American tells of love for daughter and Guatemala

May 22, 2011 / 1 Comment

Olivia had been placed in a foster home after her birth mother, “Ana” had decided to give her up for adoption and move from Guatemala City back to her rural village.  An impoverished widow, who already had two children, Ana had become pregnant by a man who later had abandoned her.

In 2002-2003, the first year of Olivia’s life,  O’Dwyer traveled back and forth between the United States to a hotel in Guatemala City.  On these visits, O’Dwyer typically transported diapers, foods, toys and other supplies for Olivia, as well as gifts for her foster family.  Even when Olivia stayed with her at the hotel, the visits never lasted long enough for the future mother and daughter to bond while the adoption pended.

After a year of delay, O’Dwyer decided that to facilitate the adoption—and to begin the process of winning her daughter’s heart – she needed to move to Guatemala, even though it meant a temporary separation from her husband, the doctor, at a time when they still were young marrieds.  She stayed first at the Camino Real, but later moved to the UNESCO world heritage site of Antigua, a town which is surrounded by seven volcanoes in Guatemala’s central highlands.   “It’s one of the most charming and well-restored colonial towns in Central America,” O’Dwyer said.  Antigua became her and Olivia’s home for six months as the paper worked continued to be dragged and dragged through the bureaucracy.

O’Dwyer regularly took Olivia on walks to the central part of Antigua, where, at internet cafés,  there were other mothers, also waiting out the adoption process, with whom she could compare notes.  In addition, she took Olivia on field trips, including one to the small San Lazaro cemetery in Antigua for Guatemala’s colorful “Day of the Dead” celebration.  “The cemetery was behind a wrought-iron fence at the end of a dead-end street,” O’Dwyer wrote in Mamalita. “In front of the fence, vendors did a brisk business selling grave blankets of pine needles and yellow marigolds—traditional in Guatemala—along with snacks of salted corn-on-the-cob and filled pupusas. A mime in white-face entertained an audience with a trapped-in-an-imaginary-box routine, while two girls paraded by on stilts.”

Noticing that people were staring at her and Olivia –she being blonde and fair, and Olivia, of indigenous Maya background,  being dark-haired and brown-skinned—O’Dwyer began to feel increasingly uncomfortable.  People were trying to guess the nature of their relationship.  She felt the urge to leave, however Olivia “was perfectly content at the cemetery. She scrambled from my arms to inspect the pine needles, then swept the cobblestones as though with a tiny broom.  She discovered that a mausoleum substituted nicely for a play structure, so much more interesting than the usual cathedral steps…”

O’Dwyer wrote she could remember thinking that she’d like to say to the people who were staring “We don’t look alike, but I am her mother. It’s been a long road to get here, but I am her mother.”   And then she added:  “No need to reveal to those families the depth of my real doubts.  My fear that some part of Olivia would never-could never-belong to me, in the effortless way their children belonged to them.”

I asked O’Dwyer to recall the moment she got over such feelings, the moment when she knew, without a doubt, that Olivia felt herself to be thoroughly and without reservations her daughter.

“It was a long process, a very long process,” O’Dwyer responded.  “This is something that people don’t talk about and I thought it important to talk about in my book.  It did not happen overnight; it did not happen immediately.  It was years before my daughter felt she could trust me.  I consulted with psychologists who we saw for three years.  I read a lot about attachment.  I did everything I thought to do that could help the process.”

She said the moment that she stopped worrying about her relationship with Olivia came during a trip they made to Panajachel  on Lake Atitlan to meet Olivia’s birth mother, who had traveled there from a more remote area of Guatemala.  When Olivia was reintroduced to her birth mother, to whom she bears a striking resemblance, it was the birth mother, and not O’Dwyer, who was viewed by the child as a stranger.   “Maybe that was the moment when I realized that I was her mom,” O’Dwyer said.  “She regarded me as her mother.  She also had her birth mother, but our relationship was secure.   I had no doubt of that.”

Today, visits to Olivia’s birth mother and family are routine parts of O’Dwyer-Berger family trips to Guatemala.   “Her other family is just part of our life.  Olivia has me; she has her other mom.  Her other mom lives in Guatemala. She has another family, another brother, another sister.  They speak mainly Queche which is a native dialect and some Spanish, and I speak elementary Spanish and we are able to communicate.  There is a lot of holding hands, and a lot of hugging, a lot of smiling, and a lot of drawing pictures and laughing.”

To get to such a relationship with the birth family, O’Dwyer had to face her fears.  “I wasn’t sure, would my daughter love her birth mother more than she would love me?  Would she wish that she were living with her birth mother instead of me?  From everything I have read and listening to adults who had been adopted, it is such a complicated relationship—it might be all those feelings at some time.  But that doesn’t mean that she is not firmly attached to me.  Now, she doesn’t have to wonder and question who she is at her core.  And similarly her birth mother now doesn’t have to worry ‘what ever happened to my daughter?  What is happening to her now?  Is she healthy?  Is she well?’ because she knows. The big questions have been answered for her.  She can sleep at night and everyone benefits.”

The relationship between O’Dwyer and Olivia’s former foster mother is more complicated.  The foster mother and her children came to love the little girl and Olivia (then called Stefany) loved them, the only family she knew, during the more-than-a year period that they were together.  When the time came, it was very difficult for the foster mother, whom O’Dwyer called “Lupe” (many names were changed in the book), to come to terms with the fact that her job has been completed.

Although O’Dwyer expressed sympathy for the pain Lupe felt, she believed that Olivia’s relationship with Lupe had to be terminated, so that all concerned could move on to the next stage of their lives.  Once, however,  on one of their visits to Guatemala, the O’Dwyer-Berger family encountered Lupe’s daughter, Vivian, who had been particularly close to her foster sister.   Olivia did not recognize her.

O’Dwyer said that while the adoption was pending she took many photos of Lupe and her family, and “every time I show Olivia one of the pictures it is as if she had never seen her before.  She never recognizes Lupe. ‘Who is that?’ she asks every time, and the only thing I can think of is that is so painful for her at a deep, deep, level that she just had to repress that memory and she does it every time.

“I think part of the reason that I wanted to write the book is that I don’t think it is fair to children that they should be harmed in this kind of craziness that goes on with the paperwork. In other words, she became very attached to Lupe and then she had to leave Lupe, and that is not fair. If they had picked up the pace, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten so attached and then had to be detached.”

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In adopting Mateo, they specifically sought a child from Guatemala “so that both of them could have someone in the house who shared their heritage. That has been important for both of them, that they are both from Guatemala. They are proud of it.”

Olivia and Mateo “get along like any brother and sister” although they come from two biological families, O’Dwyer said.  “People often ask ‘are they really brother and sister?’  and I say ‘they are now.’ They are brother and sister, and believe me, they act like brother and sister minute to minute, and they are devoted to each other.”

Although the children are too young to read the book, they have watched a promotional video for Mamalita on YouTube, and “they love watching that –’the movie,’ they call it.”

What does O’Dwyer hope readers will gain from her book?

“An understanding of what it felt like to be a mother going through adoption,” she responded. “And I hoped people would develop empathy for a foster mother like Lupe, and I’ve actually had foster mothers email me and say ‘no one has ever written a book about my pain and thank you for saying this.’

“I also wanted people to understand the situation of women in Guatemala.  Olivia’s birth mother is a good example of that, living in serious poverty, being a widow, her family broken apart by the Civil War that ended in ’96, living in a place where she had very few options and where it was kind of shameful to be a mother without a husband.  So I wanted to give a picture of all of those contributing elements to the story.  And I also wanted to show what it was like being a person from California living in Guatemala.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com