I was adopted, I know the trauma it can inflict

On Wednesday, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from state attorneys seeking to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, Justice Amy Coney Barrett kept getting at one question: Why was abortion necessary, when women who do not want to be mothers can simply give their babies up for adoption?

As an adoptee myself, I was floored by Justice Barrett’s assumption that adoption is an accessible and desirable alternative for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant. She may not realize it, but what she is suggesting is that women don’t need access to abortion because they can simply go do a thing that is infinitely more difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic than terminating a pregnancy during its early stages.

As an adoptive mother herself, Justice Barrett should have some inkling of the complexities of adoption and the toll it can inflict on children, as well as birth mothers. But she speaks as if adoption is some kind of idyllic fairy tale. My own adoption actually was what many would consider idyllic. I was raised by two adoptive parents, Alice and Terry, from the time I was an infant, and grew up in a home where I knew every day that I was loved. A few years ago, I found my biological mother, Maria, and three siblings I didn’t know I had via a DNA test and Facebook.

The first time I spoke to Maria on the phone — she lives in Alabama, not too far from my parents, and I live in Brooklyn — she apologized repeatedly for giving me up and told me she loved me and that I would always be family. “You are blood,” she would say later. I told her, and continue to tell her, every time she brings it up, that the apology is unnecessary. I had a wonderful childhood and I believe she had made the right decision. But she remains heartbroken about the years we missed together.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Both Maria and my mom, Alice, oppose abortion on religious grounds. My mom is white and Southern Baptist; Maria is Hispanic and Pentecostal. Both like to point to me to justify their beliefs, saying that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would not exist. It’s a familiar argument: The anti-abortion movement likes to invoke Nobel Prize winners who might never have materialized, or potential adoptees who might have cured cancer, if they hadn’t been aborted at eight weeks.

I’m no Nobel Prize winner, but I still resent being used as a political football by the right. I believe that abortion is a form of health care, and that every woman should have access to it if she needs it. But perhaps more than that, I resent the suggestion by people like Justice Barrett that adoption is a simple solution, and I resent it on behalf of Maria, who found the choice she made traumatizing and still feels that pain, 44 years later. Even when an adoption works out well, as it did in my case, it is still fraught.

When I echo Maria in saying that she “gave me up,” the language always rankles adoptive parents, because it introduces an unpleasant complexity — implying that my birth mother was not completely happy with her choice. Or worse, that it made her miserable. But that is sometimes the case, even when adoption is the best option for all involved. Adoption is not always an unalloyed good. It’s a complicated choice in a situation that has no right or wrong answer.

If the court overturns Roe v. Wade, many women will be forced to give birth to children they did not want or did not feel that they could afford to support. While pregnant, they will undergo the bonding with a child that happens by biological design as an embryo develops into a living, breathing, conscious human. And then that child will be taken away.

The right likes to suggest that abortion is a traumatic experience for women — a last resort, a painful memory. But adoption is often just as traumatic as the right thinks abortion is, if not more so, as a woman has to relinquish not a lump of cells but a fully formed baby she has lived with for nine months.

I’m a mother myself, to an adorable 6-year-old self-proclaimed Fortnite expert, and as is often the case, I did not know I was pregnant with him until the usual symptoms appeared a few weeks into the pregnancy. As anyone who has gestated a human will tell you, there is a vast difference between the fourth week of pregnancy and the 40th. By the 40th, you’re familiar with your baby’s regular rhythms of kicking and moving. When I awoke, my son would wake up shortly after and I’d feel him turning and stretching, or less pleasantly, jamming his precious little foot into what felt like my cervix. This is one of the paradoxes of pregnancy: Something alien is usurping your body and sapping you of nutrition and energy, but you’re programmed to gleefully enable it and you become desperately protective of it. It’s a kind of biological brainwashing. And this often happens whether you want to be a parent or not.

Justice Barrett is well aware of the kind of biological brainwashing that occurs during pregnancy; she gave birth to five children. And yet she blithely seems to assume that a mother can simply choose not to bond with the child she’s gestating solely on the basis that she is not ready to be a mother or believes that she is unable to provide for the child. She assumes that the mother will be supported financially and otherwise, throughout the pregnancy, even in a country where maternal mortality statistics are abysmal. And she assumes that children surrendered for adoption will find a home, and not a bed in the foster care system. She probably assumes these things because she cannot fathom being in this position herself. These are assumptions that stem from the privilege of being financially secure, having never needed an abortion, and perhaps the assumption that women who do have done something wrong and must face the consequences.

In my experience, some on the right believe that the trauma adoption inflicts is a consequence of irresponsibility. But unexpected pregnancy is not a de facto function of bad decision making. It can be a failure of contraception, the product of a rape, a mistaken belief that a woman is infertile. There is no justifiable reason to inflict harm on women and the babies they might produce in any of these situations, regardless of judgment.

The trauma doesn’t just affect mothers, either. Researchers have a term for what children who are adopted, even as infants, may suffer from later in life: relinquishment trauma. The premise is that babies bond with their mothers in utero and become familiar with their behaviors. When their first caretaker is not the biological mother, they register the difference and the stress of it has lasting effects.

I probably got off easy in that respect, in part because I did spend a few months with my biological mother before I was adopted, but that had the unintended effect of traumatizing my older siblings, who remember me as a baby who was there, and then suddenly was gone. This was driven home to me by my older sister Bobbi, whose first encounter with me was over Facebook. “All I can say is I remember you,” she wrote. “I have loved you and missed you my entire life.”

What Justice Barrett and others are suggesting women do in lieu of abortion is not a small thing. It is life changing, irrevocable, and not to be taken lightly. It often causes trauma, even when things work out, and it’s a disservice to adoptees and their families, biological and adopted, to pretend otherwise in service of a neat political narrative.

(Source: NYT)

A woman without a country: Adopted at birth and deportable at 30

She grew up thinking she was American. When she realised that she wasn’t, her quest to fix the problem put her at risk of deportation. 

When Rebecca Trimble was a little girl, she wore red, white and blue to Independence Day parades. In middle school, she was a flag-bearer for the Girl Scouts. During her teenage years, the Backstreet Boys blared from a boom box in her bedroom.

It was on the eve of getting married in 2012 that she realized there was something amiss in her all-American upbringing. Adopted as an infant from Mexico, she discovered that what she thought was a minor mix-up in her paperwork was something else entirely. Eventually, she realized that not only was she not American, she did not, in the government’s view, belong in the United States at all.

This year, a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arrived in the remote corner of western Alaska where Ms. Trimble cooks for homeless people and where her husband, John, is the only dentist in town.

“You are not authorized to remain in the United States,” it said, ordering her to depart the country within 33 days or face deportation.

Rebecca Trimble has been on a tangled journey through the vast American immigration bureaucracy. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

“I feel incredibly vulnerable,” Ms. Trimble, 30, said as her two boys, Elliot, 5, and Jay, 4, played in their Bethel apartment on a sun-smacked afternoon. “I am putting my faith in a miracle.”

Lax oversight of international adoptions for years fueled a booming trade in babies. In the 1980s and ’90s, Americans seeking children were tricked into paying organized rings for babies smuggled across the border. In the early 2000s, children wrongly taken from their parents by brokers in Vietnam, Guatemala and other countries were presented as orphans to American adoption agencies. In other cases, parents did not understand, or did not follow, the rules for making foreign adoptions fully legal.

Adherence by countries like Mexico to international conventions to prevent the abduction, sale or trafficking of children has curbed illicit adoptions in recent years. But some of the irregular practices of the past are upending the lives of adoptees like Ms. Trimble as they reach adulthood.

“There are too many people in limbo through no fault of their own,” said Susan Jacobs, a retired ambassador who was the special adviser on adoptions at the State Department between 2010 and 2017. “They find out in their 20s, and are held accountable for what their parents did or didn’t do when they were babies.”

John and Rebecca Trimble moved to Bethel, Alaska, in 2017 so Dr. Trimble could work as a dentist in an underserved area. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

The Adoptee Rights Campaign, a group that promotes citizenship for adoptees, estimates that at least 35,000 people in the United States lack American citizenship because their adoptive parents failed to secure it for them.

They have started families of their own, only to learn the truth when they went to vote, tried to obtain a passport or got into trouble with the law. More recently, their precarious status has been laid bare when they applied for a Real ID, a license with stricter standards that will be required for domestic air travel in 2021.

“Adopted adults are discovering they are not citizens after thinking they were Americans all their lives,” said Gregory Luce, an immigration and adoptee rights lawyer in Minneapolis.

In 2001, Congress provided relief for adoptees below the age of 18 who lacked citizenship, and the federal government has been willing to help others adjust their status on a case-by-case basis. But that flexibility appears to have diminished under the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration agenda.

Ms. Trimble has found herself on a tangled journey through the immigration bureaucracy, where every appeal seems to end the same: She must return to a country she has not seen since she was 3 days old.

A photo album with pictures of the Trimbles, high school sweethearts who got married in 2012. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

A baby born in Mexico

Ms. Trimble’s story began when her adoptive father, George Wilson, a recreational vehicle mechanic in Salem, Ore., and his wife, Pamela Edmonds, gave up on conceiving a child after eight years of trying. One day in 1989, they got word from friends in Mexico that a baby about to be born to a 12-year-old girl there would need a home. They agreed to pay the girl’s medical bills and headed for Mexico with a stash of diapers, baby bottles and newborn clothes.

Dr. Trimble holding a baby book that had been created by Ms. Trimble’s adoptive parents. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

Three days later, they were homebound with their daughter. At the border, a U.S. agent peered into their vehicle, where Rebecca was bundled up in her new mother’s arms; he waved them through. The next month, a birth certificate arrived from Mexico that listed them as Rebecca Lynn Wilson’s parents, which they thought — incorrectly — was all they needed to render the adoption legal.

Becky, as they called her, was a bubbly child with almond-shaped brown eyes and silky dark hair. “She was such a joy, so smart and so loving,” Ms. Edmonds, now 62, recalled.

Eventually, Becky learned that she was adopted. “I didn’t think I was any less American.”

After her parents separated, Ms. Trimble and her mother moved to Vancouver, Wash. At Hudson’s Bay High School, Becky excelled in her classes, took up bowling and managed the track team.

One of her teachers encouraged the class to register to vote ahead of the 2008 presidential election, and that November, Ms. Trimble voted for the only time in her life.

She fell in love with a fellow student, John Trimble, a distance runner who took her to the prom. After high school, the couple decided to get married and thought about a road trip to Canada for their honeymoon.

In the spring of 2012, Ms. Trimble applied for an enhanced ID, an alternative to a passport that Americans can use to enter the United States from Canada or Mexico.

A clerk studied her Mexican birth certificate, handed it back to her and said that Ms. Trimble had to show further proof of American citizenship, such as a naturalization certificate. She was stumped.

Ms. Trimble helps Jay, 4, prepare to brush his teeth, while Elliot, 5, looks on. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

“I go to my mom and ask her questions, and she doesn’t know. John and I started researching,” she recalled.

Confused, the couple chose to focus on their upcoming wedding. “I’m a pretty optimistic person,” Dr. Trimble, 29, recalled. “I thought, ‘We’ll figure it out.’”

Only much later did the extent of the problems with how her parents handled her adoption become apparent. Before leaving Mexico, Ms. Trimble’s parents should have obtained official custody of their new baby from a Mexican judge and then secured an immigrant visa for her at a U.S. consulate.

Ms. Trimble’s parents said they did not know that they had run afoul of any rules. The doctor who delivered her, they said, had informed them that all they needed to formalize the adoption was a birth certificate listing them as parents, and they were given one by the friends who had arranged the adoption. In Oregon, they applied for and received a Social Security card for Ms. Trimble. “As far as we knew, Becky was a citizen of the United States,” said Mr. Wilson, who is now 74.

What they would later learn was that Ms. Trimble did not have clear Mexican citizenship, either. Mexican authorities told them they had no record of the birth certificate the couple had received in the mail.

“I feel like, what’s the word for it, I have not done right by her,” Mr. Wilson said. “I feel like I failed her.”

Bethel, about 400 miles west from Anchorage, can be reached only by airplane or boat.

Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

Immigration Services officials said the agency does not comment on individual cases, but emphasized the need for adoptive parents to obtain visas for children brought into the country.

The Trimbles, who could not afford a lawyer, visited a legal aid group in 2015. During a wrenching meeting, they grasped the severity of Ms. Trimble’s situation for the first time. Not only was she not American. She also was unlawfully in the country.

As an undocumented immigrant, Ms. Trimble would be required to leave the United States and wait 10 years before re-entering as a green card applicant.

But there was hope. Having an American spouse in the military, which Dr. Trimble had joined to defray the cost of dental school, could provide a quicker path to a green card. Ms. Trimble was eligible to apply for an exemption that would allow her to remain in the United States while her application was pending.

Dr. Trimble noted on the form that his wife “literally knows zero people who live in Mexico.” She did not know the whereabouts of her biological parents. She did not speak Spanish.

But what happened next seemed to defy logic.

In February 2016, the government denied Ms. Trimble the exemption on the grounds that such a remedy is available only to those who have illegally entered the country. Ms. Trimble’s entry had not been unlawful, the agency said, because she had been waved through by a border agent.

Confident now that she could apply without a special exemption, Ms. Trimble filed a formal application for a green card in December 2016, with her husband as her sponsor.

Her packet contained dozens of pages of documents, including tax returns, a marriage certificate and photos of her wedding.

Months passed, and the couple heard nothing.

In early 2017, during Dr. Trimble’s last year of dental school, he began searching for jobs in underserved areas to fulfill the requirement of his military scholarship.

He accepted a position at the community clinic in Bethel — about 400 miles from Anchorage on the Kuskokwim River — which is covered with snow and ice much of the year and can be reached only by airplane or boat.

As the family was packing, Ms. Trimble was notified by Immigration Services that she had been scheduled, in late June, for an in-person interview — a crucial, and often last, step in the green card process.

At the meeting, the officer’s line of questioning veered to her voting record. Yes, Ms. Trimble said, she had voted in a national election when she was 19.

“I told her that I thought I was doing my civic duty,” Ms. Trimble recalled. “I had no reason to believe I wasn’t a U.S. citizen.”

“Our whole church family has bathed Becky’s situation in prayer,” said Adam London, the pastor of Bethel Evangelical Covenant Church. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

A new home in Alaska

The Trimbles arrived in Bethel in July 2017, just in time to forage for berries in the tundra.

As the only dentist at the local family clinic, Dr. Trimble saw his roster of patients from the tight-knit community quickly grow.

He played guitar in the band of Bethel Evangelical Covenant Church. Ms. Trimble became the head chef of the church’s Supper Club for the Homeless and began leading Bible study for young children.

Meanwhile, Immigration Services started raising questions about the authenticity of Ms. Trimble’s Mexican birth certificate.

One problem was that the birth certificate that had been given to her parents all those years ago was issued not in Baja California, where she was born, but in the state of Oaxaca, some 2,000 miles away. And though Ms. Trimble’s parents also had a copy of the hospital birth record in Baja California, there was no official record of her birth registered with the authorities there.

Last month, Immigration Services declined the request to reopen Ms. Trimble’s case.

Mexican authorities told her that a judge would have to analyze the circumstances surrounding her birth and interview witnesses to issue a new birth certificate, if one was needed. And Ms. Trimble would have to be present, they said — with no guarantee that she would be allowed to re-enter the United States.

Despite the uncertainty, the couple got on with life. Becky’s pear preserves won first place at the town fair that summer. The couple erected a shave ice stand, serving 21 flavors.

They began sharing snippets of their saga with friends.

At church, prayer requests poured in on their behalf.

“Our whole church family has bathed Becky’s situation in prayer,” said Adam London, the senior pastor of the 200-strong congregation.

One member, a state representative for Bethel, suggested that the couple contact the office of Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, for assistance. Immigration Services responded to the senator that the case was “under review.”

In May of last year, a member of their church organized a garage sale to benefit a family in need. Ms. Trimble was unaware that the proceeds — ultimately $1,486.01 — were to help with her legal fees.

The Trimbles hired Margaret Stock, an Anchorage lawyer who met a supervisor at Immigration Services to discuss the case. Several more months passed.

In February, Ms. Trimble received a two-page decision denying her a green card.

The denial stated that on Jan. 17, 2008, she had illegally registered to vote and that she had then voted in a general election that November. “Therefore, your application must be and hereby is denied,” it said.

Ms. Trimble had 33 days to depart the country, or face deportation.

“I felt I had no identity at that moment. I meant nothing,” she said, her voice breaking.

“I always thought I was American,” Ms. Trimble said. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

In March, Ms. Stock filed a motion to reopen Ms. Trimble’s case, and the Bethel City Council passed a resolution urging federal representatives and agencies to recognize “the uniqueness of Rebecca Trimble’s situation.”

Last month, Immigration Services declined the request. Ms. Stock’s next move is to sue the agency in federal court to secure a green card or citizenship for her client.

Both Alaska senators have introduced a private bill “for the relief of Becky Trimble” that would be required to pass the House and the Senate, a process that could take years.

Ms. Trimble, whose legal bills have mounted, has not been informed that a deportation case has commenced against her, perhaps because the coronavirus pandemic has slowed immigration enforcement.

For now, she is trying to resume what she called “a quiet, normal life.” On Jay’s birthday, she baked lemon cake with tundra-blueberry frosting, and the family celebrated on Zoom with friends and relatives. She tried to suppress fears of immigration agents showing up to take her away.

(Source: NYT)

An adoption, a pandemic and an evacuation

The Mosiers flew to India in March to pick up their daughter. The country locked down before they could leave.

The little girl, her black curls tumbling over her eyes and her slight frame uncomfortably splayed out on the airplane seat, hid crayons in her armpits the entire flight. She was puzzled how they, like the new people called Mom and Dad sitting next to her, now belonged to her.

Her new parents, Seth and Meg Mosier, looked to each other. Were they doing things right? It was not their first emergency evacuation — they had escaped war and violence before — but it was their first on a one-way flight from India sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And certainly their first with a little girl they had just adopted as a deadly pandemic swirled around the world.

In 2008, Seth, an American diplomat, was ordered to evacuate from the embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the Russian military invaded. 

Seth Mosier hiking in Madurai with his daughter, Selvi, in March just after India announced a lockdown on international travel. Credit... Seth and Meg Mosier

Meg drove a car filled with diplomats across the border and into the safety of Armenia. In 2011, the Arab Spring protests forced them to leave Egypt.

Yet here they were, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with dozens of young missionaries in suits next to a child who kept stuffing crayons under her arms and who clung to Meg as if her life depended on it.

This was not the way the Mosiers had envisioned starting a family.

Seth, 41, with a dirty blond crew cut and a perpetually earnest look on his face, and Meg, 42, with freckles, a short brunette bob and a determination to always stay positive, decided to settle down after they left Cairo. They tried to get pregnant for five years and then, after two rounds of in vitro fertilization that cost $27,000, they started the adoption process in the summer of 2018.

Instead of the excitement of doctor checkups and ultrasounds, they got reams of adoption red tape. They looked into adopting an American child, but the agency told them they may be seen as too old. They considered Georgia, but were nervous about the prevalence of developmental disorders in orphanages there. 

Eventually, they settled on India, which has an easier process than most countries.

After weeks of filling out monotonous paperwork, they were directed to an orphanage in Madurai, a city in southern India. The orphanage gave them a name: a little girl named Selvi.

Seth and Meg Mosier pose with their new daughter near the hotel where they waited to hear news of flights out of the country. Credit... Seth and Meg Mosier

Last December, when they had their first video chat with her, they struggled to hold her attention. Selvi was more interested in her caregiver than the strangers cooing at her through a screen 8,000 miles away.

Less than three months later, the first coronavirus case in Delhi was announced on March 2, a day before the adoption was approved. Countries around the world started closing their borders to stem the virus’ spread; and the Mosiers thought their opportunity to build a family was disappearing.

They booked tickets to Madurai for March 12, four days before their meeting with Selvi. Madurai is an ancient city crammed with rickshaws, street hawkers and low-slung buildings, punctuated by its famous giant Hindu temples. They did some sightseeing, to get a sense of Selvi’s home, but couldn’t shake their anxiety.

“We were all nerves,” Seth said. “All we wanted was for her to like us, but we worried she would take one look at Meg and I and be terrified.”

Just 20 hours after the Mosiers arrived, India sealed its borders, canceling all unused visas and barring entry to foreigners. Indian news outlets reported that the government planned to suspend all international flights.

Now all they needed to do was meet their daughter and get out in time. They worried about being stranded for months in a country they barely knew during a global crisis. The bonding process was never going to be easy, but now they had to speed it up. The first day with Selvi, she clung to her caregiver, an orphanage employee assigned to raise her since she was an infant.

Meg sat on the floor with Selvi, second-guessing her every move. 

Was she captivating enough? Could she bond with the little girl the way the caregiver did? She had spent every moment leading up to the adoption thinking about the caregiver, waves of jealousy washing over her.

“But when I met her, all I felt was gratitude,” Meg said. “We missed out on those first two years of Selvi’s life. We wished it had been us who were her parents from the start, but we weren’t. Selvi had been in good hands.”

Every time the caregiver left the room, the little girl cried. When Selvi bumped her head on a stair and started wailing, Meg and Seth froze. The caregiver, who did not speak English, mimed a child being cradled to Seth and then darted out of the room while Seth tried to soothe the wriggling child.

“It was so scary. There was so much weight behind this, so many moments dedicated to thinking about this moment,” Meg said. “You want her to like you so badly, you want to just know what to do and how to do it, to do right by her.”

After 45 minutes of rocking, Selvi fell asleep on Seth’s shoulder.

Meg Mosier waiting to pass through immigration with her daughter in the Delhi airport. Credit... Seth and Meg Mosier

The next day, the Mosiers could finally take Selvi home. The orphanage staff planned an elaborate handover ceremony, stuffing Selvi into a giant, frilly blue dress with a fat pink bow. An overzealous photographer choreographed the moment, but only captured strained smiles and awkward formality. For his final shot, he had Meg hold Selvi, who started screaming and clawing for her caregiver.

“I felt so much empathy for her in that moment,” Meg said of the caregiver. “She had raised her for the first two years of her life.”

Through tears, Meg thanked the caregiver and promised to make her an important part of Selvi’s life. Today Meg and Seth show Selvi three photos to explain her transition: one of Selvi and the caregiver, one of the four of them together and one of their new, three-person family.

They flew several hours to Delhi on March 18. The next day, India announced that all flights in and out of the country would be canceled in three days. They had two days to finalize an international adoption.

The final paperwork — Selvi’s U.S. immigration visa and Indian medical forms — usually take a week. But bureaucrats from both countries rushed to finish it in two days before their window disappeared. Just hours before the airport closed, the Mosiers checked in and went through customs. But they had forgotten one crucial piece of paper: an exit stamp allowing Selvi to leave the country.

They were stuck in India with few hotels still open. Then the Indian government announced one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. 

India’s 1.3 billion people were told not to leave their homes, except to buy food or medicine. The Indian police, always quick to use violence, have beaten civilians found on the streets, even stuck foreign tourists, trying to buy food.

Three passports, two countries, one family. Credit... Seth and Meg Mosier

The Mosiers checked themselves into a fancy hotel now empty of guests after massive evacuation efforts by various governments. The hotel felt deserted and sad, with only 10 of its nearly 500 rooms occupied. The handful of toys they had brought began to look painfully thin as the days passed. The crayons would disappear into Selvi’s armpits. It’s not clear why she did this, but some orphans hide toys because they don’t have their own.

They spent the next nine days playing hide and go seek with bored bellhops and the hotel manager. Meg tried to teach Selvi a little bit of English: spoon, flower, bed.

“So many people told us we were the bright spot in their day. The staff were all sleeping at the hotel, scared — and hated being separated from their families. Selvi drew so much light to them,” Meg said.

The U.S. Embassy was flooded with requests from thousands of Americans wanting to leave India, but there was a holdup with the flights that dragged on for days. Finally, they got an email saying the Latter-day Saints had chartered a flight to evacuate their missionaries. They offered the unoccupied seats to the embassy, which offered them to the Mosiers.

At the embassy, the Mosiers and a few dozen missionaries — barely out of high school — waited for their flight. One of them, Sam McGuire, 18, told them that he had been adopted as an infant from an orphanage in the eastern city of Kolkata by Latter-day Saints living near Salt Lake City.

Sam had spent eight months in southern India and had started inquiring about his birth mother when the coronavirus outbreak cut short his mission.

“I was really happy when I saw them,” Sam said later, about the Mosiers, “to talk and share my experience with them.”

Sam said he often lies awake at night, thinking about how different his life would be if he had never been adopted. Would he be an auto-rickshaw driver? A farmhand?

“I know what my circumstances could have turned out to be, what happens in orphanages when children grow older. People don’t want them,” he said. He was struck by the Mosiers deep love for Selvi. 

“They will give her a life no others can,” he said.

Meeting the young missionary eased the Mosiers’ biggest worry: that Selvi might feel she never truly belonged with Seth and Meg, because they were a different race.

“Here was this kid, born in India, adopted by Mormon parents, who grew up in the U.S. and came back to see what happened to him, where his story began, 16 years before,” Seth said. “It made us feel like everything would be all right.”

Eventually everyone piled into buses to head to the airport. Sam grabbed his bag and looked up at the Mosiers. “Goodbye, kid,” he said to Selvi. “You’re going to have a great life.”

The Mosiers are now back in Bethesda, Md., where the governor has ordered an extended lockdown. They haven’t introduced Selvi to friends or family yet because of the lockdown, which they said was a blessing that allowed them to bond with their new daughter. Meals have been difficult. Selvi does not like American food and so Seth has been researching Indian curry recipes online.

“I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting a potato masala,” Seth said.

And the crayons? Selvi now leaves them lying around the house. 

“She knows,” Meg said, “what’s ours is hers.”

(Source: NYT)

I’m almost 50 and full of regret it’s too late to have children

It sounds like a midlife crisis so visit your GP and focus on what you’ve achieved – not what you haven’t, says Mariella Frostrup

The dilemma I’m a 49-year-old woman. I work hard, own a home and live a fairly good life. My problem is that I can’t help but feel regretful that I never had children. I can’t quite believe this is how my life turned out. When I was younger I ached for my own child.

I have a partner currently. We don’t live together, he’s younger than I am and quite possibly the loveliest man I’ve been in a relationship with. It’s too late for me to conceive now and IVF isn’t an option as we don’t have the money. He says he doesn’t care, but he dotes on friends’ children and I fear that when he’s older he’ll feel regretful, too.

In previous relationships I’ve had two abortions and two miscarriages and I’m not sure I ever recovered emotionally. I somehow got my life back on track, though I suffered another miscarriage along the way. Those losses left me feeling numb and I pretend to others who ask that I made positive choices. I feel ashamed, guilty and cowardly.

I want to know how to get through these next few years unscathed. I’m too serious, anxious about money, the environment, everything. I suppose I am a typical spinster cat-woman. I fear the emotional wrecking ball of the menopause and want to move on and to not think about what could have been – but it’s getting worse, not better.

‘I fear the emotional wrecking ball of the menopause and want to move on.’ Photograph: Getty Images

Mariella replies Don’t panic! It sounds like you are living through a full-blown midlife crisis. No one wants to think they are just a number, but sometimes it’s easier to navigate life’s difficulties when you know you’ve got company – and companions with similar concerns are one thing you won’t be short of as you hit 50, brimful of anxiety, regrets and melancholy. There’s no shame in seeking help and the best place to start is with your local GP, provided they have menopause experience, so they can sort hormonal bedlam from mental wear and tear.

You’ve reached the first age of reckoning and you’d be one in a million if there weren’t plenty of choices you’d love to rethink with the benefit of hindsight. I’m afraid that has to stop. There is no gain and a lot to lose in looking over your shoulder instead of keeping your gaze firmly forward-facing. The past is a place to mine for happy memories, not dwell on for those that are less so. It’s easier said than done, but it’s definitely possible. Dwelling on the many things I could have done better, some major, some minor, would definitely flatten me.

Write a list of amazing things you can do and start to tick them off

I’ve front-loaded on the negativity because, quite honestly, the future is far brighter than you envisage. I understand your regrets about not having children and agree the likelihood of getting pregnant now is extremely slim. You can sit around and mourn or consider the surfeit of opportunities offered by not being responsible for anyone but yourself. Whether it’s relocation or re-education, your bucket list is far more achievable than if you were a parent saddled with the cost of an umbilical connection you can’t shake off.

A close friend, like you, wanted children, but didn’t have them. Quite honestly, it’s her unfettered lifestyle I envy most when my teenagers make Harry Enfield’s best caricature of adolescent angst seem normal! Instead of rueing your misfortune, write a list of all the amazing things you can do now you’re mature and solvent, grab your younger man and start ticking them off.

What’s predictably human is that despite the much longer list of achievements you have to celebrate – a good job, trophy boyfriend, decent lifestyle, own home – you’ve zoomed in on the one ambition you have not succeeded with. They are not minor details to be shunted aside, but amount to the very things that most kids hope one day to achieve.

If, despite all my encouragement to count your blessings, you still feel your life requires a child, then there are around 6,000 children a year desperate for a secure home, and nearly 50% of them are school-age siblings, which means in adopting them you’d have a ready-made family. Bearing your own biological baby may be a natural impulse, but the enormous gift you can give a child who needs parenting is well worth considering, and not as a second choice. It sounds to me like you tick all the boxes for an acceptable adoption prospect so a life with children to rear and rage at you is in reach (contact gov.uk/child-adoption).

Whatever you choose, the life lesson remains the same. From now on it’s imperative to be grateful for what you’ve got, not preoccupied by what you haven’t. And finally, the menopause… well that’s a whole other conversation, but a good place to begin is on BBC iPlayer with my documentary The Truth About the Menopause. Reaching midlife is a time for contemplation, but also for positive action. With half your life left to live there are options aplenty and inspiring ways to move forward. You just need to review your perspective.

(Source: The Guardian)

Single gay father adopts girl with Down's Syndrome who was rejected by 20 families

An Italian man, who is gay and single, has been praised on social media for adopting a girl with Down’s Syndrome after she was rejected by 20 families.

Luca Trapanese, 41, adopted his daughter, Alba, in July 2017 after having spent years caring for people with disabilities as a volunteer in Naples.

The adoption happened after Trapanese had separated from his boyfriend, with whom he founded a charity dedicated to supporting people with disabilities.

But the charity worker initially struggled to adopt due to Italy’s strict adoption laws that only allow single parents to adopt in certain circumstances.

“I was told that I’d only be given a child with an illness, a severe disability or with behavioural problems,” he told the BBC.

“I was absolutely OK with that.”

He was eventually matched with Alba, who was 30 days old at the time and had been abandoned by her birth mother.

“When I first held her in my arms, I was overcome with joy,” Trapanese said. “I felt she was my daughter straight away.”

Now, the father-of-one regularly posts about Alba on Instagram, uploading a mix of heartwarming photographs that show the father and daughter duo playing together in parks and at home.

Trapanese now has more than 154,000 followers thanks to the popularity of his posts.

One recent photograph shows Trapanese brushing Alba’s teeth in their bathroom at home.

(Source: Independent)

Going back to China in search of my daughter’s secret past

As an infant, my child was left on a bridge with a note pinned to her sweater. I thought finding it would provide us both with answers.

Seven thousand miles was a long way to go for a tiny scrap of paper. The note was pinned to my daughter’s sweater when she was found at seven weeks old on a bridge in Yixing, China. That’s what I had been told by the adoption coordinator there who had placed her in my arms.

This search was set in motion 15 years ago when, at 3, Sophie was astonished to learn from me that all babies don’t come from China but from inside their mothers. When I explained that another woman had given birth to her, not me, she protested.

I could not bring myself to utter the well-meaning evasion that she was “born in my heart,” as had many adoptive mothers I knew. But it didn’t matter what I said; her world had been upended and she kept trying to right it.

At 4, she said, “Mommy, I always think: How was I made? What was I made from? Was I made from someone?”

This was bewilderment; this was grief.

At 5, after I had tucked her in one night, she said, “But why did she give me away? Did she not like me?”

“Sophie, I’m sure that she loved you.”

“But why did she not like me? Why did she throw me away?”

At times she would plead, “Mommy, do you know her? Can we call her?”

Brian Rea

Her questions made my heart hurt, as did the awareness that the very system that had allowed me to adopt her also made me complicit in severing her roots.

Sometimes when I held her, I would think “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” before realizing the phrase was not mine to say, that there were two people walking this earth who could say it. I wanted Sophie to have a chance to find them. The only possible link between her and the part of herself she had lost on that bridge was the note.

Our age gap added urgency to the search. I would obsessively do the math: When she’s 20, I’ll be 70. When she’s 30, I’ll be 80. At some point, too early in her life, I’ll be gone. I believed that, as she matured, it wouldn’t be enough for her to know that she was part of a generation of 35 million lost daughters who, under the “one child” policy, were apparently aborted, abandoned or worse. Or that she was born into a culture where bloodlines pass through sons and folk wisdom holds that you’re better off raising geese than girls.

I knew my child. She would long for a reason more specific and personal. I wanted her to have whatever evidence could be found before it went missing or before I was no longer here to help her find it.

I began to dream of that note. I questioned those who had helped me adopt her, both in the United States and in China. I visited Chinese officials. All were kind and responsive, but the note never surfaced.

Then, when Sophie was 11, we had the opportunity to return to China on a winter tour. By this time, she no longer asked about her birth mother; she was preoccupied with “The Hunger Games,” her friends and convincing me to get a dog. She no longer enacted abandonment scenes with her toys; she spent her downtime practicing the horse dance from “Gangnam Style.” Her past no longer seemed to haunt her, but it did me.

After the tour, I arranged a trip to Yixing, the small city in the Yangtze River delta where she was found. If that note still existed, it would be there.

On a gray day in early January, we set out with our driver and translator. I was glued to the frozen landscape out the window; Sophie was glued to her iPod.

Our first stop was Yuedi Bridge, where, on August 4, 2001, at dawn, a passer-by heard the cries of an abandoned child. I had imagined one of those elegant crescent bridges in ancient Chinese paintings, but Yuedi Bridge was a concrete slab over a polluted canal.

As we walked across, I wanted to prostrate myself to the goddess of second chances who had granted me this child when I had all but given up on motherhood.

Fighting tears, I glanced at Sophie and saw that her face was also clouded over.

“Honey,” I said. “I know. This is hard.”

“Mommy,” she said, choking up. “This is so boring.”

I said nothing but pulled her close.

Whoever found Sophie had taken her to the local police station, the one place I hadn’t contacted as I couldn’t determine the precise precinct from the records. That was our next stop, and soon we were standing before a woman we hoped could help. But she said to our translator with a smile: “Records before 2005 were lost in a fire.”

“How can you smile?” I said. “A part of my daughter was lost in that fire!”

Sophie looked panicked. “Mom, stop it. They’re going to put us in jail!”

“O.K., we should go now,” the translator said.

Our last stop was the orphanage where Sophie had spent nine months after being found, a place that seemed stuck in time. When I adopted Sophie, Yixing was covered in ancient soot. There was nowhere for a foreigner to sleep. Now, there were 30 hotels. The China that had produced a generation of abandoned girls was quickly being swept into the past.

We were introduced to the new director who said that Sophie looked like “a local girl.” She instructed my daughter to study hard, help others, always love her mother and take care of me when I am old.

Sophie managed a polite smile, though I sensed her eye roll.

As we were leaving, the director handed me a file. I began to leaf through and saw the adoption papers I had signed 10 years before. Then I noticed something stuck between two pages: a torn, weathered bit of notebook paper with ballpoint scribbles.

I lifted the weightless scrap. The lines had faded. There were a few Mandarin characters and numbers. I deciphered Sophie’s date of birth, which of course I knew, and the exact time of her birth, which only her birthparents could know.

This was the note.

I handed it to Sophie, who glanced at it, then gave it back.

She seemed unmoved, but I was overcome. Through tears, I snapped image after image.

Back in the car, Sophie said, “The note said nothing, so why did we even go?”

I, too, was disappointed at how little was there, but I remembered reading of birth mothers, about to leave their girls, who had written pages, only to tear them up in shame and scribble a birth date instead. One birth mother had even sewn her baby an outfit of patterned cloth from which she cut a patch — a precious bit of proof to be preserved, perhaps, until the day they were reunited.

I knew one thing for sure: Even in its brevity, the note was evidence that my daughter was left to be found. She was not left to die.

Sophie is now 18. This child who once clung to my chest like a barnacle now lounges across the couch, a rope of hair swung over her shoulder, ice packs tied to each knee after track practice.

“Mommy, massage my feet?”

These days, it’s the only physical contact she invites. I’ll take what I can get. I knead her soft soles, notice her toenails, pearly and perfect. I ask what she thinks about our quest for the note, hoping she’ll acknowledge that words from her birth parents, few as they were, mattered.

“I didn’t care about the note,” she says. “You did. You made it about you and it’s my story, not yours.”

Had I missed how let down she might have felt by this scrap that we had pursued so fiercely yet said so little? Had I missed how pushy I may have been with my guilt, my determination and perhaps even my projection of abandonment and loss?

Had I not turned the note into my great white whale, perhaps I would have noticed that, at 11, Sophie was busy growing up as a beloved daughter in America. And while I had believed the note might help reconnect her severed roots, her annoyance made me wonder whether any human being can tell another what they need to feel tethered.

As for whose story it is — it’s Sophie’s, of course, but it’s mine too. Beyond my own desire to know what the note might reveal, I saw it as my only link to the people whose loss had led to my gaining the privilege of nurturing a child and watching her life unfold. Who were they? What had they suffered in abandoning their daughter?

After all, it’s their story, too, but one that is hidden from us, existing only as a scrawled fragment, a few marks on an otherwise blank shred of paper.

(Source: NYT)