The path to motherhood is different for every woman.
Some of us are lucky enough to conceive almost instantaneously every time, others try for a few months before we see those coveted blue lines. And yet others try desperately for years.
Then you have those who are just not that lucky. That fight, and grieve, and pray, and morn and still aren't able to have the one thing they want more than anything in the world. Something we lucky few forget to be thankful for. And in turn have to explore other avenues to becoming mothers.
So when I was asked to read and feature the book 'Mom At Last: How I Never Gave Up on Becoming a Mother' by Sharon Simons, I knew it was something I needed to do.
And, boy, am I glad I did.
Mom At Last: How I Never Gave Up on Becoming a Mother follows the author through her struggles with infertility and adoption. But, as the book promises, it's really about much more than that.
From the moment I picked up the book I was overcome with the emotions I felt through the authors words. In many of her tales, the pictures she painted were so vivid, I felt I was right there; living and breathing with her through every struggle as though it were happening to me. Honestly, there were times when I had to put the book down and go hug my own kids.
I was gripped with overwhelming heartbreak and I soared with elation right along with the author.
In my opinion, this book wasn't just meant for other families/women who are struggling with infertility or adoption issues, it's a book for women. Period. Any women who has faced a parenting struggle of any kind will find something in this book to love.
And if you don't believe me take a look for yourself. Here is an excerpt from the book 'Mom At Last: How I Never Gave Up on Becoming a Mother':
"The baby house hasn't seen new paint in decades. That’s what they call it, the baby house. Where they keep all the abandoned Russian babies. More precisely, it’s where the state agency keeps all the unwanted Siberian babies, or maybe just the Novokuznetsk babies, the small town we have driven hours to reach. The baby house is concrete block covered in dirty stucco and the facade has a slightly depressing rhythm to it: stucco and window and patches of exposed concrete repeated in long horizontal bands across the front of the building. It doesn’t look anything like a house for babies, wanted or otherwise.
The air inside our car is heavy and smells of cigarettes, sausage, and mayonnaise. We sit there at the edge of a dirt parking lot for a long moment and stare out the window. By “we” I mean my husband, Rick, and me in the back seat, and in the front, our interpreter in her punkish ball cap and a bulky Russian driver. Outside, the sky is not entirely grayblue, but strangely the same gray-blue of the baby house. As I sit here staring out the window, what strikes me, other than the bleakness of the place, is that there isn’t a baby, a child, or a wayward teen in sight...
...“This is it,” Rick says. “Here we go.”
I look at him and smile because that’s what I do, a woman who hankers for the bright side of things, the good and the positive. If I have to, I’m perfectly willing to put on blinders and blot out all the ugliness in the world, if it helps me get what I want. And right now I want inside the baby house.
I reach for the door handle and this little gesture sets everyone in motion. We crawl out of the minivan and I take a deep breath and grip the two little brown teddy bears we brought with us. Rick holds a bag of baby clothing and a few other items and hustles us inside. The lobby of the baby house is a spiritless dump, describing it as “cozy” or even “welcoming,” would be a blatant lie. Again, no babies. I learn later that we are not allowed to see any of the other orphans and thus they are hidden conveniently out of sight. I want nothing so much as to hold my baby boys, precious little Siberian tikes I have only glimpsed in photos thirty-five days ago. In one photo Dmitry is dressed in a pink jumpsuit and he stares up at the camera, frowning, his mouth slightly open, ready to say something quirky or maybe angry. Sergey is dressed in a black and yellow bumblebee outfit, arms in the air, and he has this loving, needy look in his eye.
My husband, Rick, is a cardiologist and cardiologists are compulsively alert to looming problems. He spent I don’t know how many years at Penn State and then medical school and then in his practice looking inside the body’s dark corridors for impending problems. Before we agreed to make the trip, he reminded me what we might be in for. “A lot of fathers and mothers of Russian orphans are alcoholics,” he told me. “Vodka,” he said using his doctor’s voice, in a way that was both stern and caring. “They can’t keep a job and they can’t raise a baby, so they drop the child off at the baby house. Only the child has fetal alcohol syndrome and nobody knows it.” This was a month ago, and I can still see him making a little check mark in the air with his finger listing off troubles to come. Extreme difficulty forming social connections. Check. Trouble with emotional ties. Check. Zero impulse control. Check. Learning disabilities. Check.Check. Check.
“You're signing us up for a lot,” he said, “if we take in a fetal alcohol child.”
Nothing in any the documents we’ve received says anything about fetal alcohol syndrome or any other disease. Far from it. Every bit of information has given off a calibrated, but incomplete report of the boys, which probably explains Rick’s skepticism.
“The boy’s aren’t sick,” I said.
“I’m just saying.”
“Do you want to reconsider?”
Here my husband softened, as he always did when we talked about the boys. “No.”
“I’ll love them no matter what,” he said.
“Me too.”
The director of the baby house spies us standing sheepishly in the lobby, trying not to touch anything. She marches out of her office and half-shouts something in Russian at us. Our interpreter, a skinny girl with glasses and her cap now tucked away, mumbles something to me I don’t catch. I want to see the boys and I’m tired of being in the car, of meeting strangers without understanding the language, and tired of the way the Russian adoption process doles out cryptic, often conflicting, bits of information in small doses. The director is blonde, round-faced and babbles on relentlessly. She has graying teeth and heavy makeup and a body several sizes too big for her clothes. Finally, she stops talking and stares at me, then at my husband, smiles and lets loose a little gruff noise. The interpreter says there is a small problem. They only have us down for one baby. She says it as if we’d stopped at a McDonald’s and the bored sixteen-year-old at the window had forgotten to include one of our milkshakes.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“The paperwork. It says just one,” she says.
“Two,” I say. “We’ve been over all this. The paperwork, the money, it’s all correct.”
The way it works here, way out in the boonies of Siberia, is if you want a baby, or two, you follow the rules. And here are the rules. You pay thousands up front to people in America, some whom you’ve never met, don’t know, and don’t fully trust. Then, once you arrive in Moscow, you take 10,000 dollars in cash and you put 5,000 in one envelope and seal the envelope. You take 4,000 and put it in another envelope. Seal it. You take the remaining thousand and slip it into a third envelope. At some point on your trek from Moscow to the baby house, a man will ask for one of the envelopes. You give him the envelope. No talking. No questions. Later, at another time and another location, another man will ask for another envelope. You give him the envelope. Same with the last envelope. For two babies, you double the money and the envelopes. No discounts.
What’s the money for, you ask?
No questions. We already told you.
To what degree that money filters down to care for the babies isn’t clear, but it’s not much, judging by the dilapidated condition of the baby house.
The director and our interpreter whisper in Russian. Occasionally, our interpreter turns to me and says, “Is much better, I think.” Or, she says, “Okay, the paperwork, it must not be correct.” Or she says other things equally unlikely to get us anywhere. By now, I’m gyrating with unhappiness, straining to smile at the director, moving my hands and shaking my head, and beginning to feel what mothers must feel who have inexplicably lost a child. I haven’t been a mother for even one second, and I have lost my child. This is a child I’ve never seen in the flesh, never held, never comforted, but the feeling of loss is no less real.
The director shouts and the interpreter says, “You get Sergey,” and pauses and says, “now.”
“Yes, of course I want Sergey, but I also want Dmitry.” Here I pull out a photo, the one of Dmitry in pink, as if proving he is mine. I have his picture, don’t I?
“Is not a problem,” the interpreter says.
“Can I help?” I say knowing full well that I am ill-equipped to track down the whereabouts of a twenty-one-month-old in a far off Siberian baby house, especially if he is not so much lost as hidden.
“Is not necessary,” she says.“The director, she is looking,”which isn’ t true because the director is flashing her graying teeth at me, shaking her head as if to say, “Only one baby today.”
Rick quietly intones something to me and the interpreter and the director whisper, but no one is looking for Dmitry.
Our interpreter nudges Rick and me down the hall into another room, this one radiant in its cleanliness and color and aura of hope, all elements conspicuously missing from the rest of the baby house. Without warning a thick-bodied woman appears with Sergey and carries him to the center of a little play area filled with toys and places him on the floor, the floor itself a flimsy ancient carpet that looks much like a giant board game, one that involves trains, train tracks, train stations and the like. Sergey is sitting squarely in the middle of the tracks but doesn’t notice, or if he does, he appears happy to find himself at the center of things. The director casts a frown at us. We have an hour with him and we’d better get to it while she tracks down Dmitry, or at least that’s what she means if not exactly what she says. I sit on the carpet next to Sergey, a fourteen-month old cutie in his red-and-white striped outfit, and I brush his blond hair with my hand and glance from Rick to the interpreter to the backside of the director marching away, hopefully toward my other boy.
Sergey sits next to me, inhaling giant breaths through his nose as if breathing me in. I speak to him and make soft little cooing noises. Rick kneels beside us and takes Sergey’s arm and strokes it. I show him the teddy bear, wriggle it to get his attention, and then I place it in his lap and let go. Sergey watches me, ignoring the bear at first, then leans his little head forward and smells it and wraps a skinny arm around its body and squeezes and squeezes.
There is more whispering off in the hallway and Dmitry finally appears, a tiny body cradled in a woman’s hefty arms. Compared to Sergey, Dmitry is a mess. Our order for two babies has apparently gotten waylaid, and as a rush job Dmitry hasn’t been properly prepared. He looks as if he’s been plucked from a box of mischievous babies, shaken and lightly dusted like you might a blouse you hadn’t worn in a while, and handed over. He isn’t dirty exactly, but he isn’t as spruced up and prepped as Sergey, as if the kids are only buffed, polished, and put on display when the adoptive parents show up for a test drive. He has red bumps all over his face from what I hope is only spiteful mosquitoes and nothing more serious. The bites, if that’s what they are, have been treated with something blue and pasty dabbed over the red. My little Dmitry is polka-dotted in baby blue and rose-red and, given his sallow skin, the combination isn’t at all pretty.
That, and he is wailing in one long, noisy, burst of anger, pain, or I don’t know what. Everyone vanishes. It’s just Sergey and Dmitry and Rick and me off in one corner of the play area, our little family parked on the floor of a baby house in Novokuznetsk staring at each other. "
See? Doesn't that just grip you?!
And I think what is more impressive is the Author herself.
Even after (or rather, while) fighting such a difficult battle she has held a part time job as a Director of Marketing in the insurance industry and has used her marketing skills to create and promote her website Mom At Last, (
www.momatlast.com). And she's recently launched The Adoption App on ITunes,(
www.theadoptionapp.com). She hosts a weekly internet show on Mom TV and has appeared on Dr. Oz sharing her story and she, simply, makes me feel as though I'm not doing enough with my life!
I was very impressed with the entire book and encourage you all to check it out for yourself.
It's available for sale on
Amazon, you can pick up a copy at your local book store and if you'd like to purchase a signed copy of Mom at Last: How I Never Gave Up On Becoming a Mother visit
http://www.MomatLast.com/Memoir/
