided to travel to Russia to adopt a baby. In October, apples and pears were ripe on the trees as we became healed and whole and ready to welcome our daughter into our family.

During our four months of preparation, we did a lot of paperwork, made phone calls and faxes, sent many documents and encountered various minor delays. But whenever we needed assistance, we found it. We even managed to pull together the money necessary to cover paperwork fees, agency charges, orphanage donations, airfare to Russia, food and lodging for our ten-day stay in Russia, etc. There were challenges, but each was overcome with a sense of faith and "b'shert" (Yiddish for "meant to be") under the layers of anxiety and nerves.

On October 15, 1994 we boarded the plane headed for Moscow. After the ten hour flight, we got on another plane, this time bound for Y'Katerinberg, in the Ural mountains, a thousand miles east of Moscow, on the edge of Siberia. After a three hour drive north of Y'Katerinberg, to Nizhiny Tagil, we finally arrived at the orphanage. As we entered the nursery, we recognized our almost six-month-old daughter immediately, even though we had never seen her picture.

Each day in the past three-and-a-half years, Alison has grown more precious to us. Her bright mind, active and healthy body, natural empathy, and loving soul have brought us and will continue to bring us much joy. We thank you both, Alison's birthparents, for her creation, for her prenatal care, for your loving plan for her adoption. We know you miss her, and we wish we could show you how happy and healthy she is. May God shine his light on you today, the fourth anniversary of Alison's birth, and on you each day. We remain her parents together, by birth and through adoption.

Love, Jody and Bill.

Credits: Jody T. Sterling