Last March, my husband and I boarded a Delta jet bound for Moscow. Our destination was Penza, Russia, a city similar in size to New Orleans, about 400 miles south of Moscow.

Our lives were about to change. We were going from being a working couple with two professional careers to undertaking the most demanding, challenging, and rewarding job anyone can have: We were going to become parents. Waiting for us in Penza was a little boy who would soon be our son.

Warm Louisiana behind us, we stepped off the plane into the chill of Russian spring. Within the week, we’d be struggling through blowing snow with a toddler. In a blur of airplanes, trains and cars, we were in Penza, standing in front of a dull brick building hidden in the shadow of shabby apartment buildings. Suddenly, it began to snow – light, fluffy flakes dancing in the wind and bleak winter skies. It was Easter Sunday.

For months, we’d worked on our dossier, a stack of documents necessary to complete our international adoption. Like thousands of families who have traveled this same path to parenthood, we dutifully completed the small mountain of paperwork that is needed for both the U.S. and Russian governments. Eventually, the Russian Ministry of Education would use this information to match us with a child waiting for adoption. Our own government would use the same information to allow a small new citizen entry into a whole new world.

During the months of preparation, we received wonderful support from the families in LEEAF, the Louisiana Eastern European Adoptive Families. (See accompanying sidebar.) LEEAF was started by a group of people preparing for their own journeys halfway around the world to become parents.

When we learned that we had been matched with a waiting child in Penza, we were immediately in contact with another LEEAF family who’d adopted from the same small orphanage several years earlier. Armed with videos, photographs, and their beautiful daughter, they rushed to our home and shared their story, preparing us for what we’d see, do, and experience.

Standing in front of the House of Childhood, the paperwork that had dominated our lives for so many months was forgotten. We were about to meet our son! Soon, we were inside and introduced to the boy we’d dreamed of for many long months. Our family was complete. But ahead of us we still had a court hearing, much-anticipated daily visits to the orphanage to see our son, a new birth certificate and passport for him, an overnight train trip back to Moscow, a visit to the doctor, the American embassy, and the Russian consulate.

In a small Russian courtroom, the judge reviewed the mountain of paperwork that we’d prepared, asked us questions, and left the room. Our translator assured us that this was a normal part of the process. It felt anything but normal. The minutes ticked by in an extremely overheated room as snowflakes fell outside the window. We pretended to be calm. This must be what it was like when fathers and family weren’t allowed in the delivery room. After what seemed to be an eternity, the judge returned, signed the documents, and we became parents of a beautiful little boy named Alex.

Our LEEAF friends had given us a photo album of their daughter to share with the judge and the workers at the orphanage. The judge, who had been very stern throughout our court hearing, suddenly beamed with pride at the adorable little blond in the photos, and others gathered to get a glimpse of the child they’d last seen years ago. It was at that moment, standing in a courtroom half a world away, that we realized how much the children in the orphanage were loved by the people who cared for them, how deeply the judges felt the responsibility for uniting the children with their families – and the universal hope of all parents for happy, healthy lives for their children.

Just three months later, we were in a room full of other people who’d had similar experiences. Laughing children playing, parents chatting. No different from any other playground at any place in the United States. Many of these families would never have met except for the common experience they shared of adopting a child from Eastern Europe. Yearly, more than 4,200 children from Russia are adopted by American parents and thousands more are adopted from former Soviet states such as Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan. Here in the south, the number of Louisiana families with Eastern European adopted children is growing rapidly.

Soon we’ll mark the first anniversary of our adoption. We regularly send photos of our son with families heading off on their own journeys to Russia. He’s grown and changed so much in the past year. Although we can’t speak the same language and live half a world apart, we know there are many people sharing the joy of his life.

We’ve learned that there are many ways to make a family. It’s not always easy, or painless, or worry free. All children deserve a loving home, whether they were born in the United States or a foreign country. Adoption is a perfect way to make that happen.

When the full-to-capacity Delta flight from Moscow to New York landed this time last year, a brand new American citizen entered our country, safely carried in his mother’s arms. As his parents, my husband and I walked into a country we now saw in a different light, full of hope and opportunity for a family of three.
Welcome to America, son.

Copyright 2003, M&L Publishing, all rights reserved.