Eric and I have continued to talk about doing a search for Anna’s birth mother ever since we brought her home from Guatemala in 2005 and today I put words into action. Today’s actions were brought on by Anna looking at me with a sad face at the family dinner table Sunday and then saying, “I miss Mama Cleotilde.”
We enlarged the 1×1 Embassy photo of mama Cleotilde into a 5×7 and have it in Anna’s room so she can see it. We have spoken about her birth mother ever since bringing her home and Anna has on several occasions proudly announced that she has two mom’s. In fact when it was time for her to make a list of things she was thankful for at Thanksgiving she included “mom” and “my other mom”. Even though she’s just four we know that her brainwaves are on a higher level than ours on several subjects. The truth about her having a birth mother being one of them.
With our adoption packet we actually received quite a bit of family history and so we hoped that we would have enough information to contact her birth mother once the right time arrived and see if she would want to correspond with us. Obviously, we’ve read the books that state it’s best for your child to have that connection if at all possible and we believe in our hearts it’s the right thing to do. Why would we keep any of that information from her? We just thought it might be impossible to connect with her if we didn’t do it soon. People in Guatemala, just like here are very mobile and may not be in the same place you thought they were when you go to search for them.
One of my Guatemalan blogs speaks about several ’searchers’ who will go out and search for the birth mother for a certain fee. But I decided tonight I would contact our Guatemalan attorney’s son whom we have continued to keep in close contact with and he has agreed to help us gather information so that we might be able to make contact with Cleotilde. Our attorney’s family is very dear to us because they were Anna’s second foster family in Guatemala while waiting for the adoption to finalize. Her first foster mother became pregnant and couldn’t continue to foster Anna so our attorney’s family took over. They did a fantastic job and were crying when we came back for a second visit and then brought her home. Since they only had two sons themselves, they ended up adopting a little girl and naming her after Anna. Cool! Their son (whom we continue to email back and forth) was our translator and now has his own little girl that was given Anna’s birth middle name. I emailed him tonight and said I’ve been researching the good searchers online to see whom we should hire to see if they could find Anna’s birth mother and he said he’d do it for us. Who would we trust more than him? No one!!!!! So, hopefully he’ll be able to get in touch with her and see if she is willing to receive photos and/or letters from us and if she’d be willing to let us have a new photo of her or maybe a note.
This whole thing is a lot of hoping, dreaming and praying. I only hope it can come to fruition for Anna so it can help answer questions in her mind that she might have at a later date. Eric and I are also very open to all of us meeting Cleotilde if that would be something she’d agree to. That’s where we’re at tonight. As always, we’ll keep you posted.