Dear Andrei

It has been a while since I have written you, although I still think about you every single day. I think your name crosses my mind at least once every day as does this picture of you. I love this photo; I keep it on my laptop so I see it every time I flip it open. I like the serene and quiet look on your face even though my favorite thing about you was your toothy grin and gruff laugh. This photo captures your peaceful handsome look. You are about 4 years old now! It is so hard to believe that you are a whole year older already; you are growing up so fast. I imagine you are potty trained and no longer wearing those ridiculously big blue diapers you wore at Sfanta Maria's! You must be jabbering away in Romanian and talking up a storm to all within hearing distance. I imagine you also talk to yourself like I saw you do a few times when I peaked through your hospital room window several times. Remember those magazines you would look at as you would mumble away about who-knows-what? I wish I could have understood what you were saying...

Sometimes I catch myself imagining what my life would be like right now if you were mine to raise. I have a college degree now and am exploring some different career paths I could take. I would almost be in a perfect situation to raise you as my own. I wonder if you are still in the same foster home you went to when you left last summer or if you have ended up in an orphanage. I hope you are in a home with people who love you. You would be pretty hard not to love, although you did throw some mean tantrums, bebe. You were quite impossible at times! You would get along great with our jack russell terrier. You both can be pretty stubborn, you know. 


Do you want to know something crazy? Last fall when I went through a major depressive episode, I was scared out of my whits. I lost all desire to be alive and getting out of bed and facing a whole day was a battle. And all along the way I kept thinking if I had been able to bring you home, I would have been fine. I would have had Mom and Dad care for you while I finished my last semester of school and then found a good job, got an apartment, and raised you on my own. Andrei, I would not have been able to do that. I would be on government aid and you would be in daycare or with Mom all day while I was working. Life would have been a struggle and I would have been exhausted and frustrated at being a single mom. Why did I hold on to the notion that having you in my life would have made everything just great? That I could have conquered anything easily if I just had you? I kept telling myself at least you wouldn't be in a foster home in Romania. What right did I have to think that living with a 21-year-old single American girl would make you that much better off than a foster home in Romania? It wasn't about you. It was about me. I just couldn't let you go.


I think you represented something to me, Andrei. You represented a life I want so badly right now. I want to be a mother. I want to be a wife first, of course, and then a mother. I want a toothy-grinned toddler who throws tantrums one minute and then falls asleep in my arms the next. I want to rejoice in my child's first steps and feel the warmth of my baby's breath on my neck as I rock him to sleep. I want someone to teach and to love like nothing else in this world. And I want a supporting and loving husband who plays with his children when he gets home from work and who is ecstatic to be at home with his wife and children after a long day. I want to be loved and I want to love. And the longer that dream isn't becoming real, the more the fear creeps in that there is no husband and there are no children waiting for me. That I'm going to be alone and providing for myself and watching all my friends and my siblings have children and knowing that I will never know what it is to hold your own baby in your hands and kiss their sweet little face. That fear is real and it is scary. Thus, I hold on to you and long for you as though you are the only child I will ever have had the pleasure of loving that much. I'm trying not to be afraid, Andrei. I trust in God and I know he wants me to be happy. I'm trying not to be afraid.


I love you always and forever,
Alyssa