Chapter 16

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

John 14:18

The flow of pictures and new stories that began as a gush of fresh and astounding information in the closing hours of 2014 slowed too soon to a trickle. I was not ready for the stories to end. I wanted to ask so many more questions. They had lived this story and grieved this loss that was fresh to me decades earlier. With every new piece of the expanding puzzle, more questions arose. I could not get enough of their stories. I was right there “in person” and in spirit throughout their remembrances and retelling. They all had dug deep into old wounds to help me understand beautiful and doomed Igor. But Igor’s story had an ending. A tragic one. Finally, I felt like I knew him. His haunting eyes, reaching through the decades, begging me to love his son, reaching out from Heaven thanking me because my love for our mutual son was so pure and deep. As their shared stories of Igor came to an inevitable end, I felt that Igor was at peace. And, with their sacrifice of their telling the story, Roma had an identit

Roma must have wondered through the 13 years that he was ours what had become of his first family. What kind of family relinquishes their child to adoption? He was that child. But after the days and weeks of discovery, he had learned that the story wasn’t simple. A loving, close-knit family wanted to save him, had done all in their power to do so. But forces beyond their control prevented it. I hoped the knowledge of his first family would ease any long-held concerns, resolve any possible curiosity Roma may have carried about his origins. I believed that truth had the power to heal.

When would he be ready to go to Georgia, as his family immediately suggested, to meet them all in person? Roma, staggered by the information we gathered daily, was not ready to answer that question. I understood. Except for Liana, they were all complete strangers to him.

But they were no longer strangers to me. I was eager to make plans to travel. I wanted them to meet this boy; I knew they would adore him. Through the weeks of learning their history, they became my family. I wanted to meet them in person. But Roma had to make that call. So, they would have to be patient. We all become Facebook friends. Every time Roma posted, they would leave heart emojis that reminded him they were eagerly waiting to meet their native son. They had been given a second chance to know Igor’s adult son, and they understood it was a miraculous one-in-a-million chance to reconnect with a boy from a lifetime ago.

I grew up in an era when the Cold War was at its frightening height. The foreboding Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, was dreaded Enemy Number One of our great United States of America. We did not trust the “Commies” for a minute. Most of my peers remember under-the-desk disaster drills in school by day, and the loud buzz interrupting our television programs by night followed by the ominous, yet comforting words, “This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test. Had this been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed where to . . .”

I suspect unreasonable fear and loathing was part of the reason some older family members were vehemently opposed to our family adopting a boy from Russia. I suppose to our parents’ generation, bringing a seven-year-old child from the most formidable atheistic country in the world was just begging for trouble. Their comments and questions were direct:

“The first seven years of life are impressionable.”

“What has this child lived through in his formative years?”

“What has he inherited from a family he will never know?”

These were reasonable questions. Every answer I had for the naysayers in the period leading up to our adoption and the early years that followed was, “I’m sure God knows what He’s doing.”

Although religion was never officially banned in the Soviet era, believers were usually found guilty of anti-state activities and sentenced to prison. When we were making plans to adopt, only 11 years had passed since Communism failed in the former Soviet Union. For the previous eight decades, government leaders had tried to forcefully purge the country of its religious foundation.

But despite the vast efforts of the Communists to dismiss Him, God never left the Soviet Union.

When we hosted little Roma for five days in November 2001, five months before we traveled to Russia to bring him home as our son, he exhausted me, and yet, he immediately captured my heart. Even my oldest daughter, 13 years his senior, and never prone to sentimentality over children, said, “We got the cutest kid in all of Russia!” 

During his initial visit with us, we took him to church on Sunday. As we drove into the parking lot, he saw the cross. He had learned quickly that we Americans were slow with the Russian language, and it was fruitless to use words with us. His eyes asked the question, and his little hands held together in prayer supplied more visual aids. I smiled and nodded yes. He understood prayer, church, and reverence. I was pleased with his obviously previous exposure.

When we traveled to Russia in April 2002, we encountered many people of faith. I was pleased when our translator in Roma’s home region in North Osettia asked if we minded stopping by her lovely, historic Orthodox Russian Church. We didn’t mind tagging along on one of her daily visits during Lent, where she knelt at the rail for prayer and communion. She had given up meat and cigarettes. I was reminded that I had given up nothing.

Days later, back in Moscow, our other translator took us by the famed Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where she proudly dictated the history. The Soviets had torn it down in the 1920s during the anti-religious campaign, to erect the ill-fated Palace of the Soviets, which was never built past the foundation. As soon as communism fell in 1991, the citizens rebuilt their church back to its original glory, complete with gold icons.

I had always been fascinated with Russian history and literature, even before I knew I would one day be the mother of a native son. As I slogged through nineteenth century Russian writers, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as a college English major in the 1970s, I was unaware of a divine wind blowing through the Russia that young Igor inhabited. Hardly a single intellectual, writer, artist, or musician in the Soviet Union in the 1970s was not exploring spiritual matters, a former Soviet exile living in England told British reporter, Malcolm Muggeridge.

Muggeridge was fascinated, considering the extensive anti-religious brainwashing done on the citizenry for nearly 80 years, and the absence of all Christian literature, including the Gospels. The former Soviet’s reply was memorable. The authorities had forgotten to suppress the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which were “the most perfect expositions of the Christian faith in modern times.”

No, God had never left Russia. 

Before I learned anything about Igor, I had read and been drawn to the writings and life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like Igor, Dostoevsky too spent many years in prison.  For Dostoevsky, prison is where he met Jesus.

I have often repeated a question I have pondered since I first learned of Roma’s birth family after this story began to unfold in the closing hours of 2014: Did Igor cry out to God in groans too deep for words, that God would protect his baby son? Lia wrote that Igor took the pain of losing Roma to his grave. I always felt someone most have prayed for this boy. God’s swift and determined action made me feel I was only a cog in a divine plan. Now, privy to so many more precious details, I wondered if my call from God to adopt was a plan of redemption for a helpless father, a man who seemed “doomed” by the world’s definition.

Lia proudly shared the photographs of a birthday present for her in 1998, he drew on a bedsheet with ballpoint pen and carefully frayed the edges for a decorative fringe. All from his prison cell. The passage on the back, meticulously drawn in Cyrillic, is translated “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock. If any man hears my voice, and opens the door, I will come in to him.” (Rev. 3:20)   

I studied Igor’s drawing of Jesus at the door, carefully preserved and cherished.

No, Jesus had never abandoned Igor in prison.

And He never stopped pointing me toward Himself, showing me His fingerprints on this story that He had authored. No other talent could have connected Igor to our family more than his being an artist. I was stunned as the image first downloaded from Lia.

Learning the story of Roma’s first family was a humbling, restorative, and redemptive experience for Roma and our family. The sharing of it, they confessed, accomplished the same for his first family. I wanted more answers. More photos. I wanted more details of the story, although I was infinitely grateful for the information God was revealing. In my imagination, I saw us all meeting in person, sharing photos and our stories at our joyful meeting in person, Liana and her family, Lia, and hers, the Michaels, and the common denominator, our handsome boy, Roma. 

But Roma said he was not ready yet. He was still emotional and processing his previously unknown history. I had compassion for his understandable emotions and had to his wishes.

God was with Igor. He was with Roma. He was with me. Life brings with it mighty struggles and heartaches, as well as great love and joy. There must be a purpose. Roma’s birth family went to great efforts to tell us their story. They shared with us quite a journey, quite a process, quite a story. But just like with Roma, Igor, all of us, life is often hard, imperfect, difficult, sometimes maddening. Nevertheless, the love is/was/always will be worth it, worth any struggles, or even inevitable pain.

Is that the lesson? Love is worth the sorrows that come with it? God doesn’t promise a smooth ride, but just the ride itself is the gift, and, most importantly, that He promises we do not have to go without Him.

An African proverb states, “It takes a village, to raise a child,” and this quote has never seemed more appropriate than for Roma. The whole community rallied around to cheer for our boy; friends leaned in close as I shared the stories of finding Roma’s family as he gave me permission. He trusted that I would honor him, his first family, and God, who Roma had seen first-hand through so many of his lived experiences. Roma was never just our son. I always realized that Roma was an extravagant gift to our community and beyond. Most importantly, Roma was God’s boy, an undeserved gift to me that had the power to transform my heart. It had done its perfecting work. And not only my heart. There were many others who were suddenly reading the stories on my blog, and contacting me to say they were also in awe of God’s work in our story.

After Aunt Lia had shared all the stories she and her family could painstakingly gather and have translated by an English teaching cousin, then she revealed their gratitude. It was humbling. I felt the thanks belonged to all the people along the way, for all of us who loved Roma. This was the message from Roma’s family:

“We would like to say huge thank you for all the love and care which you are taking of our Roma. We are fully aware of the difficulties which are connected to raising up children. God bless you. With your help the New Year 2015 was the happiest in our life. We had spent so many nights thinking about our dear Igor’s disappeared son, and imagine our joy when we finally found him alive and healthy, living in such a respectful and happy family. Thank God that you exist and many thanks to you personally, for all your great love and affection towards Roma! We, with all our heart, invite you to Georgia, Roma’s homeland—this visit will really make us happy! 

With lots of love,
Lia, her parents and family

Continue with with Part Three, Chapter 17