| (Editor's note: Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're tackling motherhood in the 21st century -- or being tackled by it. This is the latest in a series of reflections by UPI writers.)
BALTIMORE, Feb. 1 (UPI) --Someday, he'll ask about her, the woman in the photo with the straight black hair, the enchanting hazelnut eyes, the face worn well beyond her 25 years.
The eyes stare directly, though vacantly, at the camera as she hands the infant to a nurse in the clinic with drab green walls somewhere in Guatemala City. The days-old infant's eyes are wide like hers, his cheeks flush, his tiny fingers seemingly reaching, for something.
This moment, forever frozen in the photograph we first saw in an e-mail from the adoption agency, will be the hardest to explain to Paulie, our adopted son. There's so little we can tell him about Andrea Lopez, least of all, why his birth mother could not keep him.
We have so little to go on. Lopez, a single mother with two children, a boy and a girl, gave birth to Pablo Josue Lopez April 30, 2006. She eked out a living selling food from a cart in Guatemala City, where skyscrapers border shantytowns and the murder rate is among the world's highest.
Like most international adoptions, ours was a "closed" one, in which the agency and a birth parent agree the birth mother and adoptive parents will know little about each other and will not have regular contact.
From the clinic, Pablo went to live with a foster mother for his first nine months -- one of three soon-to-be-adopted foster children she took in to help support her five biological children. At the hotel in Guatemala City, the foster mother did not hand him to his adoptive mother, my wife, Lorraine, but instead placed him on the bed and cried a little when she said, "Pablito, Pablito."
He's nearly 4 now, and when I stare at him lying in our bed, where he usually ends up before dawn, he looks like the little baby with chubby, cherubic cheeks, not the toddler built like a fire plug who tackles his 7-year-old brother, Joseph.
He's asked the tell-tale question: Where do babies come from? Soon to be followed by: Where did I come from? For telling toddlers they're adopted, I think the best one I've heard yet came from our friend, who tells her daughter, whom she adopted from China: "You grew in the tummy of a nice lady in China and then other nice people took care of you until mommy came to China to get you."
More will come later, slowly, when the time's right.
For now, he's the youngest member of the family to which he came -- with three grandparents, 11 cousins and family gatherings that still make you think of the early scenes from Baltimorean Barry Levinson's "Avalon."
For my wife's Italian parents, the last bambino of a generation, for my mother, now 86, the 11th grandchild, five years after she thought she had seen her last. For his younger cousins and his aunts and uncles, a baby at once as familiar as family yet still mysterious as a little boy born in a foreign land. To his big brother, Joseph, "the best baby brother in the whole wide world"; to the parish priest who travels often to Central America, he remains "Pablito," to Lucy, the nanny who has helped care for him since he arrived in this country, "Paulie Bear," who reminds her of her grandson back in her native Trinidad.
It's impossible to predict whether Paulie will want to go back to the country of his birth, "Land of Eternal Spring." But I feel drawn to it, as though through one child, its people are now a part of me.
I think of the Mayan civilizations overtaken and enslaved by Spanish conquerors, and the modern-day terrors of the 36-year civil war that left 200,000 Guatemalans dead, a million homeless and thousands disappeared before the war ended in 1996. I see ruins of pyramids and stairs heading heavenward and mountains rising from the still blue waters and lush coffee fields in volcanic soil.
And the haunting face of Lopez, as she hands over her infant. One day, I'd like to have a cup of Guatemalan coffee and chat with her about her son -- and ours.
Copyright 2010 by United Press International
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