“I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
—AUDRE LORDE
Welcome to my world.” My words were published in the New York Post on October 17, 2001, just a little over a month after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. It was a controversial statement, but it was the truth. Envelopes filled with anthrax were sent to television stations and five US senators instigated national panic, but I was used to checking my mail for white powder every day. Grand Central Station was threatened with a bomb, but I’d been looking under my car for signs of foul play, my heart beating quickly in anticipation of an explosion, for a decade by then. I’d been avoiding windows for fear of bullets since Barnett Slepian was gunned down at his kitchen window in front of his wife and children in 1998. I tensed my body every time I walked from my car to Choices.
When a friend called me the morning of 9/11, telling me to turn on the television, I felt not shock, but powerful despair as I watched the second plane hit. I called Choices, told my staff to send the patients home, got dressed, and drove over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. There, on that perfect fall day, I could see the black smoke rising in the background to my right. At the clinic, my staff and I hovered around the radio and waited for directives until it became clear that I should evacuate the building. We hurried outside together, promising to keep in touch. I stepped into my car and turned on the radio just as it was announced that New York was under a terrorist attack, and people should not be driving in the city. Fortunately it was still early, so I was able to cross the bridge back into Manhattan.
Two days later, a friend and I drove down to the site of the attack. We parked some blocks away due to the phalanx of police protection that prevented us from coming within a mile of the site. I could smell the charred remains of the towers and see the black, dripping steel rising high from the smoldering ground. Already the hawkers with their souvenirs camped out on the sidewalks. Looking into the dazed faces around me, I sensed that we all shared the same reality. In the stores, on the trains, on the streets, everyone had a sense of connectedness that I had never experienced before. We were in a war zone and we had no idea what might be coming next. The immediate shock and fear of another attack was slowly replaced by searing grief, anger, and rage.
New York State attempted to provide mental health support to those affected by the attack through a program called Project Liberty, a collaboration between the Office of Mental Health, local governments, and nearly two hundred local agencies that provided free and anonymous mental health services throughout the declared disaster area. Choices, like other mental health centers, wanted to do what we could, so we offered immediate and long-term services through the program. For many, the physical wound on ground zero was a smoldering metaphor for emotional and psychological wounds that would never heal.
“How could this have happened?” I never asked that question. My body and mind were used to living in a constant state of functional anxiety, and as I absorbed this blow like the others that had come before, I wondered at myself for not reacting with more emotion.
THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 provided an ideal context for Bush to lead his holy crusade as the god-ordained protector of American citizens, born and unborn. All Americans were awash in a sea of righteous patriotism. This was not the time for questioning or opposition to a “war president.” It was the perfect environment for Bush to attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact a deeply conservative reproductive and sexual agenda with the ultimate goal of banning abortion.
On January 22, 2001, the twenty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade and President George W. Bush’s first full day in office, he reinstated the draconian “gag” rule, restricting funding for international family planning and denying medical information on abortion to poor women treated at federally funded clinics. The Bush administration’s opening salvo made it perfectly clear that the US was going to use its enormous power and prestige to tell the world in no uncertain terms that girls’ and women’s lives were not important.
In the wake of 9/11, Bush followed his first act as president by withholding $34 million in funding for women’s health care from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Then the United States became the only developed nation not to ratify the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Against all fact-based anecdotal and experiential information, the administration insisted that knowledge about sex encouraged promiscuity, mandating abstinence-only programs in schools. The administration limited vital information about birth control, even removing literature about condom effectiveness from the Department of Health and Human Services’ website. Instead, they used the space to spread misinformation about abortion causing breast cancer and depression.
This was followed by a series of vastly restrictive acts: the charter of the Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protection granted status as “human subjects” to embryos for the first time; the US House of Representatives passed legislation allowing health care entities to discriminate against any provider who even offered information about abortion; the president appointed anti-choice extremists to key FDA committees and to oversee Title X; and Congress prohibited the more than one hundred thousand women serving in the military and living on American bases overseas from obtaining abortion services in overseas military hospitals, even with their own money (to which Choices responded by offering abortions to military women at a reduced rate).
It was clear that the face of the war was changing once again. The combatants remained the same, but the nature of the attacks against women expanded into new territory. The Clinton era had seen a guerrilla war waged against abortion rights, with antis swarming abortion clinics, killing doctors, making overt threats, and ambushing patients on the streets. They had also begun chipping away at abortion rights incrementally with legislation and lawsuits in multiple states. These attacks were effective to a certain extent, but the antis lacked the main prize—the bully pulpit. When George W. Bush took office, they won that, too. The antis no longer felt disenfranchised or alienated; now, the re-criminalization of abortion was much closer on the horizon. They leveraged their new support in the White House to help Bush fight what could only be described as a total war against reproductive freedom.
Women of the United States began falling prey to the quiet, carefully planned “stealth strategy” that characterized the Bush era. Realizing that the goal of overturning Roe remained elusive, the antis focused on achieving that same end by making it very difficult, and in some states almost impossible, to provide the procedure. The strategy had its roots in the 1992 US Supreme Court decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which declared for the first time that states had authority to regulate abortion clinics performing first trimester abortions (as opposed to only regulating those who provided second trimester abortions), as long as they didn’t place an “undue burden” on women’s access to abortions. The vague language of the ruling left states open to the antis’ creative applications. They found ways to create small hurdles for clinics to climb if they wanted to stay in operation. Relatively benign on their own, these little obstacles piled up, making it more and more difficult for clinics to offer services. The goal was to create an environment where, in the words of one anti-choice leader, “abortion may indeed be perfectly legal, but no one can get one.”
Their strategy was effective. Between 1995 and 2003, approximately 350 anti-choice measures were enacted, protecting pharmacists who refused to fill birth control prescriptions on moral or religious grounds, preventing physicians from performing most abortions, requiring state-controlled counseling and waiting periods for abortion, and mandating parental involvement in minors’ abortions. There was also a rise in bogus malpractice cases brought against providers claiming that women were “coerced” into having abortions, and that many women didn’t know they were actually “killing their babies.” Most cases were dismissed or withdrawn, but each time a doctor was accused of malpractice, the ensuing legal fees and damage to the clinic’s reputation did almost as much harm as if the cases had gone to trial.
Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) Laws, designed to add excessive regulations and extra costs to abortion clinics, formed another arm of the total war campaign. States began requiring clinics to meet regulations that far exceeded the usual requirements of most medical facilities, including increased equipment, design, and training costs, higher licensing fees, and more documentation requirements. Some states mandated staffing levels above those usually needed for first-trimester abortions. New zoning ordinances were also passed to force clinics to move. They drove up the cost of abortions, placing them out of reach of many women, and forcing some clinics out of business.
During the Bush administration Choices had to change some of our practices, including rewording our consent forms, to conform to the new legal requirements. It was the most violative period of government interference in Choices’ entire history. Aside from being licensed and regulated by New York State, Choices was also accredited by the Ambulatory Association of Health Care Centers (AAAHC), which gave us excellent reviews after inspecting the facility. But when the New York State Department of Health, which oversees the AAAHC regulators, came for an inspection one month later, their inspectors managed to find problems with the fire alarms, weak water pressure in two of our faucets, and gaps in our ceiling tiles—issues that were shared by the entire building, not just the clinic. Still, they threatened to close us down unless we made immediate repairs, which totaled approximately $400,000.
I had navigated such regulatory battles since Choices was still Flushing Women’s, and I’d always found a way to survive. But many clinics simply could not manage the prohibitive cost of these attacks. The cost of abortions was always the one thing in health care that decreased. Patients received complete first trimester abortion care for under $400 dollars, a fee that had remained the same for twenty-five years. And since many providers often lowered their fees or waived them entirely for those in need, it became difficult, and sometimes impossible, to make ends meet. State by state, clinics began shutting down, until 87 percent of counties in the United States had no abortion providers.
One of the most maddening aspects of the stealth strategy was that it was conducted in the name of “women’s health” in order to garner public support. Stricter regulations for clinics and laws mandating “unbiased” counseling were characterized as protections for women. The antis had found a new defense against accusations that they valued the fetus’s life more than the mother’s: turning the argument back on its head, they retorted that the mother and fetus had a sacred bond, and in honoring the “baby,” they were also honoring the mother. They were slapping a women’s rights label on fetal rights so that they could proclaim themselves women’s rights activists, co-opting the language of feminism and thus pushing even more Americans to the anti-choice side of the reproductive rights continuum. Now, you could be “pro-life” and a feminist, too.
Pro-choice advocates were forced into a continually defensive posture. We lacked state power over the levers of government and we didn’t have the support of powerful institutions like the Church, nor the millions of corporate dollars that were funneled into the right-to-life movement and the Republican party. The pro-choice movement literally lost ground every day as more clinics closed down and more Americans bought into the anti-choice vision. How could we fight against this multi-headed pro-life Hydra?
I thought perhaps the key lay in changing the legal foundation. Roe determined that the right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action was broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy (within a gestational framework), thus classifying it as a fundamental right. But I had always believed that arguing for the right to reproductive freedom under the same umbrella as the right to read pornography in one’s home was a tenuous arrangement. The US Constitution contains no express right to privacy, so the foundational legal pillar of women’s reproductive freedom is vulnerable.
As I had written in my letter to Senator Hatch so many years ago, the right to reproductive freedom is as fundamental as the right not to be a slave. When birth control finally became available in all its forms, women’s rights activists and feminists said that women were no longer slaves to their biology, that pregnancy would no longer be the guiding and primary directing principal of their lives. The legalization of abortion went even further toward freeing women from this constriction. In a sense it was a complete negation of the Freudian principle that “biology is destiny.” But the ruling meant to uphold this right was full of holes inflicted state by state, its strength leaking out the sides. Now geography was destiny.
We needed a new starting place, a stronger legal base from which to articulate and ground our rights, one as airtight as laws against slavery. As the stealth laws threatened to defeat the impact of Roe, I became more and more convinced that the right to abortion should have been articulated under the Thirteenth Amendment. This would frame reproductive freedom as a universal human right, and perhaps give the pro-choice movement the strength to hold the relentless attacks by the antis at bay.
The matter became even more urgent when President Bush dropped another bomb in 2003, signing into law the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, the first legislation to criminalize an abortion procedure since Roe v. Wade. The law forbade the procedure even if a woman’s health was endangered, mandated prison terms and financial penalties for doctors who recommended abortions, and allowed a woman’s male partner or parents to sue her if she had the procedure against their will. Planned Parenthood and two other organizations sued the government, and the ban was struck down by three federal district courts, but this unprecedented attack was the most audacious yet against Roe.
Outraged by this blatant disrespect for women’s rights and well-being, I brought my ideas to a Veteran Feminists of America event honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wanted to hear her opinion on whether or not lawyers should be working toward recasting reproductive freedom as part of the Thirteenth Amendment. “I have criticized the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade—not, of course, for the result,” Ginsberg replied when I asked her my question. “I think the notion [is] that it isn’t just some private act; it is a woman’s right to control her own life.” Roe had made abortion legal, but it was not strong enough to cast reproductive freedom as a positive moral value.
The morality of the decision had been defined by the religious class. Even people who supported the right to abortion said that despite abortion being legal, and possibly the best decision under the circumstances, it would never really be objectively moral; it would never be a purely positive good. Women making the decision remained suspects or victims at best, and murderers at worst. Saying “I had an abortion” aloud hadn’t gotten any easier since 1973. Abortion was ever a tragedy, a necessary evil, something to be kept private and about which to feel ashamed.
As long as people see abortion as immoral, its legality will be in danger. How, then, to move beyond the legality and embrace the morality? How to fully combine the two and produce ethical laws? How to create a transcendent class of women as active moral agents with which people identify and will fight to defend? The future of abortion still comes down to that fundamental question: Can we really have abortion without apology?
Women must gain the kind of biological entitlement (and the sense of power and agency) that comes so much more easily to men. To secure reproductive freedom as a fundamental right and abortion as a moral choice, we must forge our own paths to selfhood. And with these selves, we must create and assent to laws and cultural norms that serve us and withdraw consent to those that do not. As Sojourner Truth said, “If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it?” Why, indeed.
The movement was too quiet. There was little coordinated pro-choice activism. The main theater of battle was the courts, where consistent legal defense was necessary to attempt to block the cascade of restrictions that were proposed. NARAL, NOW, the Feminist Majority, and Planned Parenthood—the main pro-choice institutions—remained in the front of the firing lines, but they continued to lose both legal battles and the hearts and minds of many women.
Meanwhile, the clinics struggled on, and the patients kept coming.
THE GOING WAS TOUGH at Choices. I had been glad to help support people who needed help after 9/11 through the Mental Health Center, but the massive legal fees I had incurred in recent years made the continued subsidy of Mental Health Center expenses impossible. In order for me to keep Choices running, I had to disband the center after ten years of operation. I had created something that was very dear to me, but I had also learned when to let go.
Riding horses, that beloved pastime that had given me solace through the worst trials of my life, also faded into the past. I endured several traumatic injuries to my hips, and the pain became so excruciating that I began to have difficulty walking and bending. I was finally forced to have hip replacement surgery. By then I’d sold Garrison and donated all twenty-seven of my animals to good homes. I moved to East Hampton and brought only Hollywould. I kept her at a stable in East Hampton for a couple of years, but it was becoming more and more obvious that I would never really be able to ride again.
After fully recovering from my surgery, I went with Mahin for a summer weekend retreat to the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown. I’d spent so many summers of my childhood in the country, at overnight camps where the days were hot and steamy and the nights required cool clothing. But this was the first summer that I had embraced since my childhood, the first summer I felt so powerfully the passing of time, the first time I anticipated greeting the first coloring of the leaves in the fall with alarm. The first time I felt I was aging. I was beginning to feel that so much of my life was behind me.
I took a trip to Normandy to walk the massive beaches with their history of blood and battles. I stopped in Caen, where the young Charlotte Corday had grown up, and then went on to Rouen, where Joan of Arc was tried and burned. I entered a small museum and walked down a winding set of stairs to a room filled with tableaux vivants of famous stages of Joan’s career. I rested in front of each one, relishing my past imaginings, when a young family with a son about five years old came in behind me. The parents stood with their child between them, pointing to scenes in the montage, teaching, showing—a transmission of cultural memory before my eyes.
How would it feel, I thought, to have a little girl next to me right now?
That night, I wrote in my journal:
I pick up this novel—Kaddish for an Unborn Child, by Imre Kertész—and by the third page I am crying, because I know I will be faced with thinking about it—no, not thinking about it—feeling it. Feeling that question, that question without answer, the question that I always answered so glibly, so matter of factly: What would my child have been like if I hadn’t had an abortion?
There is an answer inside me. It came out the night before the abortion, the night I wrote “For one night I am a mother.”
Of course I’d thought about this unborn child before, but I would only allow myself fleeting encounters with the fantasy of being a mother. I imagined a small, intense girl walking beside me on the beach, the whitecaps moving in horizontal lines while our footprints made matching patterns in the sand. But I would quickly put these thoughts away, forgetting her for months at a time. After all, I was busy with the reality I had chosen, and it had never included a child.
Now, at age fifty-eight, I allowed myself to think about what had always seemed impossible. I wanted a child. I wanted a daughter.
At first, this intense desire would come in waves and beat at the shores of my heart and then subside, leaving me with only a memory of the storm. I tried to be realistic, going over exactly how I would have to change my life in order to incorporate a child. For so long I couldn’t imagine making these changes. Then the desire took hold of me with such a compelling force that I felt like I had succumbed to a tsunami. It was a moment of grace, an epiphany, a gift. It was the culmination of so much of my life, a setting free. I was going to adopt a little girl.
I reasoned I probably had at least twenty years left. If I lived to seventy-eight, then she would be twenty-five years old, the age that I was when my father died. Would the years that I had left be enough to give her a good foundation? Would I be able to integrate her into a life built totally around my own rhythms? How would it feel to be a mother? Would I like her? Would I love her? How would it feel for her? Would she like me, love me?
I had known many of love’s faces. I had been consumed by passion, loved tenderly, possessively, and selfishly. But I had never loved unconditionally, the way parental love is described. And it came to me that the little girl I would adopt had not experienced limitless love either. Perhaps she had not experienced love at all—only its pale shadow through her caretakers. Strangers to this reality, we would have to find our way together. I found this thought strangely comforting, as if I would be adopting a comrade-in-arms.
My only experience with human adoption had been at Choices. Occasionally I’d receive adoption requests with photos of happy and seemingly well-adjusted white families desperate to have a child, and willing to pay for one. I could not imagine asking a woman to keep a pregnancy she did not want for $10,000 or a million dollars. It would be akin to asking her to set a price on her freedom or on her free will. I wanted to adopt someone already born, waiting, alone, unwanted and abandoned.
I initially thought of adopting a Chinese girl, since the Chinese were notorious for one-child-only policies, sex selection abortions, and ubiquitous female infanticide. But in truth, I was not confident that I could deal with raising a child of a different race, with all the added complications that brings. I thought I could minimize the challenges by having a child with my heritage in common. Since Russia was so much a part of me, it seemed natural to go there.
I knew that taking a child out of a foreign orphanage was a huge risk. AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome—I’d heard the tragic stories of adoptions gone horribly wrong. I wanted a child I could raise, but not an infant. There could be too many potential medical problems that wouldn’t have manifested themselves in the early stages of development, and I knew I could not take on the responsibility of a special needs child. After much research and many discussions with Mahin, I decided that a three-year-old would be the best fit.
I began the adoption proceedings.
ONE YEAR LATER my plane to Russia lurched in the icy darkness. Anxiety engulfed me as I looked at the white whirlwind outside my window. Now, by adopting, was I admitting that something was missing? Had I fallen into that essentialist hole of thinking that no matter what a woman does, she will not be a complete woman until she has a child? Was this the actualization of all my becoming—or a final existential crisis of meaning?
Hurtling through the sky to meet my little girl, I forced my thoughts to stop racing. I knew the answers. The decision to adopt her had come as organically as the decision to create Patient Power, to build Choices, to expand to Russia, to breathe freely and live my life as a fully realized individual. These acts were all results of a process of decision making of which I was hardly conscious. The fact that I was fifty-eight? Well, it had taken me that long to be ready. I was ready.
The day after my arrival in Moscow, I drove to Children’s Home Number 13, where my little girl was a numbered and filed ward of the Russian state. She was three years and two months old. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her birth date was September 26, 2001. Her name was Irena, which, I was told, meant “peace” in Russian. That was all I knew about her when I pulled up in front of the orphanage.
For the adoption to proceed on schedule, I had to make a decision by the end of the week. After that, I’d return to New York for two or three months until Irena was available for official adoption. I, who had made so many decisions in so many crisis situations, found myself humbled. As with abortion, this was a lifelong, irrevocable decision. Whatever the intended or unintended consequences were, I had to live with them permanently. This child would live with them, too. I was making a decision that would not only change my life forever, but hers. The power and audacity of it all took my breath away.
I opened the door and heat rushed at me. The smells were wet and institutional, like a New York City public hospital. Inside, I was met with pure Russian bureaucracy: filling out papers, waiting, and filling out more papers. After what seemed an endless amount of time, the director finally approached me. “Would you like to have tea or immediately proceed to meet Irena?”
I turned and saw a part of her for the first time. She was peeking out from behind an adult arm, wearing two of those classic crunched bows people put on top of the heads of little girls. She was crying and rubbing her eyes with her fists.
“Irenitchka, go say hello to Mama,” the director told her. She came over to me and put her little thin arms around my neck. There was hardly any weight to her touch. I held her tight against me as she whimpered, “Ma Ma Ma Ma.”
Had they told her that her mother finally had come to get her? What would they tell her if I didn’t want to adopt her after all? Did she have any idea of how high the stakes were? In her own child’s way was she attempting to be the best little girl she could so she would be chosen? My heart froze at the thought of her potential level of performance anxiety.
She already had a life, a reference group to which she was attached. Was this her family? Would she miss them? There were approximately twenty children in her group with only one other girl. I learned that it was not unusual for parents to put their children in orphanages because they could not afford to feed them—another casualty of the breakup of the Soviet Union. These were the children who were not aborted between the twelfth and the fifteenth or the thirty-fifth abortion. They called every caretaker Mama. Most would likely never be adopted. Would it have been better for them to be aborted? I knew their future: bleak prostitution for many of the girls, drunken unemployment for the boys.
When I walked with Irena into the playroom the other children crowded near me, tried to sit on my lap, called me Mama, looked up at me with wanting eyes. Irena blocked them, already proprietary. I stroked her thin hair in those two big bows. I saw that she was practically bald in the back of her head. They told me it was because she moved her head back and forth on her pillow at night, a typical orphanage self-soothing behavior pattern to help her sleep.
She went to the couch, stood on it, and lifted up the curtain, pointing outside and saying, “Sobaka. Sobaka.” Dog. I saw a small mutt who seemed to live there. I laughed and took out a photo of my dog Pushkin, saying, “This is my Sobaka.” Irena looked at the picture and then turned again to the window to show me hers. “Sobaka doggie,” I said. She repeated it. I had created a common word—a common world.
I SPENT THE WEEK visiting Irena every day until the time came to decide. Her caretakers told me how much more engaged and responsive she had become since meeting me.
I could see it in her eyes. Now that she had found me, she was probably wondering if I would keep her. I tried to imagine her three-year-old consciousness. What must it be like to be so helpless, so powerless? Even though all children experience powerlessness in different degrees, hers was so absolute.
This child, abandoned at birth—unwanted. Her skin was too dry, speech too delayed, her mother too young and too poor. Was Irena the result of the mother’s first real love, a one-night stand, a rape or a trick? What act of desperation led her mother to abandon the premature baby girl in the hospital where she would spend the first two months of her life in the intensive care unit?
“Do you want to proceed with this referral?” the director asked.
Others were in the room, but I felt alone. “Yes, I want to proceed. Yes. I do.” I felt dizzy with the decision. I changed my life and embraced my fate.
The director asked me what name she was to be called. At this moment I felt a sense of possession: this is my child, and I must give her a name. I had come to Russia with the idea of naming my daughter Sasha. I spontaneously combined Sasha and Irena and said, “Sasharina.” It sounded magical and musical and flexible. The caretakers found the name beautiful. I had created something new that would become part of our legend.
On the last day of my trip, as I said goodbye for now, I gave Sasharina my picture. “Ya vernoos,” I told her. I will return. She surprised all of us when she held the picture out with both hands and placed it against her heart. Then she kissed it. I was profoundly moved by this expression. No tribute in the past or in the future could ever equal this one. I thought, “This is how love begins.”
BACK HOME, thoughts of becoming a mother crowded out the obsessive worry about liquidating pensions and investments to keep Choices going during what was becoming a very difficult financial bind. However anxious I was, I believed in my ability to turn it all around. I had a daughter now. I had someone who gave me more than myself to survive for.
I called family and friends and caught them up on the details of the trip. Some listened in wide-eyed amazement, while others expressed anxiety about their losing priority in my orbit and my being too old. To my dismay my twenty-year friendship with Phyllis ended. It became obvious that she did not have the desire or will to deal with my having a child. It was deeply disappointing, but I couldn’t dwell on it. Like marriage, divorce, and death, having children restructures one’s relationships.
Other friends were supportive. The sculptor Linda Stein invited me to a political gathering for History in Action, a listserv for Second and Third Wave feminists. I walked into her loft in Soho and recognized a young journalist, Jennifer Baumgardner, who had done direct action work on the abortion issue. She was visibly pregnant, and I made my way over to her to share my “pregnancy.” Later that evening I surprised myself (and everyone there who knew me) even more. When Linda got up in front of the room to welcome everyone, she asked me to come up and say something. In the past, I would have thanked her and presented some political issue or action for everyone to think about. This time, I began with the words, “I have just returned from Siberia . . . I am a mother.”
Yet I had to laugh at my current version of motherhood. Before I left Omsk, I had made arrangements to speak with Sasha a couple of times a week over the phone. It was the only way I could think of to keep some kind of connection with her. Now, I found myself standing in my kitchen at 3 a.m. saying, “Sasha, sobaka-doggie” and “Ya vernoos.” Sasha didn’t respond to this. The only thing I heard back was the sound of screaming children and then silence as the calls dropped.
I called my attorney and changed my will to include my daughter. And of course I went shopping for everything that I thought she and I might need. The consumer landscape of motherhood was all encompassing—clothing, toys, DVDs, sheets, furniture—an endless sea of colorful inanimate objects.
The director of the orphanage had mentioned that the building needed new flooring in the main room and new curtains in another. I arranged to take care of this, thinking of Sasha’s friends who would be left behind. The time passed with preparations and my labors of love. In these small and big ways, my life changed.
WHEN I RETURNED to Russia to get Sasharina, I entered the orphanage purposefully. I stuck my head into the door of the playroom and stretched my neck to look for her. I saw a little blonde head turning to look for me, then her face, filled with recognition. Her eyes shouted, “You have returned!” Sasha rushed to meet me as I opened my arms wide. I felt every part of her smiling as I swept her up into my arms and held her tight against me.
The audience of caretakers watched as the other children gathered around us. My arms were not wide enough to hold all the need, and my heart broke a little with the attempt to stretch it. The orphanage receded as our car pulled away and we watched as the kids outside ran toward the car, waving to us, their figures fading in the snow. Sasha sat quietly. I thought how utterly small and vulnerable she was. I put my arm around her and she leaned against me.
I brought Sasha up to our hotel room, alone together for the first time. She immediately morphed into a whirling dervish, running through the rooms, jumping on and off the bed, turning light switches on and off. I tried to lay her down on the bed and the pillows started flying. She was scared. I was overwhelmed, frustrated, tired, and getting angry. I managed to place a call to Mahin. “What do I do?”
She said, “Just hold her.”
I realized that Sasha was having an acute anxiety attack. Whatever could her three-year-old mind make of all this? She had been taken away from all the security and familiarity she had ever known, barraged with new sights, sounds, and terrifying large spaces with this woman who spoke strange words and tried to hold her. It must have been some kind of nightmare.
I went into the bedroom with her, closed the door, and turned off the lights. We lay down on the bed and I held her next to me. She screamed and thrashed. She tried to push me away. “Shh . . . it’s alright,” I told her. “Sasha, shh—try and sleep. I won’t hurt you.”
She finally fell asleep, exhausted.
The last night we were in Moscow, I took Sasha to Red Square. It was snowing lightly. The cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral rose to the black sky in fantastic shapes and colors like snow cones. We basked in the moment, and I knew that one day I would be back here with her.
She was wild again in the airport. We were late for our flight. I found a cart, lifted Sasha, put her in the pullout where pocketbooks are usually kept, placed the luggage on the bottom, and began to run. Racing through the airport to get to the gate, she put her arms out like a bird and made flying motions, screaming with delight. I passed escalators, reading signage at warp speed as I yelled, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” My chest felt like it was going to explode. I had to make this flight to New York.
Finally, we arrived at the security section for our gate. I tried to catch my breath, but Sasha ran in and out through the metal detectors. I followed her, setting off the alarms with my metal hip. I stopped to reorganize our bags, and when I looked up, Sasha was gone. I looked around and saw an older woman leaning over her. She brought Sasha over to me and asked, “Is this your daughter?”
“Yes,” I said as I tried to hold onto Sasha.
“She says she doesn’t have a mother.”
I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach and struggled to gain control. It was too much to explain, so I simply thanked the woman for catching her.
FEBRUARY 15, 2006. It was our family’s anniversary—two years from the day Sasha came to New York with me. I took her out to dinner and sang “Happy Anniversary” to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” which was her favorite song (birthdays were not celebrated in the orphanage). Mahin sat next to her and told her the story of her homecoming. There would come a day when she would ask for a more complete story, for me to tell her where she came from and why she was here. I would tell her as much as I knew.
As I put Sasha to bed later that night, she smiled. “I know who you are,” she said.
“Who am I?”
“You are my mother.”
“Yes. And you are my daughter.”
She laughed. After two years, she was beginning to trust this, and so was I. We had found each other. I was Sasha’s home, and she was mine.
My mother and Murray, her companion for thirty-five years now, formed part of our home, too, when they came to visit me shortly after I adopted Sasha. My mother had been going blind for the last three years with macular degeneration, and I could gauge the level of her declining sight by the nuances of her critique of me. “Your ass is too wide,” she used to say. “Your breasts are showing. Why are you wearing flat shoes? You should dye your hair blonde again.” Now she just touched me and told me how much she loved me, her frail hands embracing me while her clouded eyes searched my face. Oddly, I missed the criticism. This new expression of love felt somehow inauthentic.
But watching my mother get to know and love Sasha, I felt my love for her change. For the first time I experienced the joy of family and a true sense of being home. I thought of the moment I’d brought Sasha home to meet my mother. I’d slowed the car, wanting to freeze the moment of anticipation, to hold it forever. Sasha ran across the lawn as my mother watched from the window . . . and then she was in my mother’s arms, my mother, my daughter, then me. My mother had always had problems giving and receiving, but here was a gift that was defined by the giving. With Sasha there were no boundaries, and now the boundaries to my love for my mother also dissolved. I watched the light in my mother’s eyes as she held Sasha tightly and kissed her with passionate force, laughing loudly at Sasha’s funny antics and mothering her in a way I did not remember experiencing myself.
She became ill with Alzheimer’s. She was afraid she would be put away, and no amount of reassurance would convince her otherwise. When she began to die, I went to stay with her in Florida. In the pain and struggle of her oncoming death, I found more warmth and intensity than ever before. I was her daughter, her sister, her mother, and her friend. As I held her in my arms, her childishness became a bittersweet burden. I diapered her, fed her, gave her medication, soothed her when she cried out, kissed her all over. I sensed memories of the time I existed within her body. I was holding her in her hospital bed at home when she began to turn into a corpse, her beloved Chopin waltzes and nocturnes playing on the CD player. It was the most intimate and loving interaction I ever had with her.
A FEW DAYS LATER, I sat in my house on the bay, eagerly awaiting the sunrise. I wrote as I looked for the light of dawn. I was no longer afraid of death. I said yes to life because that is all we know. And living with Sasha made the whole experience bigger, almost epic, and at the same time intimate, sacred, and precious.
Sasha would carry me into the future. I was a mother, and all the philosophical questions of my life were now played out in the smallest of places. I knew there would be no lack of battles for her to fight in the generational struggle for women’s rights. As my ancestors had done for me, I would instill in her a sense of romance in revolution. I would teach her that it is never purely a cerebral or theoretical process, although analysis can give it form and direction. Revolution at its core is driven by love.
I took Sasha with me to Choices sometimes. Outside the entrance, we’d see dependable Sister Dorothy, still standing outside the front doors handing out rosaries and pink plastic fetuses in rain or shine after all these years. We would nod “good mornings” when we saw each other, but we never really entered into conversation until she found out that I had adopted a child. She began to give me children’s books, little Bible stories that I accepted but did not use. Aware of my love of philosophy, she even gave me a copy of “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,” the famous treatise in which Kierkegaard writes of the responsibility of single-minded spiritual seeking, offering clues to the nature of the good while insisting that each of us find it for ourselves. Though I never forgot that she was the enemy of everything I held sacred, I was touched by her gesture.
One day when I stopped to chat with her outside the clinic, I shared with Sister Dorothy how much I loved being a mother. She smiled. “I am sure you are a good mother. But you would be a better one if you stopped killing all those little Sashas in there.”
At that moment I was filled with absolute certainty of the one true thing I knew: that there were women and girls who were waiting for my help that day and for the foreseeable future, and that this war to stop me and others from doing that would never end in my lifetime. I was grateful to play my part and I had learned to love the struggle.
Sasha took my hand. Together we turned and walked into Choices.