It was Mother’s Day and
Tatyana, the nine-year-old
adopted daughter of
American Mary Kirkpatrick,
came to her mother crying.
She wanted to know “who she looked like.” The holiday was a reminder for her that she had two mothers and knew only one of them.
That was the day Kirkpatrick decided to do everything she could to find Tatyana’s birth family. She said she had long wondered about Anna’s birth mother, especially after being told, a few years after the adoption, that Anna’s birth mother had returned to the Russian
-
orphanage after the adoption to make an inquiry.
“When Tatyana first inquired about her family, I was a little hurt,” Kirkpatrick later wrote. “I suppose, jealous of this mother who I didn’t know. However, I felt Tati’s [short for Tatyana] birth mother deserved to know her child was alive and doing well. I decided to put Tati’s interests first.”
Kirkpatrick found a St. Peters-burg contact who agreed to travel to her adopted daughter’s hometown and make inquiries about her birth family. The contact found Tati’s birth mother, Anna, living in a nearby village and expecting a baby. Anna was deeply moved and cried when she saw her daughter’s pictures. She said she had left her daughter – Tatyana – at the orphanage because she had been too young at the time and her financial situation had been very unstable. However, when a few years later she came to the orphanage to ask for her girl, it was too late, Tatyana was already adopted. It was like an episode from the Russian movie The Italian. For ten years Anna was unable to have children again, and she said she thought it was punishment for what she had done to Tatyana.
But within a day after meeting Kirkpatrick’s contact, Anna was talking with Tatyana and Mary on the phone. In January 2006, Mary and Tatyana, then 11,
met Anna in Helsinki, Finland. And it might have all ended there, but for the amazing power of the Internet.
Mary Kirkpatrick posted her story on an adoption message board and soon found she was not alone. Russia remains one of the largest sources for foreign adoptions in the U.S., and many of those adoptive parents are interested in tracking down their children’s birth families.
So of course Kirkpatrick set up a website: russianfamilysearch.com, where she helps others who are searching for Russian birth mothers, Russian siblings or even orphanage friends. Kirkpatrick’s partners find adopted children’s relatives, send them translated letters or make phone calls, and visit families and Russian orphanages all over the country.
“Our goal is to foster connections and communication through annual visits. Connection between siblings is a very important relationship and our children have a right to know their siblings. We want to help our children maintain contact with their siblings,” Kirkpatrick said. To date, Kirkpatrick said, she and her partners have re-united over 40 adoptees with their birth families. Here are a two of their stories.
A Mexican Mother and Russian Grandparents
En route to St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport Mexican-American Luz Ma Beasley, 43, could not stop crying. “Why are you crying, mommy?” her three-year-old adopted son Vladik asked.
Beasley explained that crying was sometimes good, and this one was one of those times.
“You can cry when you miss someone, and that means we really love those people,” she told him.
Luz Ma, her husband Graham, 56, and Vladik had just said goodbye to Vladik’s birth grandparents and his two sisters, whom they had met in St. Petersburg after the Beasleys’ long search for the boy’s birth relatives.
The Beasleys decided to undertake a search “to give Vladik the opportunity to
also be loved by his Russian family... to give him the right to know the truth,” and “to be proud of being Russian.”
The Beasleys live in North Carolina. She is an interpreter and he is a toolmaker. They adopted Vladik in 2004 from a Vladivostok orphanage, when he was nine months old.
“I will also never forget the first night he spent with us at the hotel in Vladivostok,” Luz Ma said. “He woke up, he was in crawling position, and he started rocking back and forth… He looked at us, and he started smiling at us…What an incredible moment!”
The Beasleys have always been open and honest about Vladik’s adoption and heritage. A lot of people told them that they had “saved” Vladik, but the Beasleys have never thought of it that way.
“We considered ourselves lucky to have had an opportunity to have had the means and desire through hard work and love to adopt him,” Luz Ma said, “and, thanks to him, we are now a family. He gives us as much as we give to him.”
When they began their search, the Beasleys knew only that Vladik was the mother’s third pregnancy and that she had been 22 at the time. They soon found out that the mother’s name was Nadezhda. Luz Ma wrote her a letter:
Dear Nadezhda,…
We want you to know that we are very lucky to be Vladik’s adoptive parents, to have him in our lives, and we love him immensely. We want you to know that we are taking very good care of him. We want him to be the happiest kid ever. Even though he is only 3 years old, we have always told him that he is from Russia, and that he grew up in another lady’s tummy that lives in Russia, who is his birth mom...
Luz Ma said they anticipated that one day Vladik would ask them a lot of questions about his birth family, and they wanted to be able to provide answers.
“We by no means are trying to hide that he is adopted. We want him to know that he is from Russia, and that he would be proud to be Russian. Even though we don’t know a lot about Russian culture, we have been lucky to have made some Russian friends here, and we are trying to learn more about his native country,” Luz Ma said.
It was actually Vladik’s grandparents, the Voronovs, Valentina, 52, and Boris, 56, who responded to Luz Ma’s inquiries. The couple lives in the village of Svetlogorye in the Far East, caring for three granddaughters – Natasha, Tanya and Katya – born to their daughter, while she lives a life separate from them. The girls call them mom and dad. They only found out about Vladik’s existence after he had been adopted.
“It’s hard to explain how happy we were to have found him when Luz Ma began her search for us!” said Valentina Voronov in a telephone interview. “Before that, I lived in darkness, knowing nothing about his whereabouts, because of adoption secrecy and worrying about how he’s living.”
Vladik’s birth mother Nadezhda gave birth to her first daughter, Natasha, when she was just 16 and she left the infant with the parents. It was the same story with Tanya. But for some reason she didn’t tell them about Vladik and left him at an orphanage in Vladivostok, where she lived at the time. The investigator’s attempts to find Nadezhda in the city where she lives came up empty.
The Beasleys and Voronovs met in St. Petersburg in December 2006 and immediately had an emotional connection. The women hugged each other. “Luz Ma, I love you! I love you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Valentina said to Luz Ma, using the few words of English she knew.
“They are incredible people,” Valentina said of the Beasleys. “I think, there are few people like this in the world. And I constantly pray to God that Vladik will always be thankful to them and love them.”
The two families decided to share one rented four-room apartment while they were in St. Petersburg. Vladik and his sisters played together as if they had known each other all their lives. At night, Alexander, a volunteer interpreter, came to the apartment and translated the details of their lives for them. Otherwise, they toured the city, cooked, and looked at pictures, communicating as best they could.
Both families said they were happy to have found each other. They now call each other every month, exchange packages, and want to meet again.
“Some people over here [in the U.S.] thought we were kind of crazy for having done this birth family search and for getting ready to meet them in St. Petersburg, and they were concerned that this encounter would create some confusion for Vladik,” Luz Ma said.
“I can’t speak for everyone to say if such searches for relatives of adopted children is needed,” said Valentina Voronov. “But I am personally very thankful to the people who conduct such searches. If they hadn’t found us, I’d be living with a wound in my soul about Vladik. Now my soul is happy, for I know that my grandson is in reliable hands.”
Four Boxes of Chocolates
For almost two years after little Anastasia was born, she couldn’t walk. She was small and pale and would cry for hours at night from pain in her legs.
Then doctors told her Russian mother, who already had another daughter, that Anastasia had cerebral palsy. They also said that the best thing she could do for her daughter if she loved her was to put her up for international adoption, so that she could get “the best” medical care possible.
After a heart-wrenching deliberation, Anastasia’s mother put her up for adoption.
The girl’s adoptive parents, Diana and Bob Hubberts, found Anastasia in a village hospital near Moscow, where she was placed because there was no orphanage in the area. She was two years old at that time.
The Hubberts had always planned to have four children – two biological children and two adopted. After two years of marriage, they had a son, John. But further attem-pts to have another child failed. Then they began their search for a child to adopt.
After long months searching, they received a picture of a tiny, two-year-old Russian girl, accompanied only with her name and age. They liked Anastasia at once. Their son John also said it was definitely “his sister” because they had “the same hair.” Only later did the couple find out that Anastasia had “severe cerebral palsy.” But by that point, it did not matter for the Hubberts.
“As we arrived at the children’s hospital that was holding our daughter, we saw how pitiful the building was inside and out, and it scared our son a bit,” Diana said. “But the people inside were very warm and loving. They swarmed into a tiny room to wish us well and send Ana off to her new home. Some of them cried.”
From the very start, the Hubberts, who live in Chicago, were open about Ana’s adoption. Bob, 49, even made Ana a storybook with pictures, maps and documents about her adoption story and gave it to her on the first anniversary of her adoption.
Soon after arriving back in the U.S., the Hubberts also learned that Ana did not have cerebral palsy. Their doctor hypothesized that Ana likely just had rickets – shortage of vitamin D which affects one’s bones and muscles, but which can be easily treated with vitamins and sun.
“Our experience was that she walked, grew and got stronger, the longer she was home with us. She did often have leg and foot cramps during the night, and I would have to stay up with her and massage her legs. But at that time I just thought it was because she was growing so fast,” Diana said. After six months in the U.S., Ana was very strong and didn’t have health problems, Diana added.
Meanwhile, as Ana grew older, she began to ask about her birth mother. By the time she was five, she was repeatedly asking if Diana thought her mother was alive, hungry, remarried, had had another baby, etc.
“She also wanted her mother to come to the U.S. and live in her closet, so that we could feed her. Once, she told her dad to call 911 and have the police check to see if her mother was okay. We had to explain that 911 was not an international service,” Diana said.
When Ana became older, the Hubberts told her that she had an elder sister. They were nervous about Ana’s reaction, but she became very excited. John, however, cried. He worried that now Ana would “never love him the same.”
In February 2006, when Ana was 11, she said she wanted to search for her birth family. Diana found Kirkpatrick’s website, and soon the family had been located.
“The family was shocked to hear about Ana after all these years, but thrilled to know that she was loved, healthy and safe,” Diana said. “Ana’s sister, Tanya, teared up in the video at the sight of her little sister. Ana’s birth mother appeared much more stoic on the surface, but would later say that her mind and heart were swirling with the news of her adopted daughter’s well-being,” she said.
Ana’s birth mother said that, when they placed Ana for adoption, they were told that they could not come and see Ana while she was being held in the children’s hospital. At the same time, they would be told when she was adopted and to which country. She would also be informed about her physical well-being as she matured. Yet, as soon as Ana was adopted, the case was closed, as are all Russian adoptions, and they never got any news.
When the Hubberts found Ana’s birth family, they felt like “the circle had been closed.”
“It felt magical to us all, though we each expressed it in different ways,” Diana said. “I, for example, would look at the first few minutes of the video over and over, and study the faces of Ana’s birth mother and sister. I especially felt an instant love for Tanya, even though I did not know her at all. Her tears told me all I needed to know about her heart. Plus she was Ana’s sister!” she said.
At the same time, Ana’s grandmother, while happy that she was healthy, got very angry with the doctors in Russia for their mistaken diagnosis of cerebral palsy. She went to the children’s hospital in town and showed the pictures of her “healthy” granddaughter to the doctors and asked them to explain, Diana said.
Diana said she also realized the ultimate sacrifice Ana’s birth mother made when she gave the girl up. “I was grateful to share loving her daughter with her,” she said.
As the Hubberts planned their trip to Russia, they talked a lot about how it was going to be and what Ana wanted to ask. Ana made some index cards with questions: “What is your favorite food?”... “How was it for you the day I was taken to the orphanage?”
Ana also picked out a locket for her birth mother which would hold two pictures – hers and Tanya’s. The parents also made picture books for Ana’s birth mother and for Tanya, documenting Ana’s growth from the moment of her adoption to the reunion ten years later.
The night when the two families met for dinner, Ana changed into a skirt – something that she never does, Diana said.
“When the four of us – Ana, John, Bob and me – iled into the glass elevator and headed down to the hotel’s lobby where we were to meet the family, I felt true apprehension. I put my arms around both of the children and said ‘We can do this,’” Diana said.
“But before we knew it, we were all meeting and hugging and it felt like we were in a cloud or a dream,” she said.
The interpreters helped the families to understand each other. Ana’s birth mother thanked the Hubberts for taking such good care of her. And the Hubberts were thankful and honored that “she would trust strangers like us to raise and love their delicate child.”
The next day, the Hubberts were invited to the birth family’s home.
“We walked into the dark hallway of this old Soviet building which needed repair and had a bad door,” Diana remembered. “Tanya told us that they lived on the 10th floor. For some reason, Ana got into the tiny elevator and, before you know it, the doors closed without anyone else and she began to go up. Tanya got this panicked look on her face and began running up the stairs to catch the elevator wherever it might stop. She was ‘saving’ her little sister,” Diana said.
The living room was set for a feast. It felt like the birth family had spent a month’s salary to serve their guests a fine meal. Before dinner, when Tanya was giving the Hubberts a tour of the apartment, she handed Ana a beautiful blonde doll. It was her favorite doll and she wanted Ana to have it.
“Tanya said that it would give her great joy knowing that her doll was being watched by her ‘little sister’,” Diana said.
The Hubberts in their turn bought the family a computer so that the girls could communicate by email.
Ana’s grandmother thanked the Hubberts over and over, saying that “now, after 10 years of wondering what became of her granddaughter (who they believed was quite sick), she could die in peace, knowing that she was healthy, happy and loved,” Diana said.
“Babushka kept going into her room throughout our visit and giving one of us another box of chocolate,” Diana said. “We ended up leaving with four boxes of Russian chocolate. Jen [the interpreter] told us later that this was very symbolic, as Russians in the past would buy and save chocolate for special occasions because it was so hard to get...”
“I know this gets a little philosophical,” Diane continued, “but I truly believe that everything that happened was meant to happen. As we tell Ana: her Russian mother and granny made the best decision they could with the information they were given, in the hard times that the Russian people were going through. And because they loved her so much, they wanted to give her the best chance in life.” RL
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
