Another Father

On this Father’s Day, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge an important father in our lives.  I am sure he has never received a Father’s Day tie or a plaster-of-paris handprint. I’m also sure he’s never gone a day—even a Sunday—without having to work, and more than most, I’m sure he has stayed awake nights worrying about his family.

I met him only once: the day we picked up Lily and Lewi from the orphanage. He had made the long trek from his village to meet us. He had surrendered the children for adoption about six months earlier, knowing that he and his new wife would not be able to care for them. His older children were of an age to help support the family, but these younger two, without a mother to care for them…well, what could he do?

In August of 2009, we traveled to Ethiopia. At an orphanage about an hour outside of the capital of Addis Ababa, we met our kids for the first time, as well as their biological father, Ulfina Deressa. He was too thin for his clothes, not tall, and he wore the sadness of a man living in grinding poverty.

We spent about an hour there, talking with him through an interpreter. We were never sure if we were getting straight answers, as it often seemed their discussions were long and the translations were far more brief.  We learned that the kids’ mother had died two years early of unknown causes. She was 36, and the two of them had four older children. For a time an aunt had helped to care for the youngsters, but when the aunt and the father married, they came to the conclusion that the two youngest should be put up for adoption.

I’m not sure what he hoped for, for his kids or for his family, when he took this brave step. On that day and in the days since, we wondered if the father imagined that we would provide him with some kind of financial support. This is expressly forbidden in international adoptions. Nothing—except a few photos—is permitted to change hands, because the State Department wants to avoid the sale of children, or even the appearance that children are being exchanged for money. 

We also wondered if the father really understood the magnitude of his actions. Perhaps the family thought that, because they weren’t infants, Lewi and Lily would never be chosen, and so the risk to putting them up for adoption was small. I do know that our translator, an executive for the adoption agency, spent a great deal of time explaining to the father, and not for the first time, that this was really happening.

We gave Ulfina pictures of our other children—Lewi and Lily’s new brothers and sister. He gave us a collection of photo booth snapshots of their birth family, each wearing the careworn expression of their father. Then our guide mentioned that the rain was about to start, and so we had to go. Lily’s bio father carried her to the van, talking to her in a language I did not understand but with inflections that were clear in any language.

I’m sure he often thinks about the kids, and about his decision. I hope he knows that his actions changed the world for the better for so many people, and that we feel blessed to call Lily and Lewi our own. So on Father’s Day I remember a father half a world away, and say a prayer of thanks for him, and the love that allowed him to release his children to us.