Introduction
Needing Family No Matter What is the story of an adoption of making that choice and of what followed. It was written over a twenty-two year period and is divided into three parts: Needing Family No Matter What, 1992; Afterbirth, 1998; and Loss, 2003. It represents only my story my side of things my understanding and my reality. On June 13th, 1988 Luca was born. Nine weeks later to the day Frank and I adopted him at a brief but legal, assured by our lawyer, ceremony before a Paraguayan judge in the City of Stroessner, Paraguay. Needing Family No Matter What 1992 looks back to the earliest days of 1980 to understand how the decision to adopt Luca came about. Drawn from journal pages it goes on to tell about the first few months Luca and I spent together as mother and son in Paraguay.
Afterbirth-1998 recounts events that took place almost a decade after Luca was born when he was ten and I fifty-eight. Under a distant but perennial Latino sun my fate and therefore ours took or tumbled into an erratic course. Predictable? Probably. The house built on flagrant dreams and false promises toppled. The past ripped through our lives with the force of an angry improbable tornado. Exhumed the weighty body of the unexamined, me. Yet stunned by the sudden disconnect the synaptic break where a false move became a truth. Our lives as a family blown asunder and then falteringly our coming back together rearranged the subject of Afterbirth.
LOSS-2003 is the story of sitting with Frank as we watched our son Luca fourteen battle a life threatening attack of ulcerative colitis. Kicked up like bad dirt all of the excruciating and mentally tormenting feelings about Frank that I had tucked away in a manageable place since our divorce five years ago. Sinking overtaken by grief and horror I a mother sat by her child’s bedside watching the forces of life and death collide. Usually Eastern Europeans have this disease many Jews our Indian from Bombay physician informed us when first diagnosing the ulcerative colitis only a year earlier. Lulled by a brief period of remission we were ill prepared to confront the menacing unpredictable cyclical nature of this disease. Luca our found child lay in a hospital for nearly four months wasting away racked with unimaginable pain until his septic perforated colon was cut out of him. Luca in the year 2003 at fifteen without colon and as our genealogical narrative goes part Guaraní Indian part German with maybe now a splash of Jew.
