Finding David's Birth Family, Part 2

(Read Part 1 here.)

Shortly after wiring the money to Velvet and Fide, I emailed them the few documents and photos we had, along with this letter to David's birth mother--"in the hope that Fide is successful" in finding her.

August 16, 2009

Dearest Andrea,

Your son, David, is an amazing boy--almost nine years old, healthy, happy, and loved. We think of him as not just our son, but yours also. He is handsome, smart, active, curious, funny, and content.

He is doing very well in school; his teachers say he is very intelligent and a delight to have in their classes. He loves to do karate, play piano, read books, play all kinds of games, and listen to all kinds of music. He loves to play with his dog, a brown Labrador retriever named Aly. He also loves to wrestle and to be tickled. We want you to know how happy he is.

The first page of our family photo album has a picture of you. Although we do not know your circumstances when you placed him for adoption, we do know it must have been a difficult decision. We tell David that you love him very much, and that you made the best decision you could for him.

We have many questions, many of them about the rest of his biological family--especially about you, his siblings, and his biological father. We hope that sometime you can write David a letter and tell him more of his story and yours.

We promise to love and cherish David, your son and ours. We will teach him everything we can about Guatemala. We have already made great efforts to teach him Spanish, and we hope to travel with him to Guatemala every few years so he can see the beautiful country he was born in.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for David. He is a truly amazing boy.

We hope that our contacting you will give you peace, and help with any pain or questions in your heart about either your choice or his life.

We ask the Virgin Mary to keep her protective mantle over you and your family and bring peace to your home.

With gratitude,

Richard and Robby

Since I didn't know whether our search would succeed, I hesitated to tell David about it. Rightly or wrongly, I wanted to spare him any disappointment if we failed. Instead, while I was negotiating with Velvet and Fide, I casually asked him in passing if he thought that "someday" we should try once more to find his birth mother. He nodded yes, and for the moment we left it at that. I figured, whatever the outcome, I'd be explaining it all within a few days anyway.

I was right. Just two days after sending our documents and letter, Velvet replied: They had found Andrea. And not only Andrea, but also David's birth father and David's two younger brothers, ages 5 and 7.

The following afternoon, their report and several photos of the family arrived in my inbox. Reading those words and staring at those photos was truly magical for me--like peering through an icon to another plane. Here are a few excerpts that especially jumped out at me:

Alejandro and Andrea expressed their sadness and cried for David. They commented that they gave him in adoption because they came to the conclusion that his destiny was to grow up with another family. They wanted him to be happy and peaceful.

[H]e was 8 months old when they gave him in adoption and they knew that he was going to be adopted by a family that wanted him.

Thank you for what you do for David and may God give you life to share with your son. Thank you for sharing your material possessions and above all your patience, love and care for David. They are happy to know of his family.

They would like to meet David’s adoptive parents and be able to see David again some day. They want to make sure you know they respect you as David’s parents and know you are his legitimate parents.

All this life-changing news arrived just a couple of days before David's ninth birthday. That afternoon, after bringing him home from his day at summer camp and settling him in, I began to tell him.

"This year, Papa and I got you something extra special for your birthday."

"Some NASCAR cars? Oh! The Jeff Gordon one!?"

"Dude, this present is eight bazillion times cooler than any NASCAR cars."

"Uh, a new video game for the Playstation?"

"Way, way cooler than all the video games in the universe." I could already feel my face getting warm and tears starting to well up.

"You found my mom?"

"Yep, we did."

Then I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks and a big smile coming over my face, and I hugged my kid like there was no tomorrow.

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.)

Going Too Fast

It's Spring in San Francisco, so last Saturday David and I took our bikes to Golden Gate Park. We went along the path we've navigated many times before, the one that suddenly becomes a steep, treacherous downhill slide.

Last year, he rode his scooter, and when we came to this valley of death he cautiously dismounted and walked to the other side. The year before, he was still in preschool and we were on foot. That time he gleefully zigged and zagged down one side and up the other, dazzled first by a towering tree, then by the echoes in the tunnel that runs under the adjoining street, then by a dandelion going to seed. That was also the time he climbed some big rocks along the path, tumbled down, scraped his knee, and burst into tears.

This year, when we got to the slide, he matter-of-factly got off his bike and walked to the other side as we headed to Stowe Lake for a row-boat ride. But later, on our way back, he stayed on the bike, whooping and hollering all the way down that hill and back up the other side only to do it again and again and again. We could have spent the rest of the day there.

And I realized how fast he's growing. He's an all-out boy now. And, for me, it's all going so fast. Much too fast.

Update on Casa Quivira--November 17

The children have been returned to Casa Quivira, and their adoptions will now move forward. It looks like normalcy is returning to this beleaguered orphanage after the government put the 42 kids through a horrific and unnecessary ordeal. See the Guatemalan Adoption blog which reports "that while everything is not cleared up for all the cases, it does look like at last innocent children are not going to be caught in the middle of the politics and tensions that exist in Guatemalan adoptions and that they will achieve permanency in a loving, family environment."

Was Our Son Stolen from His Birth Mother?

Was David's adoption process a fraud? The Guatemalan Procuraduria and the US Embassy are implying that it was. In the charged climate of a Guatemalan election year, they are painting American families like mine as unwitting contributors to child trafficking in Guatemala and, perhaps worse, as inflicting unspeakable pain on women like David's birth mother.

Are they correct? I doubt it. Most adopting families, including mine, have followed the existing legal procedures of those very same government agencies slavishly. And when my family went through the process, there were many precautions in place, including a DNA test establishing his birth mom's biological connection to David, her statement of relinquishment carrying her photo and signature, and a voluminous report of the social worker.

Still, even after all this, who can say for sure? The uncertainty now leaves me wondering what to think and how to feel.

Maybe I should just blow the whole thing off. Aren't we First Worlders already used to sipping rich creamy lattes knowing that the Guatemalans who picked the beans received barely enough to support their kids? We've gotten used to these moral ambiguities. Why not just add this adoption issue to the list?

But, hold on. Despite what Guatemalan politicians may say, this is not another story of exploitation by greedy Americans. It is, instead, a result of the sad legacy of Efrain Rios Mont, Guatemala's former brutal dictator, and his many sidekicks.

Thanks to that legacy, a high percentage of Guatemalan children--perhaps as many as one in four--die of intestinal infections because their families cannot afford filtered water. Education for these kids is almost non-existent, rarely going past the second grade. And there are many, many Guatemalan children in the streets and (as pictured above) around the dump in Guatemala City who survive by selling candy, shoe shines, and their bodies. It's for good reason that agencies like Camino Seguro (Safe Passage) ask for our help. And that many of us choose to adopt from Guatemala.

Rob and I once considered the surrogate route to creating our family. But with so many homeless kids in the world, we decided it would be better for us to adopt a child from a poor country. As it turned out, our discernment took us to Guatemala and Casa Quivira, an agency known for its integrity and the quality of its care.

Along with the rest of the world, I keep hoping that the authorities will clean up the abuses in the Guatemalan adoption system. But I don't regret my family's adoption path for a moment--despite the eyebrows now being raised by government bureaucrats and well-intentioned friends. Because David, the light of our lives and an aspiring race car driver, is safe, healthy, and, as I write this, tugging my pant leg and badgering me for a trip to the park. It could have been otherwise.

Schumann Arabesque, Op 18, Rob Tan, piano

Here's my husband wowing the world in his latest student recital. Prepare for a treat!

The Landmines of Kamrieng Commune

It's a guy thing, this love David has for things that crash and blow up: tipping over towers of building blocks and cheering mightily as they tumble to the floor, or watching stock cars collide in flames in NASCAR race films, or hurling toy trains from toy bridges. He shares this crashing fascination with other boys his age. He loves this stuff.

But when the crashing and blowing up are over, David gets up and asks for cheese puffs and chocolate soy milk. Snacks, not catastrophes, have the final say. All this crashing stuff is a small part of a larger story in which life goes on.

On the other side of the world, in Kamrieng Commune in Cambodia, six-year-olds like him share his fascination with exploding things--with one important difference: Kamrieng is strewn with landmines once planted by the Khmer Rouge and by the government.

There, boys throw stones at what seem like toys, the winner being the one who detonates the mine. What would otherwise be a typical boyhood fascination, far from ending in a snack, can sever limbs and sear flesh. The larger life-over-death story does not emerge--at least not there, not yet. In Kamrieng, life does not necessarily go on.

Add to this the physical hunger and poor nutrition resulting from the mine-pocked fields. Kamrieng borders a jungle and the soil is perfect for growing yellow corn. But farmers can be suddenly maimed or killed by the exploding mines. So the black, rich soil remains untilled while families do without proper food.

Someday the landmines will be cleared from Kamrieng, and the larger story will re-emerge. Severed limbs, seared flesh, and diminished lives will no longer have the final say. People will regain their trust in the typical thrills of boyhood and the soil that gives life to an incredibly beautiful land. Life will go on as it did before.

But not yet. Right now, there's too much work to do.

Our Parish

Over 20 years ago, when AIDS was mowing down friends left and right, I came to St. John's for the first time. I was meeting a friend who had asked me to join him for the funeral of an Episcopal priest whose name I can't remember. At the time, I was a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, and, after several years of parish work in the Northwest, was plugging away at a doctorate in Berkeley. Shortly before my coming to Berkeley, the Vatican had issued another of its searing letters about gays, one that had left me fragmented and weary and wondering where my own life was heading. Finding my way through the red doors of St. John's with my friend, I slumped into the last pew.

To my surprise, that liturgy, with its many stories about this gay priest, gave me a glimmer of hope that my own disparate life could become whole again.

Fast forward several years: I have left the Jesuits and become an Episcopalian, and my partner, Rob, and I have been together five years. A friend, learning we are moving to San Francisco, suggests we check out St. John's.

We did, and we stayed. In time, we were married here. Later, I was received as an Episcopal priest and began assisting here. Later still, perhaps best of all, our son, David, was baptized here.

I remain at St. John's for three reasons.

• The location. During the week, I'm a technical writer in the Financial District working with some of the brightest minds in the country. But Sunday mornings, on my walk to St. John's, I see life from a different angle: giggly children bantering in Spanish with their playmates; homeless people in doorways; carefree twenty-somethings wandering home from a night at the clubs; shopkeepers sweeping up the windblown newspapers, hypodermic needles, and broken wine bottles; bright, colorful murals telling the joys and struggles of this diverse and lively neighborhood. I gather up all this terrible beauty and press it to my heart on my way to the Eucharist.
  

• The people. Despite our ups and downs, the people of this parish keep inspiring me to learn more about Jesus and what it means to follow him. We try, each in our own small ways, to do this--looking out for each other when we get sick, lending a hand to struggling parishes in El Salvador, helping neighborhood kids get a jump on their math and reading, handing out food and vouchers to people off the street, or just being a little kinder, more joyful, throughout the week. We do what we can.
  

• Our seven-year-old son. He's crazy about the place. He loves his friends and the special treatment they get in Godly Play, the ladybugs and spiders in the garden, and the oatmeal raisin cookies that occasionally appear at coffee hour after mass.

David's Challenges

Karate is one of David's many challenges these days, and getting it right is hard work, whether it's the horse stance or ken-po, keeping his balance in the obstacle course or kicking a cushion through the target. Then there's swimming: executing that breast stroke and breathing correctly. And fencing: keeping perfectly erect when en garde. And chess: carefully thinking through your strategy. And church: learning the stories and rituals, the seasons and feasts of our tradition. And a normal school day: learning to read and write, to draw, add, subtract.

Until a year ago, his challenges were minimal, with no worries about getting everything right. Then, suddenly, all these demands arrived at his doorstep like a huge special delivery from the big wide world. Now, words like "focus", "discipline", and "hard work" take their place alongside "fun", "awesome", and "cool".

And yet, when he's with Papa and me, I want it to be different. Forget about getting everything right. We'll ride our bikes, play board games, build train sets or race stock cars, laugh, explore the world, talk of cabbages and kings. And, OK, so we'll watch a little TV now and then, too. The point is that home is for fun, letting down our hair, chilling.

I know, I know: family life has its own demands--saying "please" and "thank you", attending to each other's feelings and needs, forgiving each other again and again, doing the chores around the house, welcoming guests. Papa and I will guard these demands because we ignore them at our peril.

But in the big wide world, let David's other mentors be the heavies. Here at home, papa and I will be his champions.

Rob's Recital

It wasn't a major event in his musical career. Rob played beautifully as his teacher sang Schumann and Caldera. Then Rob smiled broadly, bowed, and yielded the ivory to the next student. His part of the recital was over in five minutes.
Still, it's a moment to give thanks for my husband and his music. It tumbles out to the sidewalk on Saturday mornings to greet passersby, ambles down the hall to the kitchen to mingle with the electronic whirrs and beeps of David's gameboy and the clatter of dishes. It winds up the stairs to our bedrooms and office, then on into the rafters of our house. It weaves itself into the fabric of our life as a family. It's known to bring a satisfied gleam to Rob's eyes, goosebumps, a flush to the cheeks, and joy to my heart.
Not a major event, but still...

At the Train Museum

Think of cocker spaniel pups with an edge. Maybe they've had too many caffeinated soft drinks or too much TV, or maybe it's Those Evil Video Games. Can't say exactly why, but these kids are frenetic. They bound from one model train to the next, shoving each other out of the way in a manic race to the control button. A colorful, sweet blur with a shrill hum.

David is by himself at the far end of the room, peering through the glass dome that mercifully protects Thomas the Tank Engine from his adoring fans. My heart sinks when I see David there: He seems so out of place among these Future Psychopaths of America. I walk over, wrap him in my arms and tell him I love him. But before my parental unction runs its course, he tells me that the small wire extending from the base of the engine car to the track is "where it gets electricity." And that Thomas takes six turns around the track before coming to a stop. And here is the button that makes him go again.

I'm relieved and impressed. This kid's not lonesome as I thought. In fact, those deep brown eyes, so intent and focused, belong to a genius making his way in the world. Yup, that's what's going on here. Then comes the coup.

The stressed spaniels make their way to Thomas, crowd around the table, frantically scanning for the control button. They can't see it carefully hidden under David's casually draped arm.

Suddenly, Thomas, his requisite six turns around the track complete, stops dead. Panic ensues. What happened? How do we make him go again? Where's the button? The room is electrified, the suspense so thick only a buzz saw could cut it.

But then, mysteriously, Thomas begins to move again. The pups are baffled. For a brief moment, they look around aimlessly like dazed aliens, then dart off to the next new thing.

Once they've moved on, David looks up at me with his dimpled grin and glee in his eyes. "They don't know it was me who made the train go."

David Rides a Bike

Today, my son learned to ride a bike. I'm hoarse from all the cheering. We're both completely exhausted from the thrill.

So no more blogging for this week. We've got too much struttin' to do.

Our 17th Anniversary

I didn't remember it until that very evening, during dinner with friends. And I forgot to tell Rob until the next morning, on our way to the park for David's bike-riding lesson: "You know, yesterday was our 17th."
The date had just blurred by, like an oncoming car you don't notice until it's in your rear-view mirror. Still, our 17 years are a triumph: We've defied not only the usual stresses that shipwreck many a relationship whether gay or straight, but also the homophobia of George Bush and his zealous friends.
So now, although I'm a few days late, I stop and remember: our first night together at my place in Berkeley; trips to Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, France, Italy, Amsterdam, Costa Rica, and, of course, Guatemala; a few years in Palo Alto before moving to this magical city; Lucy, our ever-affectionate golden retriever; an elegant and festive wedding; weekends in Bolinas; the "queen-ification" of two lovely homes; jobs that only occasionally make us crazy; good health; gourmet dinners at home and about town; Rob's annual recital; Richard's occasional sermon; nights dancing into the wee hours; lots of hugs, wonderful smiles, a few tears, lots of forgiveness back and forth. And wonderful friends and family. Yes.
And, as if life couldn't possibly get any better, we have David, this beautiful son of ours, full of breakfast and plenty of mischief.
So much to savor. This year, we're celebrating it all a couple of weeks late. But next year, we'll be on time. I'll make sure.

Friday Afternoons with David

I like his new swagger. Kindergarten is agreeing with him and he's just finished a full and satisfying day of it. We're heading to Muddy's Cafe on Valencia, talking of cabbages and kings, me firing my usual barrage:
"What was your favorite thing today?"
"Did you eat all your lunch?"
"Did you write in your journal?"
Then, halfway to Muddy's, I tell him I can't pick him up early on Fridays as we'd planned. Too many meetings at work. But maybe I can still do it once in awhile.
He stops in his tracks. No more swagger, now he slumps and starts to cry. To my surprise, so do I.
I see now how much those Friday afternoons mean to him--and to me. Our "daddy and Magoo times" when we eat chocolate chip cookies at Muddy's, ride bikes in Golden Gate Park, read a few stories at the library, or, if he's tired, maybe just play a few board games at home.
But, in my case, it's not just the loss of Friday afternoons with my kid that brings the tears. I also find myself asking what kind of dad--no, what kind of person--am I becoming.