Leaving the orphanage with a priceless pair of tights

April 5, 2017 by Beth Shepherd

Our daughter spent the first year of her life in a “children’s home” in Armenia, aka an orphanage. All of the children’s homes I visited in Armenia (three in total) were, as orphanages go, “good” homes. The facilities were clean. Children had their own crib or bed. Basic needs were met. Our daughter was well cared for by loving nannies.

But nothing in that orphanage was hers and hers alone. The eight nannies who cared for her, also cared for other children. And whereas in most families a baby can count on the same person feeding, dressing or bathing her, a baby in an orphanage can never be certain who will come soothe her cries, when they will come, and sometimes whether anyone will come at all. Diapers were washed, hung on the line outside to dry, and reused. Blankets, towels, clothing—all shared. Everything our daughter touched or wore, was touched and worn by other babies. I’ve seen pictures of babies who were also adopted from our daughter’s orphanage wearing the same bunny slippers or the same sweater.

I think about this a lot, especially when I see babies being cared for by a mom or a dad, knowing that baby associates comfort and security with seeing the same face over and over again. The familiarity her mom’s arms wrapped tightly around her, how she smells, even the baby’s own scent on her very own blanket. Visceral memories deeply ingrained in our psyche.

As an adoptive mom and a photographer I also think about how the minutiae of infancy is meticulously documented, at least in the U.S. Most moms I know have albums full of pictures showing their baby being held and fed, sleeping in their crib, their first smile, cute outfits they wore. Images reflecting their baby’s life during that formative first year.

These are the kinds of things many kids look back on as they grow up, and ask questions about. What did I look like as a baby? What was my favorite toy? What did I wear?

This is why the day we took our daughter out of the orphanage is forever etched in my mind. I was excited and nervous because our lives were about to change and from this moment forward we would be together as a family. At the same time I felt a deep sadness, knowing we were taking our daughter away from the one place she’d lived and the people who had taken care of her. Imperfect as orphanage life was, it was all she knew.

Other than the memories my daughter has tucked deep inside, there are only a few things we can share with her about her beginnings. We have referral photos and a short video we received from our adoption agency when our daughter was a few months old. There are pictures I took on our first visit to meet her when she was almost six months old. But until she became a member of our family that is all we have, except one precious gift: a pair of tights.

When we picked up our daughter we made sure we had all the clothes we thought she’d need, because her nanny would change her out of whatever she was wearing before bringing her to us. We brought a long-sleeved onesie, cotton pants, a cotton shirt, a sweater, one coat with a hood, a cotton cap, socks and shoes.

We waited on a bench outside the office of the orphanage director. Her nanny dressed her in the baby room and then came down the stairs and and handed her to us. We took a few pictures with the director and then piled into a taxi and headed to Yerevan.

Two hours later, when we reached our apartment in Yerevan and changed our first diaper, we discovered her nanny had also put her in a pair of tights, blue cotton with pictures of buttons and spools of thread woven into the background. I remembered those tights from our “get to know you” visits to the orphanage. Each day when one of her nannies brought her out to us, she was dressed in an adorable outfit. One day she wore a tiny beret, another day she was completely decked out in a white hand-crocheted ensemble, and on yet another she was sporting the cutest bunny slippers. On several occasions her outfit featured the blue tights. But cute as those clothes were, they weren’t hers.

When I look at her tights now, I see a treasure, the one tangible thing she has from her days spent in a children’s home, and the only thing she can literally hold in her hands knowing they were once on her legs when she was a baby. The tights are tiny, only 15-inches long, yet enormous when I reflect on what they stand for. To me those tights are priceless.

It’s all about the journey,

Beth

Rock of ages: Celebrating five years together as a family

March 22, 2017 by Beth Shepherd

March 22, 2012. Gyumri, Armenia. Snow lay on the ground and temperatures hovered around freezing. We made our way to the orphanage where our daughter was living. Our daughter. Only moments before she was simply a little girl who lived in an orphanage. Now she was ours and we were hers.

Two days before, we’d stood in an Armenian court of law and made our case as to why we should be this little girl’s parents. Then, on March 22, we went to court again and received the news our adoption was approved. We were a freshly minted family! But even though she met us six months ago and we visited her every day for a week, in our daughter’s brain we were just a couple of nice nannies in the rotating cast of nice nannies she saw on a daily basis. She had no idea what becoming part of a family would mean. And neither did we.

For some time I’d thought about retrieving a memento from the land upon which her orphanage was built, something we could share with her as she grew up, a physical reminder of her first home and her homeland. A leaf maybe? Or a small rock? When we first met her, it was autumn but still very warm. Gold leaves hung on the trees, shading us as we sat together on a bench in the courtyard of her orphanage. However now it was March, and there was nary a leaf to be found. We decided our treasure would be a small rock.

As we walked across the courtyard to the door of the building in the orphanage where she was living, skating across ice on the pathway, I said to my husband, “Now is the time. Let’s find our rock!” Joel’s eyes scanned the ground around him, covered with snow, and landed on a small rock poking it’s head out from a drift a mere three feet from where we stood. He stepped away from the sidewalk, took two big steps and reached down to pick up the rock, instantly finding himself ankle deep in mud. Who would have guessed—in the dead of winter, despite a blanket of snow and temperatures ducking below zero (F) at night, a slithery soft puddle of mud lurked beneath the surface? Mud dripped from his hands as he held up his prize, and we both belly laughed, a much needed release from the months of angst preceding this moment.

How fitting. A perfect metaphor for the days and years to follow. Fitting because family life is messy. Things rarely go the way you expect. And sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you find yourself stuck in the muck.

Gyumri, Armenia: March 22, 2012

2017: Our family turns five!

It’s all about the journey,

Beth

Driving to meet our daughter: Two men, two women, a taxi and a flat tire

October 13, 2016 by Beth Shepherd

You know you’re going somewhere when you find yourself in the back of a taxi bombing down an exceedingly bumpy two-lane highway at speeds exceeding 100 mph. And five years ago, we were in fact going somewhere important as we sped north on the road that connects Yerevan, Amenia to Gyumri. My husband and I were headed to meet the baby girl we hoped to adopt. Little did we know this would become the taxi ride we’d never forget.

We sat in the back of the taxi, watching the autumn scenery out our window. Hillsides in shades of gold, 13,419 foot Mount Aragats looming to the east, snow already coating its steep slopes, herds of sheep, cows and the occasional shepherd.

Our driver appeared to be in his forties, slim, dark haired with an aquiline nose and pleasant, unassuming face. I’m pretty sure he’d been driving a taxi since he was old enough for his legs to reach the pedals.

As the crow flies, the distance from Yerevan to Gyumri is roughly 75 miles, but because of the road conditions it can take up to two hours to go from one city to another.

Armenian taxi drivers know this route like the back of their hands. Ours swerved this way and that to avoid potholes. It’s very unusual to find seat belts in Armenian taxis, and ours did not have any. So that meant whenever we hit a bump or landed in a pothole we’d find ourselves airborne, like we were riding a mechanical bull at the rodeo, heads clonking hard against the ceiling of the taxi. By the end of the ride, my husband joked his spine was two inches shorter.

We’d been on the road about an hour when I heard a high pitched whine coming from the rear, followed by a thwakety-thwak as the car careened unevenly towards the median. Our translator asked the driver what was happening, and with an anxious look he pulled the car off to the side of the road. Cars flew by us as he stepped out. Flat tire.

So there we were, stuck on the side of the road, surrounded by an empty wind-swept valley. No villages. No gas stations. I silently crossed my fingers hoping the driver had a spare road-worthy enough to take us the rest of the way to our destination. We’d already missed the first day of visitation because the orphanage director was out of town.

Sure enough he did. Fiften minutes later, he had the spare on and we piled back into the taxi to continu on our journey. Another hour passed, uneventfully, until we reached the outskirts of Gyumri.

Gyumri is a city with roughly 122,000 residents, still reeling following a devastating earthquake in 1988. 25,000 people lost their lives in that disaster. Box cars provided as “temporary” housing nearly three decades ago are still being used today.

Our driver tell the translator he hasn’t been to Gyumri in years, which quickly becomes obvious to us that as he pulls the taxi over to ask first one and then two people for directions to the orphanage. We stop a third time to ask a police office who stares blankly when our translator tells him the name of the orphanage. So instead we drive in aimless circles, passing by the same statues, the same town square until we finally arrive at a corner the translator recognizes. Gingerly, our driver edges the taxi around several crater-sized potholes before pulling off the road beside a stone wall painted with faintly visible scenes of mountains and people, painted by children. A turquoise blue door opens to a driveway where a small scraggly brown and white dog greets us. We have arrived.

It’s all about the journey,

Beth

Leap of faith: Our family turns 4

March 22, 2016 by Beth Shepherd

Four years ago we took a huge leap of faith, and on March 22, 2012, a judge in Gyumri, Armenia granted us permission to adopt an 11-month-old girl. With that decision, our long journey to become parents was over. But…another adventure had just begun. When we went to the orphanage to hold her–our daughter now–it’s hard to describe the emotions we felt. Relief that the angst of the past four years was behind us. Elation at finally being parents. Fear because we were–gulp–parents. Now it was our job to keep her alive.

Over the past four years we’ve learned a lot about how to care for a child, our child at least. We’ve also learned a lot about ourselves. We’ve laughed, cried and screamed. There have been awesome days, and days when we feel like this was the stupidest mid-life crisis ever!* Parenthood has been an adventure like no other.

Happy Family Day to us!

It’s all about the journey,

Beth

*Thank you, Megann, for this pearl. Spot on!

And thank you to Weeone Photography for the photo of the three of us!

A gift from Gyumri: Armenian fruit leather

October 2, 2015 by Beth Shepherd

A package arrived from Armenia this week. Inside were several special gifts including Armenian fruit leather. There is nothing more delicious (in my admittedly biased opinion) than homemade–IN ARMENIA–fruit leather.

The fruit leather from Gyumri, where my daughter was born, has a certain something that makes it so good, you want to wrap yourself up in it. And you could. The piece I received measured in at a mere 13-inches square. I remember buying a piece during one of our visits that was literally as big as a baby blanket.

Of course, looks aren’t everything…the proof is in the pudding. Or fruit leather. So we brought in our little Armenian for a taste.

Where is the fruit leather from?

The sniff test.

Checking color and clarity…just like wine tasting!

The taste test.

The full report.

Dada, where is Armenia again and how far is it from Seattle?

Yes, this fruit leather came from very far away.

On the other side of the world from where we live.

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Take the road less traveled, Beth

Autumn in Armenia

September 18, 2015 by Beth Shepherd

Four of my six trips to Armenia have taken place in the fall, so when the weather begins to change and the air becomes crisp, leaves turn color, and the smell of rain is in the air, my mind wanders to Autumn in Armenia.

Alongside roads, farmers set out fruit to sell.

Ripe grapes hang from trellises by many of the homes.

Every kind of canned fruit or vegetable imaginable can be found: apricots, cornelian cherries, pickles and okra.

Wonderful Armenian honey and honeycomb is harvested.

Unusual fruit like Sea Buckthorn are juiced or dried.

Strings of berries hang from trees waiting to be taken home and made into jam.

Fields filled with sunflowers and wild Cosmos.

Shepherds bringing their flocks down from higher pastures.

Always beautiful.

…and, of course, then comes the rain.

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Take the road less traveled, Beth

Leaving one home to join another

March 25, 2015 by Beth Shepherd

Out the turquoise doors we passed, our daughter leaving one home to join another. Walk through these doors in the other direction and you enter Baby Bird’s first world, a children’s home, where she lived for the first year of her life, surrounded by the voices of nannies and other children just like her, children who–for any number of reasons–were not able to live with their birth families.

I will always be deeply grateful to the nannies who did their best to meet her needs. But to me, these walls also tell another story, one with limited opportunity, where there isn’t space to crawl and run and play, where there are no clothes or toys that were hers and hers alone. The children’s home was a place where even the most loving of nannies cannot meet the needs of a child in the way a family can.

I can only imagine what might have been going through her head as two virtual strangers removed her from the only home she had ever known, from familiar faces, smells and sounds. I often think about what she left behind when–three years later–on most mornings, we clink our glasses together as a family and say ‘Genatz,‘ cheers in Armenian. I think about the women who cared for her, her language and culture. But then I think about the other children we saw, some whose faces I will never forget, many of whom will spend all their growing years inside the walls our daughter left behind in the arms of her new family.

As we drove south, from Gyumri to Yerevan, Baby Bird looked out the window–eyes wide open–studying the new world surrounding her. Catch lights appeared in her eyes. Photographers love catch lights, which are created when a light source causes reflections in their subject’s eyes. They give the eyes depth, soul.

If you look into my daughter’s eyes, you will see something beautiful, something that will always be inside her, that she will never leave behind. You will see the land where my daughter was born. You will see Armenia.

Take the road less traveled, Beth

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Seeing our daughter again after five long months

March 17, 2015 by Beth Shepherd

I’ve never given birth, but I can imagine how desperately you long to meet your child after nine long months of pregnancy. However, while a pregnant mother-to-be has been with her child from the moment she was created, adoptive parents begin their relationship with their child many months later, even if they have the good fortune to be present at the birth. Adopt internationally and you will almost certainly miss out on many months–or years–of your child’s life. This is how it was with our daughter.

She was six-months-old when we met her, and the time that elapsed between our first, registration, trip to our second court trip was five months. Five long months.

I remember a number of people telling us a year is “nothing” in a baby’s life, meaning she wouldn’t remember the orphanage and the transition to her adoptive family would be easy. Three years down the road as a family, I will say I disagree. A year is a lot of time in a baby’s life, especially the first year.

Saying goodbye at the end of our registration trip. Baby Bird was six-months-old.

On March 17th, we went back to the orphanage where we’d first met our little one when she was six-months-old. In the five months that transpired between our registration trip and our court trip we hadn’t received any information or photographs. We had no idea what she would look like–what she would be like. For those of you reading this post, who have given birth, try to imagine what it might be like to take a five-month hiatus from your child during the first year of her life.

When they brought her out, it took me a minute to recognize her. She had hair! Lots of hair. Her once green eyes were now decidedly brown. She was much bigger. There was less “baby” in her face and more toddler. And the blue dots? Well, she was recovering from chicken pox and the nurses put a tincture on to help her sores heal.

Saying hello again, five months later. Baby Bird is 11 months old.

Big Papa and I passed her between us, wondering if there was any recollection of who we were lodged somewhere in the far reaches of her memory. When we first met her on our registration trip, I’m sure she thought she’d hit the jackpot with two new nannies who were spending a lot of one-on-one time with her. How nice! And I imagine, after the week passed and we left, she might have felt puzzled, “Where did they go?”

Dada and daughter. She might have been thinking, “Who are these people?”

For us, seeing her again was surreal. In a matter of days, this little girl would become our daughter. Forever.

Take the road less traveled, Beth

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Three years ago: Gyumri, Armenia

March 16, 2015 by Beth Shepherd

Three years ago on March 16, we flew from London to Yerevan, Armenia. We arrived at midnight. Snow was falling. The roads were icy and hazardous.

I should also mention our driver, who did not speak any English, was a former professional wrestler. One glance at him told us all we needed to know. He was a very large, exceptionally muscular man. This was supposed to be a comfort to us–should we encounter any “trouble.”

However, as we wound our way up and down hills, through tiny villages, traversing small side roads unfamiliar to us, I began to worry. We’d driven from Yerevan to Gyumri and back, five times on our registration trip six months…but we’d never taken this route. My mind played terrible tricks as I imagined our fate.

But arrive at our destination we did. And safely. At 3:00 a.m. in the morning.

We checked into the Nane Hotel. I still feel badly for the poor guy at the front desk who was forced to wait up for us. He gave us the key to our room, a number I will never forget–the area code for our home city. On the table in our room, was this statuette, an apropos reminder of why we’d traveled half way around the world.

In the morning, a snow-covered Gyumri greeted us. Along with a temperature of 5-below-zero Fahrenheit.

Take the road less traveled, Beth

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Mushurba – The golden cup of Gyumri

March 5, 2015 by Beth Shepherd

When I saw this photo of a giant mushurba statue in Gyumri, I was dismayed. Despite all the photos I took to remember the city, how did I miss this? I felt a better when I read it hadn’t been installed until 2013. We visited in 2011 and 2012.

Arman Musikyan, Wikimedia.

A mushurba is a cup–distinctive to Gyumri, Armenia–with two chambers, made from copper or silver. As you sip, you’ll hear the sound of gurgling water. The sound results from he intentional design of the cup.

From what I understand, the way it works is by preventing air from coming out when water is poured into the cup. This creates bubbles which, in turn, make he sound of a burbling brook.We were told the design of the mushurba helps keep the temperature of the liquid inside stable.I’ve also heard that in the 21st century there was a local tradition with the host presenting a mushurba to guests.

Without a doubt, the mushurba is a symbol unique to Gyumri, which is why we really wanted to locate one to take home with us. Our translator helped us locate a gift shop on the pedestrian shopping street in downtown Gyumri where we could purchase our gurgling cup. The shopkeeper was so sweet and poured water in our cup so that we knew we were getting the real deal.

Our mushurba is one of the souvenirs from our travels, I treasure the most. I look forward to sharing the tradition of this special golden cup with our daughter as she grows up.

Take the road less traveled, Beth

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