I KNEW SHE WAS MEANT TO BE MY ADOPTED DAUGHTER THE MOMENT I HELD HER

Scientist Michelle Adams, 38, has been married to Stasinos, 42, a cardiologist, for seven years. They adopted their daughter, Lelia, three, in Cyprus almost three years ago.

THE nurse gave me a hopeful smile and asked: ‘Would you like to see her now?’ For an hour we’d been discussing my daughter’s medical history and the life she’d lived for four months without me.

Moments later, I found myself staring into the huge eyes of a tiny girl, her hair as curly as corkscrews.

I felt certain she was looking at this strange woman with tears on her cheeks, wondering what made me so special that she’d had to be woken from a nap.

‘I’m your mama,’ I told her, and with a shaky finger I tickled her tummy.

She giggled and reached for me. I decided it was a sign. I whispered to my husband: ‘Finally, we’ve found our baby.’ We’d been waiting for three years. During that time, I’d watched friends have babies and my fears intensified each time I saw my dreams played out elsewhere.

In a moment of desperation, we met with a surrogacy agency. But it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want any child. I wanted my child, and it was my strong belief that she was coming to us via adoption.

A few months later, in July 2017, we got a call — the conversation that would lead us to Lelia. When I held her on that first day, I knew she was the child I had been waiting for. The first time she fell asleep in my arms and I laid her in her cot, it was as if a line had been drawn between the past and the future. But an uncomfortable dichotomy emerges from adoption: for my dreams to be fulfilled, first someone else’s had to be shattered.

When Lelia was born she was unable to feed

properly due to a cleft palate, and soon became unwell. While we will never know her exact reasoning, Lelia’s birth mother felt unable to cope, and decided to leave her in the care of hospital staff. Lelia spent the next four months in the intensive care facility of the hospital.

To be given away by the person on whom you are entirely dependent is a great loss, and I imagine her biological mother, too, must have suffered an unimaginable burden when making her decision. And yet there was I, stepping into the role, never happier in my life.

Everything I did that first week Lelia remained in hospital was scrutinised and evaluated.

Because of her cleft palate, we had to learn how to pass a feeding tube through her nose and into her stomach.

The moment we could take her home was overshadowed when she pulled out the feeding tube that same afternoon.

Later that night with a new tube in to feed her, I realised the fantasy I’d had about parenthood was over. After she fell asleep I stood in my bedroom and cried. Some of those tears were relief. Some were gratitude. But most stemmed from fear. Perhaps I was better able to understand the fears of her biological mother in that moment than I will ever be able to again.

After the tube came out she lost 0.5 kg, and I felt the weight of the judgment of the medical professionals. When she cried in public and I couldn’t soothe her, I felt the disparaging looks from strangers.

I was vocal about our adoption, proud of our daughter and the way she came to us, but found it hard not to react when people asked me what had happened to her ‘real’ mother. I found myself desperate to prove I was good enough.

Eight months later we were declared her legal parents, and, at 13 months, Lelia finally had surgery to repair her palate.

My husband and I waited for news for two hours. Then I rushed to Lelia’s bed to find her screaming and disorientated. Blood seeped from her mouth.

I scooped her up, just like on the first day, and whispered that Mama was there and everything was OK. And this time, despite her pain and my fear, she reached out, held on to me, and was soothed.

For months I’d been wondering whether I had the right to call myself her mother, but all along the only person who had the answer was my daughter.

Since that day, I’ve never questioned who I am to her.

ADAPTED by Felicia Bromfield from The Best, Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood, edited by Katherine May (Elliott & Thompson, €18.20).