Finding David's Birth Family, Part 1

Last Tuesday, three months after returning home from Guatemala, I finally hung the photos of David's birth family among the rest of our family gallery on the staircase wall. There's one of the four of them--mom, dad, and David's two younger brothers. And another of just his mom with her gracious, relaxed smile. My favorite is of his two brothers--Marco, age 8, and Wilson Giovanni, age 6--with their arms slung over each others shoulders, wearing big smiles, and flashing that same sparkle I so often see in David's eyes.
The very process of hanging these photos--browsing for the right frames, remembering where I'd last laid the hammer, scrounging for picture wire and the right-sized nails, scoping out the wall for just the right spot, carefully adjusting the frames--all of this gave me time to mull over this past year's meeting with David's biological family.
You might say we'd been building up to this trip from the day we first met David at the Guatemalan orphanage. Where did he get those beautiful brown eyes, those dimples, that infectious laugh? From the beginning it was a simple curiosity, enough to prompt an email to the orphanage every couple of years to ask how we could contact his birth family. They never replied, and I simply decided that not having this information was a mild discomfort that I, and presumably David, could live with at least for the time being.
Well, to be honest, the discomfort was not always so mild. Every few weeks, usually at his request, David and I would thumb through our family photo album. I'd retell the story of how we came to be a family, how we finally found him after a long, long search, how we loved him the moment we laid eyes on him. And he and I would gaze at the small photo on the first page of the album: a tired-looking, brown, thin woman with a shy smile. His birth mom. I would usually say something about how pretty she looked, at times telling him the little I knew about her: that she loved him very much, but was too poor to take care of him and wanted him to have a good life, so she took him to a place where she knew he would be happy and well-cared for. David would usually say nothing, but now and then he'd wonder aloud, "Well, I wonder if my mommy misses me," and I'd feel a lump in my throat and a throbbing in the back of my eyes just to think that it would ever occur to any kid, especially mine, to ask such a question.
Then one day the headline appeared on my Yahoo page. Something about a Guatemalan orphanage getting raided by the government. Something about charges of kidnapping and other irregularities. I was stunned, and I hesitated to click the link.
My worst fear proved to be true: The orphanage in question was the same one from which we had brought home David. My heart sank. The questions started ricocheting around in my head.
What if David had been stolen from his biological family? Imagine their pain, even after all these years! But wasn't this one of the most reputable orphanages in the country? Didn't we have all of his paperwork in order, including the results of a DNA test complete with a photo of him in his mom's lap? Didn't that document say very clearly that he was her biological son and that she was freely relinquishing him? I bounced between thinking the unthinkable and trying to reassure myself that all was OK. But the reassurance part was short-lived.
After trading emails with one of the adoptive dads mentioned in one of the articles on the Web, I learned that even the DNA tests were being falsified. In fact, there was no sure way of knowing if David's adoption was legitimate other than locating his biological mother and asking her point blank.
Now came the dilemma: whether to search for David's birth family. On the one hand, enormous fears arose. What if we learned, God forbid, that our son had, in fact, been kidnapped? What were we supposed to do then, send him back to his birth family? David had been with us for eight of his nine years on the planet, and God knows he was OUR son and no one else's. He wasn't going anywhere.
And suppose he had been kidnapped; would that piece of information make life better for him or us or his birth family? The fact is some wounds can never heal, some damage is so immense it can never be fixed. So maybe it's better not to know some things. Maybe we should just live with the painful moral ambiguity life occasionally sends us.
And if we did find his birth family, would David then feel like he had to somehow choose between them and us? Would we somehow lose him at least a little? The thought was too much to bear.
On the other hand, a sense of hope. Maybe connecting with his birth family would mean a fuller and richer life for David. Maybe knowing all the pieces of his story, and the people who gave him those brown eyes and marvelous sparkle, would open up new places in his heart, give him an even deeper sense of belonging to this earth.
Maybe Rob's and my efforts to find his birth family and re-connect him with them would, in some ironic way, deepen his connection to us as well.
And then, of course, there was that man-in-the-mirror thingy: I couldn't live with myself knowing that we might have, even unwittingly, caused another family so much pain. We had to do whatever we could.
So we decided it was worth the risk. Maybe the news would be kind. Maybe we would meet some wonderful people. Maybe we would become even closer as a family. Or maybe not. In any case we would do the search and just deal with whatever happened along the way.
Through a forum on the Web I learned about two women in Antigua who conducted searches for birth families for North American adoptive families. One of them, named Velvet, was herself the adoptive mom of a Guatemalan daughter. The other, Fidelina, was a highly educated Mayan woman fluent in both her native Mayan dialect and Spanish. The two of them, I soon learned, formed quite a team.

(Read Part 2 here.)