“When should I visit my birth country?”
On two separate occasions, I had such thought.
The first happened when I was in college.
I remember sitting across one of my college advisors, as he showed me a catalog of programs in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod.
With each turn of a page, my eyes lit up even more.
What was once a dream slowly becoming a reality.
I couldn’t wait to visit the town I was born in.
I couldn’t wait to see some of my family members.
I couldn’t wait to create new memories with old friends.
Weeks had passed.
I was still determined to make my dream a reality.
I wrote essays to scholarship funds, spoke to former students who had studied at some of these programs, traveled to Washington DC to renew my Russian passport.
All that was left to do was renounce my Russian citizenship, as I couldn’t travel on the US passport while being a citizen of the visiting country.
Then, I found out about the mandatory service requirement all 18-27 males had to fulfill.
I got scared.
Slowly, I began to let go of my dream.
Eight years later, I was in Norway, celebrating Christmas with one of my friends and his family.
The question came up again.
“Maybe this is the time,” I thought to myself.
On a snowy afternoon, I walked to the Russian Embassy in Oslo in an attempt to get more information about how I could fulfill once a dream of mine.
The Russian Embassy was closed.
Part of me was devastated.
The other part made me think that maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
Was I truly ready to confront the past, in-person, for the first time since I was adopted?
Was I truly ready to look my sister in her eyes and ask her questions that I desperately wanted to know answers to?
Was I truly ready to visit my birth Mom’s gravesite?
Questions I simply couldn’t find answers to.
As I’m writing this today and thinking about the initial question, “When should I visit my birth country?” I can’t help but acknowledge the honest truth of it all.
The type of response that has taken me years to accept as a possible answer.
“I don’t know!”
