Chapter Forty-Four

September 2, 2000

“I know this pain
Why do lock yourself up in these chains?
No one can change your life except for you
Don't ever let anyone step all over you
Just open your heart and your mind
Is it really fair to feel this way inside?

Some day somebody's gonna make you want to
Turn around and say goodbye
Until then ... are you going to let them
Hold you down and make you cry?
Don't you know?
Don't you know things can change
Things'll go your way
If you hold on for one more day ...”
–Wilson Phillips

    Like Sinead O’Connor sang in “Troy” — I remember this day far worse than that rainstorm in Dublin she sang about.  

    To say I hit rock bottom — personally, professionally, maritally, spiritually — is the ultimate truth.  That day, the trap door fell out of rock bottom.  The only thing keeping me together that day was my core — a core I hadn’t realized was still in place.

    The two other forces I mentioned previous which had been at work in our lives other than Anguel’s adoption, collided early on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 2, 2000. 

    I didn’t wake up that morning, because I had never gone to bed.  The calendar which had hung on the wall above our computer now read that awful date of nearly a year of not having seen my son after having one so cruelly taken from us.

   That morning, I didn’t walk. I crawled.  Literally. 

    I crawled and looked around at my house, my life, my beliefs.  Nothing was left for me. Nothing. 

    I had taken everything I could possibly endure on the road to parenthood. Death.  Lies.  Cruel treatment by fools.  

    This, combined with the other things, brought me so far down, I didn’t think I could ever get back up. 

    I was sick of feeling this way.  I was sick of being kicked and lied to and spit on and told to be quiet. My marriage and my own beliefs were on the line.  I couldn’t take any more.

    Earlier in July I had told Daniel that in no uncertain terms, that if by Sept. 15 we did not have a travel date for Anguel, I was leaving him. 

    In August I purchased a book on Amazon about DIY divorce in the State of New York. This marriage-and-child family thing was some sort of lie told to me that I could no longer believe in.

    I told Daniel that if he wanted he could either continue on, and raise Anguel as a single father, or he too could abandon Anguel to the Bulgarian orphanage system. If there was no travel date by Sept. 15, I was going to be out of there. Anguel was now so lost to the “phantom child world” that he was losing his significance to me.

    Daniel didn’t know what he would do.  Would he continue on as a single father, raising a child whose needs might be insurmountable? Or would he also like to be free of the entire situation and move his life on in another direction?

    He too had suffered, and told me that we had endured worse than Denise Hubbard during our seven-year marriage.  

    Maybe. My back was to the wall and my beliefs were dangling around my knees. I could not go back from my self-imposed deadline. I’d given them my all.

    If you feel that the above is callous and cruel, it is. 

    Understand something. Neither my husband nor I were the ones who placed Anguel into an institution to be raised by strangers.  His biological parents did that. 

    Neither my husband nor I were the ones who placed that same child up on an Internet photolisting in an attempt to sell him off for our own profit motive.  Denise Hubbard and Valeri Kamenov did that. 

    We were the believing saps who got lured into the adoption of the child on his own merits — and had been over promised by the avarice of an industry that sold these dreams. Of that we are 100 percent guilty.

    This ate and ate at me.  If we walked from Anguel at that stage — remember, the court documents had been signed, naming us as Anguel’s parents — what would become of Anguel?  

    You can be certain, to add an even greater twist of cruelty, that we would not have given consent for any other family — American or Bulgarian — to readopt him. Why let BBAS make any more money off of one tiny child?

    Since he had slipped away into “Phantom Child Status,” as the calendar turned it pages to September, I was no longer thinking in terms of him as being my son, more as another child irrevocably taken from me.  

    Life had to go on.  And that people, is the truth. 

    So I sat on our sofa and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  

    Never in my life had I cried like that. Visions of a destitute, 16-year old Anguel, scouring the city of Burgas for garbage filled my mind.  For if we didn’t adopt him that surely would have been his fate.  

    But my heart and mind were shattered. My belief in “the system” was gone.     

    On and on I cried knowing the choice that I would be forced into making hinged on a person’s very existence and possible future for life.

    Daniel walked around stunned, unable to do or say anything to calm me.  The effect of not sleeping and the feeling of being physically beaten the entire summer hit me all in the space of 24 hours.  That day I realized why people took cocaine or became alcoholics. 

    Beyond rage, at 10 a.m. I reached for the telephone.  I’d had it. 

    It was time to make somebody pay for this, for my despair, for my hurt, for my loss of belief and hope.

    Need I tell you what numbers I dialed?  You betcha. BBAS’s toll-free and toll lines.  And I didn’t care who heard what filth was about to roll from my depths. 

    Of course I got the answering machine!  It was Labor Day weekend, the last weekend of the summer of my discontent. 

    Daniel stood by in the kitchen, his hands by his side looking at the spectacle of his seething, shaking wife dialing the toll-free number to the adoption agency in Medina.  

    Later, he said he agreed with my raging sentiments. They had had this coming for a very, very long time. In a few weeks’ time, he, too, would let them know how he felt, in his own words.

    When the answering machine picked up, I laid forth every “A,” “B,” “C,” “F”  and “S” adjective I could fit into a sentence. All while crying and screaming. 

    I called Denise Hubbard a baby seller and I said that she would be going to hell.  Knowing myself when angry, I perhaps called her a large “C” word. I asked the answering machine how it felt to sell dead babies. 

    And then I called the toll number and did exactly the same thing.  All with a few “F” words every other word and another round of calling her a pimp on top of baby seller. 

    Perhaps immature, but justified.  They deserved much worse than profanity.

    Don’t know if I felt any better doing that.  All I know is, they were on notice.  I sounded like I’d lost my mind, but it was my only outlet after everything coming down on me in 24 hours.  

    Our plans were now in place, and God help Denise Hubbard and anybody associated with the agency she ran if Anguel made it home.  If we had walked, again, this website would not be up.

   Elizabeth Case was out and ready to strike.  And I make no apology for it.

***

    This was the bottom, but later things slowly began to look up. Later that week, my father came down and Daniel helped him repaint what had been our study but was now to be Anguel’s room. It went from a dull light cream color to a bright scheme of dark and light blue, sort of like (but not really inspired by) Blue the dog on Blue’s Clues.

    And then one morning the next week, we were talking things over again in the morning when I heard myself asking Daniel “I wonder ... what’s Anguel going to be for Halloween?”

    It was the first time in a very, very long time that I’d thought of Anguel not as a fading abstraction, but as a real child who would soon be living his life in our house.