The adoption option
The first time I saw my twin daughters, they were sitting side by side on top of a suitcase, rolling through the arrival gate at Montreal's Trudeau Airport on a luggage cart. They sat stock-still, like two little queens on a throne. Beautiful three-year-old girls from Haiti with striking dark eyes, their hair freshly braided in delicate cornrows, their apparent serenity belied what was happening to them.
Reality soon hit. The moment my husband and I tried to embrace our daughters, their composure melted. They howled, kicked us and struggled to break free. "Another international adoption," muttered a cashier at the snack bar where my mother-in-law had gone to buy a bottle of water.
We weren't surprised. After all, that morning Nathalie and Erika had been swept from the only home they knew, an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, and shoved into a noisy machine full of strangers. They had no idea what was happening, or whom they could trust.
As we left the airport with them, we felt like soldiers dragging away prisoners of war. The girls sobbed as we pushed their limbs into snowsuits. They became hysterical when we approached the car. Erika, the smaller and more delicate twin, refused to get in. After we finally got her strapped in, she spent the trip home trying to escape, Houdini-like, out the bottom of her car seat.
Navigating the first difficult days
By the time we carried our girls into their new bedroom, it was 10 p.m., and they were exhausted. But to our delight, they walked straight to the two beds to pick up the doll we had placed on each. The sight of toys seemed to reassure them. Some time later, we took them to the bathroom; they brushed their teeth, put on their pyjamas and fell asleep.
The next morning, we all woke up to a strange new world. Clinging to their dolls, the girls were too afraid to explore the house, let alone go outside. They spent their first days obsessively scribbling circles on construction paper and twisting their dolls' hair into tiny strings. It took them days to open their mouths and utter a single word in French Creole, weeks to get up the nerve to venture into the backyard, and months to stop crying at the sight of the car.
As my husband and I tried to think of ways to help our daughters conquer their fears, the four of us spent those first few months cocooning. Everything from hospitals and doctors to the word aéroport to the sound of a toilet flushing elicited tears. But what they feared most was a knock at the door. Visitors petrified them. Six months after the girls arrived, we still had to reassure them that our friends and relatives hadn't come to take them away.
Next page: The average age of adoptive parents is 43 - but it's getting increasingly difficult for older parents to adopt.
