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.)

Barack and Gay Marriage

Barack's got my support, my money, and my vote. Now that he's clinched the Democratic nomination, here's an item for his agenda...

How about some civil--and I mean civil--conversation about gay marriage? With the California Supreme Court's ruling, the tone of the conversation is already shattering the champagne glasses.

So far, the conversation has been a major yawn: one side with its irrational (as opposed to rational) appeals to the Scriptures, the other side with its knee-jerk charges of bigotry and homophobia.

Spare me! Something's gotta give here.

Barack has already catapulted our discussions about race light years ahead of where they were. Maybe he can help us find a little common ground on this important and polarized issue as well.

He doesn't have to change his opinion on the matter, much as I might wish he were more supportive of gay marriage. I'm simply suggesting that he be a catalyst for a more enlightened discussion than we've come up with so far.

Especially since people just like his own mom and dad were once, like gay people today, denied the right to marry.

Barack can make a crucial difference in getting the present conversation unstuck. If he wants to.