From the second I caught sight of you – your fragile, nervous but beaming smile, your enormous come-dive-in-me eyes – you were my daughter, my Maya. If anyone thinks the love-hit with a baby who hasn’t come out of your body is in any way less powerful than that felt by a mother who has experienced birth, they’re wrong. Our hit was as big as they get. I suspect that our love was so easy because you and I were always meant to find each other: you were just waiting for me get to the end of my journey to you.
That journey started when, at the age of 15, I began struggling with endometriosis, an illness I always knew would affect my chances of having my own biological child. I clung on for as long as I could, but ten years later I had to throw up my hands, surrender and have the hysterectomy. At 25, that ultimately restored my body, my sanity and my life. But it did cruelly take away my right to give birth. To begin with, I found it hard to handle the grief of losing something so intrinsic to my sense of where I had thought my life would go. I’d always wanted to be a mother, always wanted a little girl, so the concept of adoption was something I wasn’t yet able to consider. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to deal with it until I healed the wounds and got my breath back. I also needed to decide not to wait for Mr Right to share parenthood with.
First, I needed to find the strength to think about putting myself in the hands of other people: authorities in both the UK and India, social workers and orphanages. And thank goodness I did wait until I was 35 before I contacted social services and set the wheels in motion. Any earlier, and I don’t think I would have made it to the finishing post. I needed a lot of emotional strength to fight what would turn out to be some pretty unpleasant people – people who seemed to take what at times felt like sadistic pleasure in erecting as many barriers as possible to stop me finding my daughter; people who appeared to be exploiting the plight of children in an orphanage for financial gain, extracting endless so-called “donations”.
As with every prospective adoptive parent, I had first to go through the UK assessment process, which is organised through social services, but can cost around £3,000. This involved a series of interviews and challenges: friends and family were scrutinised and interrogated, not only as the larger family of my future child, but also about my suitability as a parent. Of course, the situation was complicated by the fact that I wanted to adopt as a single parent, and adopt a child with a different skin colour (I had already decided I would like to adopt from India, a country and culture with which I had a deep connection). Of course, I understood why checks had to be made and questions asked, but I met people on my adoption preparation course who were turned away for all sorts of destructive reasons: too old, too middle class… In assessing me, social workers challenged two of my dearest friends, who are married: did the wife think I had ever had an affair with her husband? What possessed them to think they had the right to walk into someone’s house, their marriage, and ask such a thing?
Still, I just concentrated on the task of jumping through whatever hoops UK bureaucracy demanded, and hour after hour of questioning. The social worker wanted to know about every aspect of my life and about my attitudes – my sex life, what I would do if my child turned out to be gay, why the bedroom I’d allocated for my child hadn’t got any toys or cuddly animals (which, to my mind, would have been unbelievably inappropriate: I did not have their permission to be a parent yet and, more importantly, surely we build up a child’s room as we get to know them, or at least when their arrival is imminent, not months ahead).
Finally, on November 12, 2003, I was at last given the go-ahead to venture to India to find my daughter. I decided to adopt in India once I realised my chances of adopting a baby in Britain were so slim. I had travelled widely there and loved it. I wanted to experience the baby stage of motherhood and I also knew that the younger one adopts a child, the less likely your child is to experience difficulties bonding. Also there aren’t that many babies put up for adoption in the UK, and married couples seem to be placed highest on the preferred list. So I had to look abroad, and India was one of the countries which technically allowed single mums to adopt.
At the start of my journey, I encountered a great deal of prejudice against my single, white British status. Most of my 50 or so letters to orphanages across India were ignored. I sent them FedEx (I couldn’t risk ordinary mail, as the chances of them ever arriving were non-existent). And once the FedEx man realised my plight, he too helped in the search for Indian postcodes of remote orphanages in his free time, ringing me when he’d found them. I then made endless follow-up calls to Catholic orphanages, only to be told that I should find myself a husband and have my own child.
By December I could wait no longer. I had to get out there and face people, let my voice and my frustration show. I was naive enough to think that the simple fact of a successful, loving, healthy, authority-approved woman standing at their door was all it would take. I started my search in Calcutta, as it has quite a few orphanages. Yet despite flying thousands of miles to show how serious I was, I had the door closed in my face every time. Was it disapproval of my single status in these mostly Catholic orphanages? The reasons given were wide-ranging, but the answer was always the same. Most orphanages did not want to deal with the UK because we don’t have an agency to help with the bureaucratic nightmare involved. They preferred to encourage adoptions from the US and Scandinavia, where there are agencies. But despite this preference for placing children in the US and Scandinavia, I was then told that one of my problems was being white, and they want Indian children brought up in a multicultural society where they won’t feel out of place. This seemed strange: you can’t get more multicultural than London, and the last time I went to Sweden I hadn’t seen that many dark-skinned people! Of course I know how important the issues of cultural identity are, but I was surprised by the level of racism shown towards a white woman wanting to be a loving mother to an abandoned child.
With Calcutta orphanages closing their doors, I ventured west to the only place that had responded positively to any of my FedEx letters – their “maybe” being enough to make me travel the width of the country. This would be the sixth orphanage I’d walked into. Even before I arrived, thousands of cries had reached my ears and I’d seen hundreds of children, from lines of premature babies wrapped in swaddling cloths to four or five-year-olds who pulled at my clothes, desperate to be touched, to be held, to be chosen and to be loved.
People often expect me to say that I wanted to pick up, cuddle and take home every child, and in fact I too had always imagined that I would feel that way, but I found myself overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation. So many children in such impoverished conditions and row upon row of cots with crying babies lying in their soiled cloth nappies made me feel horribly inadequate. I was shocked, and my first thought was simply to run. Maybe it was the glazed look of the older children. Their bodies were there but their souls – the part of them that had reached out and asked for love – had left them, so all I saw was an impenetrable sea of shadows.
But this orphanage was different and seemed to welcome me with open arms. I sat crying in relief and joy with their social worker. I was told, yes, I would be considered for one of their babies, and I should come back the following morning to discuss the finer points of the next stage. That night I collapsed, exhausted, in my hotel room and treated myself to a Cobra beer with my usual room service – to sit as a single woman in many restaurants in India takes confidence, and all my strength had been used up just getting through the days. The phone ringing in my room as I struggled with sleep altered everything. The orphanage had changed their mind. I wouldn’t be allowed to adopt one of their babies, but instead they felt that with my professional skills, my support network, my incredible family and friends and my “obvious big heart”, I was ideally suited to give a home to one of their children with special needs. In India that can mean anything from a child who’s HIV- positive to one with physical and, most likely, psychological disabilities. I was devastated. I just knew I couldn’t do it.
I know, of course, that I will have to deal with whatever life throws at my child, and I also know that there are some wonderful people who can accept such a challenge, but as a single mother who needed to work and who had, during the social services assessment process, thought long and hard about what I could and what I wanted to cope with… well, it sounds awful but I just didn’t want a child with such difficulties. So even though I went to the orphanage the next morning to see if I could hold one of their special needs children and fall in love, I lasted only minutes. I couldn’t hack it. Tearfully and shamefully, I walked away.
I so nearly gave up. India and the orphanages had battered and bruised me, and still I couldn’t understand why something so natural as a woman wanting to find a child to love and mother was being rejected by so many. But something made me make yet another phone call. Within an hour, I was sitting with my Parsi friend Adel and some of his friends, who told me that they knew of another couple of orphanages in the city where I might be lucky. To be honest, I only got in their car out of politeness. I’d had it with orphanages saying no and just wanted to come home. At the same time, I was being compelled to stick with it, to not give in. And so, two more orphanages later, we drove through another set of gates.
