6. The Fairy Godmother

The path that led us to parenthood was as circuitous as it was improbable.

Plan A was to start a family. When that failed, we moved on to two depressing years of Plan B fertility treatments. Every passing month felt like a death had happened. It wasn’t the actual loss of a child. It was the shattered dream of a child, the hope for a child, the visceral yearning for a child.

Pragnienie is a rich and nuanced Polish word that perfectly encapsulates the complex and intense emotional state I found myself in. While the English word longing conveys a similar sentiment, pragnienie carries additional existential layers of meaning and emotion. Deep. Desperate. Desire. That’s where I was when we decided to move forward with what I came to call Plan C: Adoption.

To anyone who has embarked on the adoption journey, the realization quickly dawns that many disparate forces in the universe must synchronize perfectly: belief, luck, vision, chance, trust, reality, and perhaps even divine intervention. Even then, adoption isn’t easy.

The first step was meeting with a social worker assigned to conduct a home study on our suitability as adoptive parents. Within a few minutes of meeting her, it became clear who the rumpled, elfin woman with short dark hair and a round face really was: an aspiring writer with a day job. She was Polish and had discovered late in life that she was Jewish, which gave her plenty of writerly material. As a small child at the start of the Second World War, she had been entrusted to a Polish-Catholic family by her Jewish parents. Of the almost one million Jewish children in Poland in 1939, she was one of the survivors.

As someone who is Polish, married to someone who is Jewish, the first sign from the universe was being randomly assigned this particular social worker. There were more connections to manifest. She had studied social work under my mother-in-law, who taught at McGill University. She also knew my father-in-law through his involvement with an ecumenical organization fostering connections between Christians and Jews.

I could sense that she liked us. We told her, in passing, that we might like to adopt a child from Poland, but we hadn’t started. At this early stage in the adoption process, we didn’t want to presume that she would declare us suitable.

The home study, which entailed two meetings in her office, plus her visit to our home, went smoothly. During our final encounter, she mentioned that she had a Polish friend who was also involved with the ecumenical group and often travelled to Poland. Her friend had many connections there.

“I told her about you. I hope you don’t mind. My friend thinks she can help,” the social worker said, beaming as if this were all part of the job.

The friend was a slim and attractive blonde. The afternoon I met her, we spoke a mixture of English and Polish, switching back and forth as I struggled to find words in Polish and she in English. I had no idea yet that the forces of the universe had coalesced or, in our case, collided.

I tried not to get my hopes up, but the social worker’s friend turned out to be a fairy godmother who had a magic wand. She conjured up a lawyer in Warsaw who knew of an unwed mother about to give birth. The young woman had no means to support herself and a child and was dependent on her family in a rural village. Three decades ago, traditional Catholic attitudes were still firmly entrenched in Poland, and her family wanted nothing to do with this out-of-wedlock baby.

Within a few weeks, I was holding a beautiful and healthy baby girl in my friend Ela’s small apartment in Warsaw. Ela, whom I had met on my first trip to Warsaw at age sixteen, her husband, and their two children rearranged their apartment and schedules so that the baby and I could stay with them for several weeks while we waited for the adoption process to proceed.

Fortunately, I had a book on baby care in my suitcase, a last-minute gift from a friend just before I left for Warsaw. The baby slept sixteen hours a day, and I feared there was something wrong with her. The book cleared up the misconception and provided much-needed reassurance. And thank God for Ela, who, with two children, had plenty of parenting experience and showed me the basics—bathing, feeding, burping, dressing, the works.

In 1993, four years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there were no adoption agencies in Poland, so we were on our own. There was no support for international adoptions and even less for people with no connection to Poland. A cavalier we-can-take-care-of-our-own attitude remained and meant that many children ended up in orphanages. The government wanted Polish parents to adopt healthy Polish children. Sick or disabled children were, of course, harder to place and so could be adopted internationally or remain in the orphanages.

Our lawyer was an older woman with a stern don’t-mess-with-me attitude. She arranged for a doctor’s report fabricating a medical condition affecting the baby, one requiring specialized treatment only available in the West. In those transitional years after decades of Communist rule, a widespread belief lingered that the West possessed far superior resources and expertise compared to what was available in Poland. So, her strategy was plausible.

The lawyer coached me on the answers to questions I might be asked in court about the health of the baby and how the birth mother and I happened to meet and come to arrange an adoption together. I was to say she worked in a coffee shop that I frequently visited. The lawyer also coached the birth mother, so our stories aligned.

On my first trip to Poland with my father in 1970, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, I learned that the end justified the means. People did whatever it took to survive under the Communist regime. That is how the universe always worked in Poland; everyone was in on it: the lawyer, the doctor, and the judge. Now I joined them.

Jonathan, who had left the details to me, arrived to meet his daughter a few days before the court date. When my turn came to face questioning from the judge, relief washed over me as I discovered all those Saturday mornings at Polish school in the church basement had honed my fluency to an adequate level to speak for myself in a Polish court. I confidently conveyed my supposed commitment to raising the child in a nurturing Polish home and showed the judge a letter from my father. He recounted his involvement in the Warsaw Uprising, shared his dedication to preserving Polish culture in his home in Canada, and recalled our first trip to the motherland many years ago.

Jonathan testified through an interpreter. It was all I could do to keep a straight face as he attempted to explain his crisis management and public relations work to a civil servant who had grown up in a system where the state was the only employer, with no need to spin or communicate its message. As we waited on the hard bench outside the courtroom for the judge to render her decision, the birth mother and I sat together and nervously held hands.

“I love her very much,” the birth mother said.

It broke my heart. All these years later, I know exactly how she felt. Her family had given her no choice; she could not return to her village with a baby. She was doing her very best.

When the judge granted our request to adopt this Polish baby, Jonathan and I were elated. There was a waiting period of another month before the court decision was finalized. I returned to Montreal because I had been away from work for too long, and Jonathan stayed to care for the baby. My sister arrived to help him, leaving her own two small sons in the care of my mother, their doting grandmother.

A month later, within twenty-four hours of all the paperwork being finalized, our lawyer used her connections and secured a new birth certificate for the baby, listing Jonathan and me as her parents. The same day, she expedited the issuance of a Polish passport for her. The next day, a final force in the universe lifted a plane off the ground, and father and daughter left Warsaw and flew to Montreal.

We named our Polish daughter, Alexandra. As I write these words, she is thirty years old. In a testament to her Polish heritage, she possesses a strong character and an uncanny understanding that the end justifies the means when it comes to helping family and friends.

The universe aligned. The fairy godmother retired. We were the only couple whose wish she granted.