Will I still be an orphan if...?

“If I find my parents, will I still be an orphan?”  Little G looked at me with her big, baby seal-like eyes and waited.  What a question!  Obviously something that she has given a lot of thought to lately.

Like most of the other orphanage graduates I have talked with, her conversations often return to the subject of finding her parents, or more specifically, her mother.  They all come out with the same line: “If I found my mother, I wouldn’t want to live with her, even if she was rich.  I just want to see who she is, what she looks like, and to ask her: Why did you leave me?  But, if she was poor and in trouble, I would help her.”

Today, however, was the first time I had heard this more philosophical line of thinking on the subject of absent parents.  Did she mean in the eyes of the law? in her eyes? in the eyes of the community around her?

Little G filled in my silence with some of her own reflections.  “I grew up in an orphanage, so I guess I will always be детдомский. And after all, Kenji has a mother, but she’s still detdomskii…”

Her thoughts are no doubt influenced by her new life living around ‘normal’ people – people with family, people with education, people with ‘upbringing’, and people with a misguided and unexecuted insistence, almost as soon as they meet our girls, that they can help them find their parents.

Identity, belonging and worth – core issues we all wrestle with to some degree or another. How much more for one abandoned at birth?  As I was confronted by little G’s desperate need to hear the perfect answer, I was even more convinced that these issues cannot be completely addressed by any human act, no matter how well intentioned or perfectly executed.