NEW YORK — Jessica O’Dwyer, author of Mamalita (Seal Press, 2010), a book about O’Dwyer’s struggle to adopt her daughter Olivia from Guatemala, talked to The Red Thread about her book and her adoption experiences.
Mamalita follows O’Dwyer’s journey to become a mother through some of the darkest moments she faced –from a diagnosis of endometriosis to a terrifying adoption process in Guatemala that ultimately forced O’Dwyer to decamp to that country to fight to bring her daughter home.
Today, American parents are in limbo in Guatemala, as new regulations, changing governmental staff and new international regulations have caught them in a web of confusion. That group, called the Guatelama900, continues to pressure the U.S. government to assist them in getting their children home.
Jessica, Tim, Olivia & Mateo in California
O’Dwyer’s story begins in 2002, several years prior to the latest round of political and bureaucratic difficulties, but her book illuminates the often murky international adoption process and sheds light on the joyous connections that create families.
When she was diagnosed with early menopause in her early 30s, Jessica O’Dwyer could never have imagined what the future would hold. After a series of boyfriends declined to continue their relationships with her after learning of her infertility and her desire to adopt, O’Dwyer came to believe, by her early 40s, she might go it alone as single parent.
At the time O’Dwyer was working in communications for an art museum in San Diego. One weekend while on a long distance bike ride, she met Tim Berger, a warm, athletic dermatologist living in northern California. After dating for a few weeks, she told him, as she did all her boyfriends, about her infertility. Only this time, the boyfriend didn’t bolt.
They moved quickly towards marriage and within a year had decided to adopt together. At the time, Guatemala had some of the strongest adoption programs for families in the United States. O’Dwyer and Berger signed up with an agency, the director of which had herself adopted and was in the process of adopting another daughter from Guatemala.
They were given a referral for an infant girl they called Olivia. She was living with a foster care family and O’Dwyer was able to visit as often as she could while paperwork coursed through the system.
The process to finalize the adoption should have taken a few months. Instead, it began to drag on without clear answers. When O’Dwyer reached out to her adoption agency, she would be told they were trying, things were difficult and to be patient.
“I would be heart-broken when I went down to Guatemala to visit Olivia and find her strapped into a stroller in front of the TV,” recalls O’Dwyer. “The foster parents weren’t bad people, they had other children and they had signed up as foster parents to a baby and Olivia was growing up. Time was going by and Olivia wasn’t growing up with us. Her attachment was to her foster parents.”
That’s when O’Dwyer made the decision to move to Guatemala, even while Tim stayed back in California. “I really had no choice. I wanted to raise my daughter,” she explains.
She rented a home in a town called Antigua, a community where several expats were located, all mothers who had moved down to Guatemala to live with their children, also caught in bureaucratic limbo. The good news was that the American parents were permitted to keep their children with them as the paperwork dragged through the system, but the bad news was that there was no streamlined process that afforded these families any sense of security. “I actually faced the fact that I might have to live in Guatemala until Olivia turned 18,” says O’Dwyer.
Jessica & Olivia in Antigua
At first, O’Dwyer was just grateful to have Olivia living with in a rented house in Antigua, but as months began ticking past, with no movement towards finalization of the adoption in sight, she began to take matters into her own hands, making the rounds to the in-country facilitator, bureaucrats, lawyers and other parents who helped her navigate an often feckless and cumbersome system. That is not what O’Dwyer had intended to do when she moved down to Guatemala, but she grew to understand that if she failed to be proactive there was a good chance she would not be able to bring Olivia home.
“There was no moment of epiphany. Rather, it was a process. I began to realize if there was any hope of getting us home, I was going to have step up my efforts,” says O'Dwyer.
Days spent in the warm Guatemalan sun, pushing Olivia’s stroller over the cobblestone streets, lounging in limbo at a local pool with other expats and doggedly pursing every bureaucratic opening consumed six months until O’Dwyer was finally successful in securing the documents needed to bring Olivia home.
Mamalita details that journey, her evolution from wide-eyed, ecstatic new mother to obedient adoptive parent passively led through the system to the take-charge mother forced to stand up to ineptitude, indifference and corruption in order to bring her daughter home.
Ultimately, the book is a love letter to her daughter. “In becoming Olivia’s mother, I became the person I always wanted to be,” says O’Dwyer.
After Olivia and O’Dwyer’s return to the United States they connected with Olivia’s birth mother and grandmother. “It was important to me, and I wanted Olivia to know her birth family,” she explains. It is Olivia’s birth mother who bestowed upon O'Dwyer the nickname “Mamalita” or little Mama, from whence the book got its title.
“Her birth mother speaks K’iche, an indigenous language, with minimal Spanish and with Spanish being my second language anyway, communication is a challenge. There’s lots of pointing and gesturing, but also lots of hand holding,” notes O’Dwyer. “And over the years, we’ve grown close. Her teenage children call me their American mother.”
Olivia walking with her birth mother and birth grandmother
It took O’Dwyer five years to write Mamalita. She based it on the mountains of contemporaneous notes she took, the bulk of them written while she was living in Guatemala.
“I just knew I had to do something with this experience and share it with other people,” says O’Dwyer.
She spent years in writing classes and working with local Marin County writing groups to polish the manuscript. A fortunate encounter with author Joyce Maynard, who is her neighbor, propelled her forward until she landed an agent.
“I stuck with it because I knew this story was worth telling,” recalls O’Dwyer. “I was prepared for rejection and I wasn’t going to let that get in my way.” And it didn’t. Seal Press published Mamalita in 2010
After bringing Olivia home, O’Dwyer and Berger adopted their son Mateo from Guatemala, a process that took six months and was downright breezy after the experience of Olivia’s adoption. “At that point, I knew the system, how to get through it; I knew the good people working in Guatemala; and we finalized our adoption before the new Hague (Treaty] came into effect and regulations changed,” notes O’Dwyer.
When asked for advice for other parents stuck where she was, waiting and wondering if they will ever be able to bring their kids home, she offers this: “Do the very best you can and be active. My goal was to do one thing every single day that forwarded my goal, even a small thing. Lobby and advocate officials for change, and when outraged write letters. Most importantly, don’t give up.”
This article is the copyrighted property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media. REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.
