I Think Today Is My Daughter’s Birthday

I say it that way on purpose. Not “today is my daughter’s birthday.” I think it is. When we traveled to Russia to meet her, the paperwork gave us some numbers, but we didn’t know whether they’d been translated from the traditional European date format to the American one, and no one seemed to know either.

This was twenty-five years ago, long before anything like Google Translate existed to help us sort it out. Our translator, Natalya, didn’t know the answer either and suggested it would be whatever we wanted.

We chose August 9th. I don’t remember why. It might be right. It might not be.

That was the first of many things we didn’t know, taking the leap off the cliff toward this international adoption of the daughter we longed for.

The paperwork we were given before we flew 7,000 miles to meet her was two paragraphs long. We believed it at first. After we arrived, we were certain it wasn’t true.

Medical Summary: The mother was 32, smoked, used narcotics and alcohol, and had chronic bronchitis. This was her fifth pregnancy, and she was not under a physician’s care. It was her fourth live birth, and it was premature. There was early leaking of amniotic fluids. There was a delay in the fetus’ intrauterine development.

Diagnosis at birth: a light case of perinatal encephalopathy of the post-hypoxial genesis and a delay in intrauterine development, hypoplastic type. Currently, she is being raised in the orphanage.

That same paperwork gave us her birth weight: 5 pounds, 15 ounces, seventeen and a half inches long. I don’t know if that number was even accurate, given the quality of medical care available in a remote Russian city in the late nineties, one far removed from the resources of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

What I did know was what a healthy baby looked like, because I’d given birth to my son, who was 9 pounds, 2 ounces, more than 50% bigger than she was. By the time we met her at 16 months, she was still only 15 pounds.

When making conversation with the caregivers at the orphanage through our translator, we asked about her extremely short hair. They told us it had been beautiful and long but that it had to be cut because she was too hot.

What I know for certain is that at sixteen months old, malnourished, starving toddlers don’t have long hair, and are certainly not hot in orphanages where the heat was routinely cut off in the middle of winter when the high temps hovered at zero degrees Fahrenheit.

It was just one more detail that didn’t reflect what we saw in front of us.

Even her name is questionable. On the paperwork, she was Lyubov.

Love.

I’ve wondered if that was a name her birth mother chose for her or if it was assigned somewhere along the way by the hospital, the baby hospital, or the orphanage. Another piece of her identity that was perhaps decided by strangers because there was no one there to care about the details. Lyubov became Catherine, and we called her Katie, because it was a name we loved and went with our very Russian last name of Kushnerov.

I wonder about Katie’s birth mother today, too. She’d been pregnant five times and was not married to Katie’s birth father. What were the circumstances of this pregnancy? This was her fourth live birth, and I wonder what happened to the others. Did they live with her, and Katie was just one too many? Were there other children given up before her? Did she go on to have other children?

Before my son Nick was born, I had two miscarriages, and there were medical reasons that made another pregnancy too risky to pursue, which is part of why we adopted. I had the luxury of choosing a different path after my losses. I don’t know if she had any choice at all, in the pregnancies and the adoption, or what access she had to prevent becoming pregnant in the first place.

So today I wonder if she wonders about this tiny girl, born approximately 27 years ago. Does the woman who gave birth to my daughter have any idea that the baby she couldn’t keep grew up 7,000 miles away, in a family with a Russian last name and a little of that heritage? Does she have any mental picture of who Lyubov is now at twenty-seven? And is she curious, too?

I’ll probably never know. I’ve made a kind of peace with moving forward without knowing. But I’m curious because I think today is my daughter’s birthday.

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This post originally appeared on Substack.