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Following the visit, the two families began e-mailing or talking every couple of months with the help of a cellphone that Marcy bought Alma and a network of friends and professionals to translate.

Not all relationships go so smoothly, though, and several searchers told me they are frustrated by adoptive parents who vanish after the initial contact. In some cases the parents, or their children, are uneasy with the facts a search uncovers — adoption corruption or alcoholism or a birth mother who abused her child. But other parents simply get what they need and don’t want more. “We get phone calls from birth mothers begging for some more photos or news of the child, but the adoptive parents do not respond,” says one searcher in Russia.

Even with the best of intentions, parents on both sides often struggle to bridge the enormous gulfs that are inherent in most international adoptions. “Usually they are very quiet,” S. says describing birth mothers during their meetings with adoptive families. “I need to keep reminding the birth mother that she’s entitled to ask questions.” S. recounted a recent reunion between a birth mother and her 12-year-old daughter. The girl sang her a song and talked about her ambition to be a singer. Then the girl asked her birth mother what she dreamed of being when she was a young girl. Confused by the question, she told her daughter she dreamed about her two weeks before the visit. “I had to explain to the girl that the birth mother couldn’t answer a question like that,” S. told me. “People here at that socioeconomic level don’t really think in terms of dreams and ambitions.”

One recurring theme among adoptive families searching for birth families is money. I thought about this before ever contacting S. What would I do if Lucia’s birth mother asked for help? Would I say yes, but only under certain circumstances? Or would I simply offer to help, regardless of whether she asked? Also, was it possible that my money could encourage another woman in the community to relinquish her child in hopes of receiving financial support from an adoptive family one day? If I said no, how would I answer Lucia if she asked why I hadn’t helped support her birth mother?

“Some birth mothers would never accept any money from adoptive families,” S. says. “And adoptive families can say no if birth families ask. But if we’re talking about what they need, money is what they need.” When one family gave a birth mother whom S. had found $200, she bought a TV set with it, infuriating the adoptive family. “But to her it was a gift she could spend however she wanted,” S says. “And if she spent it on two months of food, after two months she’d have nothing left.”

S. says she works with about 100 families who provide support to birth families, usually by paying for the education of other children in the family. (Public school in Guatemala, which costs about $5 for enrollment and another $150 annually for school supplies and uniforms, is out of reach for many birth families.) Also, at least a half-dozen adoptive families are now building houses for birth families in Guatemala, including Marcy and her husband, who recently completed a house for Alma. For years, Alma, her mother and children have lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor and no running water or electricity. Next month, they will move into a new, concrete one-bedroom, one-bathroom home.

Not surprisingly, though, money can also sour relationships, as it did for years for Belle and her daughter’s birth mother, who met when Belle first adopted her daughter in Guatemala. It wasn’t long after that that Belle, who asked me to use her nickname, learned that her daughter’s birth mother had ambitions of finishing her high-school equivalency — an aspiration in stark contrast to those of many Guatemalan birth mothers, who are illiterate or read only at a first- or second-grade level. When she asked if Belle would help out, Belle said yes: Here was a chance to put more than Band-Aid on a family’s poverty; here was a chance to change a life.

Belle hired S. to handle the logistics of paying the school tuition. But less than 24 hours after S. put down the deposit, the director of the school telephoned S. and told her the birth mother had returned to withdraw the money. “I remember my heart just falling,” Belle told me in the living room of the house near Boston where she lives with her husband and two children. “This image we had of a wonderful determined woman who was our daughter’s mother who we hoped to help, and this idealistic and hopeful story took a very bad turn.” Belle was angry and bereft not only at the loss of trust but also at the loss of her image of the birth mother of her 9-month-old daughter. “It was wonderful to think of our daughter’s birth mother in this certain way,” Belle said. Letting go of that, she said, was one of the challenges and risks of having the relationship.

It took Belle four months to write a letter to the birth mother. The first version included the phrase “we forgive you.” “But that felt like a terrible thing to say because of the power dynamics between us,” Belle says. Finally she wrote that she simply wanted to remain connected. When S. went to deliver the letter, the birth mother had moved. Until then, Belle hoped that her daughter would eventually have a relationship with her birth mother. Instead, it seemed Belle would be left with only a painful story to share with her.

Then three years later, after Belle’s sustained efforts to find the birth mother and with the help of a Guatemalan adoption lawyer, the two women did reconnect. Neither mentioned what had happened, and initially they kept any talk of money out of their letters and e-mail messages.

But when the birth mother later requested money for an emergency, Belle and her husband decided to help, this time without strings attached. Now they send about $1,000 a year for housing costs, food or whatever else she and her family need. “People who live in desperate poverty often have to hustle, and I didn’t want her to have to hustle us,” says Belle, who has worked with poor communities for years. “I wasn’t comfortable with trying to control this woman’s choices while trying to build a real relationship.”

This summer, in New York, as a woman named Mary and I sat watching her 7-year-old daughter, Bekele, in a double-dutch jump-roping class, she told me the story of Bekele’s adoption. In 2003, Mary adopted Bekele, then 4, from an Ethiopian orphanage, seven years after Mary’s oldest daughter, Chengyun, arrived from China. (Mary asked me to use her and her daughters’ middle names.) Though Bekele barely spoke English at first, soon words were spilling out of her mouth. As it turned out, she had a lot to say. She told Mary about her memories of life in Ethiopia — the day a lizard crawled down her shirt, how she cried at the orphanage. And then one day she told Mary she had an older sister, Temame, in Ethiopia, whom she was worried about. She also said her mother took her to the orphanage when she was 3, which Mary would later learn followed the death of Bekele’s father. Now Bekele wanted to find her Ethiopian family, 7,000 miles away.

Mary, a warm and easygoing woman who resembles an earthy Carly Simon, hired a searcher in August 2005. Several months later he called Mary with his report. Temame, who was 13, was alive. So was her mother, though she was ill with AIDS. The searcher also explained that since Bekele’s father’s death, the family had plunged into deep poverty.

A few weeks later, Mary arranged with a translator to talk to Bekele’s birth mother by phone. She already had some hint of what might unfold. The searcher had told Mary that the mother wanted Mary to adopt Temame. Mary was a single mother living on a teacher’s salary; her oldest daughter’s college tuition was looming; she wasn’t planning on adopting again. And there was the overwhelming unknown of adding a teenager to the family — a teenager who would be leaving both her mother and her country. Mary explored alternative possibilities with the searcher: Were there relatives in Ethiopia who could raise Temame so that she could stay in her country? Could Mary pay for her education at an Ethiopian boarding school?

During that first phone conversation with Bekele’s birth mother, Mary told her about how well Bekele was doing in school and how much she loved her. But Bekele’s Ethiopian mother kept turning the conversation to her other daughter. Finally she said, “Will you adopt Temame?” The question hung in the air. Looking back on that moment, Mary says she had an image of a woman in a sinking boat handing her a child. “You don’t say, Sorry, it’s not a convenient time right now,” she says, though in the coming weeks Mary would wonder how well her own boat would hold up. But when the question was asked, Mary went on instinct: “It would be my honor,” she said.

In the next months, Mary would have an adoption agency representative and others talk to Temame and her mother to try to make sure the family understood what the adoption would mean for them. Mary would talk to her own daughters about the prospect of another sister: Bekele was overjoyed at the idea of reuniting; Chenyung, who knew that another child would diminish her mother’s time, was unhappy.

It has now been nearly four months since Temame became part of Mary’s family, and it is still too early to say how it will all play out. But when I spoke to Mary this month, she was optimistic. Temame is in eighth grade learning English, making friends and staying in touch with her mother in Ethiopia. Chenyung is adjusting, too, and finds ways to get the one-on-one time she needs with her mother. It is Bekele, Mary says, who struggles the most with sharing her mother with an added daughter in the house. All the dynamics, of course, could be turned on their head in the coming months and years. “I thought that whatever road it took us down, we’d figure out how to handle it,” Mary says, looking back on her decision to search. She adds with a small laugh: “I obviously had no idea how emotional and complicated it would become.”

Such instances of “found” siblings — whether they are loved and with their families or languishing in orphanages — aren’t altogether uncommon. And I knew it wasn’t entirely far-fetched to imagine that if we found Lucia’s birth mother we might be confronted with a similar predicament. What if Lucia’s birth mother was pregnant and wanted us to adopt another child? We had no plans to adopt again (Lucia is our second child), particularly from Guatemala. Though we had concrete reasons to believe our daughter’s adoption was legal, there have been increasing reports of payments to birth mothers and other corrupt practices. But if we could be certain everything was ethically aboveboard, would we adopt Lucia’s biological sibling? Or would this instead be a chance to support Lucia’s birth mother, financially or in other ways, so that she would keep her child? Then again, poverty isn’t at the root of all adoptions. If there were other circumstances at play, what would be best for that child? And what would be right for my own family?

The most disturbing search situation may be the one that reveals that a child was stolen. When Desiree Smolin and her husband, David, adopted their daughters, Manjula and Bhagya, from India, they quickly learned something was amiss. Within six weeks of arriving in the U.S., the adolescent girls, who were clearly angry and traumatized, said that they were stolen from their parents. During that first year, the Smolins, who also have five sons, weren’t sure what to believe; other adoptive parents told the Smolins that the girls were probably fabricating the story as a way of dealing with their relinquishment; that older children were unlikely to be stolen; and that looking for a birth mother could put the woman’s life at risk. The Smolins say they repeatedly pushed their agency to investigate the adoption. Then they found an advocate in India who offered to search. Within a few months, she had located the birth family and confirmed the girls’ alarming story. As it turned out, the girls’ mother had been duped into placing them in an orphanage for education, and the girls were then slated for adoption. And though both daughters, now in their late teens and early 20s, have returned to see their Indian family, neither one feels that India is home any longer. For their part, Desiree and David Smolin have become outspoken adoption-reform advocates.

Desiree argues that searching can be one way to expose corruption. And in some cases, she says, parents have a moral imperative to do it. She notes a case earlier this year in which Samoan parents were tricked into placing their children for adoption. Writing on an adoption listserve and later in an e-mail message to me, she said: “If you are an adoptive parent of a Samoan child adopted through this agency and you see the press reports of Samoan parents crying and begging for the return of their children — do you not have an obligation to both the child and first parents to birth-search and re-establish contact?”

Several weeks after I sent the photos of Lucia and a letter to the birth mother last year, S. sent me a long e-mail message, describing her efforts to find Lucia’s Guatemalan mother, including the various addresses she had visited. In 314 searches, S. has located 261 birth families. We were unfortunately in the minority; she could not find Lucia’s. “I will keep the search open,” she wrote, “for as long as I keep doing this job.” In two cases, she told me recently, she found birth mothers long after her initial search for them.

While I didn’t count on it, it was certainly possible we would find Lucia’s birth family sometime in the future. For now, I would wonder how much Lucia would or wouldn’t care. Searching by adoptive parents remains too new to know anything significant yet about adoptees’ reactions to these searches and the relationships that sometimes unfold. In any case, their responses, like adoptees’ life experiences, are unlikely to be monolithic.

At the least, my husband and I could tell Lucia we did everything we could to find her birth mother. While it wasn’t my motivation for searching, the act of doing so was a way — not the best or the only way — of telling our daughter that we recognized her past. She has a first chapter and a heritage that doesn’t include us. As adoptive parents, my husband and I do believe that love matters most. But we know that blood matters, too. And if one day Lucia searches for her blood connection, we will encourage her. But before she heads out the door, I’ll probably have words of advice: Think hard about whom and what you may — or may not — find.

Maggie Jones is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was about juvenile sex offenders.

Copyright 2007
The New York Times Company