Mariana 'is a lot like me,' Linda Rahal says of her adopted daughter. 'It's weird.' Photo / The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken
In 2010, Linda Rahal's life included 60 kilometre bike rides and Ironman training sessions. It included travels around the world, dinners out with friends and occasionally long hours as managing partner at the immigration law firm she had helped start.
It did not include a husband or children - or any real regrets about that.
"Because I had a good life," she says. "I was working. I was making money. I could do almost whatever I wanted."
And then one night in 2011, Linda, then in her late 40s, got a surprising phone call from a former client. The woman, Ljiljana, was living in her native Serbia with a toddler she'd adopted the previous year. But she was sick - with stage 4 breast cancer - and wanted to know if Linda would care for the child after she died.
"I immediately said yes. Right away," Linda says. "I'm a person who lives by my gut, and I just said yes."
Then she got off the phone and wondered what exactly she'd committed herself to. Linda had represented Ljiljana a decade earlier and had bailed her out from time to time ever since - even letting Ljiljana stay with her for months at a time when she was out of work.
"She sort of befriended me," Linda says. "And whenever she got into trouble, she would call me."
Ljiljana was first diagnosed with breast cancer when she was still living in the United States. And once she was declared cancer free, she became intent on having a child. Fertility treatments didn't work, so she moved home to Serbia to pursue adoption.
But even as her adoption of a young Roma orphan progressed, her cancer returned. Ljiljana occasionally emailed Linda with updates and photos of the child. "And she was cute, but I didn't focus on that. It was just, 'Oh my God, what are they doing? Why did they give her this little girl? Poor girl,'" she recalls. "I always thought it was very selfish of her - you know you're dying and you take a kid."
Then came the call. And Linda's answer, which she told almost no one about. But a few months later she travelled to Serbia to meet the child, Mariana, who was then an active, happy two-year-old.
Ljiljana looked healthy and said that she expected to survive at least another year, maybe two. But within nine months, Linda got word that she had died.
Ljiljana had left a will but hadn't secured US citizenship for the child or cleared the way for an international adoption. Mariana was technically once again a ward of the state, though she was allowed to remain with Ljiljana's elderly parents.
Linda soon began to feel as though she'd been thrown into a race through a complicated legal maze. She needed to get custody of Mariana before the social service agency took her back or her grandparents became too frail to care for a lively toddler. And she needed clearance from both US and Serbian immigration officials to do it.
Her years of immigration work and network of contacts proved invaluable. She found a Serbian woman living in Washington who could interpret during her monthly Skype calls with the child. She met with the Serbian ambassador and prepped for a home study to determine whether she would be a fit parent. The Serbian government denied her initial request to adopt Mariana, so she hired a lawyer in that country to help her navigate a legal system that didn't look favourably on international adoptions - never mind one by a single woman who'd never had children.
"I didn't know quite how I was going to make it work," she says. "At some point, I thought, 'Well, maybe it just won't work.' But I don't think I ever thought, 'This is too much and I should just give up.' " She still had trouble picturing herself as a mother, or her life with a young child, but by that point she'd begun to fall in love with Mariana.
In February 2013, Linda travelled to Belgrade for a month, visiting the US Embassy and then staying in a tiny room at the grandparents' house in the country, where social service workers came to observe her interacting with the little girl, by then four years old.
Linda and Mariana communicated in broken Serbian and English but found that they could play with dolls and run around in the yard without sharing a language. And after Linda appeared before a panel of Serbian immigration officials who scrutinised her motives for wanting the child, they approved the adoption. The decision made headlines in Serbian newspapers.
Soon Linda and Mariana were on a 10-hour flight back to Washington. When they missed a connection, Linda, exhausted and depleted, found herself standing in an airport with tears streaming down her face. And at that moment, she became a parent.
"I see Mariana look up at me - horrified - wondering why I'm crying," she recalls. "So I had to stop."
When the pair got home to Washington, Linda's long solo bike rides stopped, too. So did the spontaneous drinks after work and the unpredictable hours at the office. Life became about nannies and kindergarten enrollment and easels full of Mariana's art projects.
"I always say I've lived life kind of backwards," says Linda, now 51. "I was the empty nester in my 30s and 40s and could go out and play and travel, where other friends of mine, their kids are going off to college now. My whole life has changed."
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At first Mariana needed "the same attention as an infant," Linda recalls. She was confused about where she was and couldn't communicate her needs to her new mother. But her English quickly improved, and she settled into a new routine with Linda, walking their dog, Mabel, after breakfast and heading to the playground on weekends.
"I kind of think about, 'What did I do beforehand? What kept me so busy back then?' Because now I'm really busy," Linda says. "I had a great life, but after two years, I don't miss it."
She finds it amazing how much Mariana's personality reflects her own. Now six, Mariana has grown into a spirited, affectionate, outgoing little girl who makes friends easily. "She's a lot like me. It's weird," she says. "She's high energy. She's stubborn. She's athletic but can be a girly-girl at the same time. This is more than mere coincidence."
When she thinks about it now, she feels certain that Mariana was always meant to be with her - and that fate just took her on a circuitous route to arrive here.
Looking back, Linda thinks that's the real reason Ljiljana came into her life in the first place. "That was my purpose in knowing her," she says. "It was to bring Mariana to me. It wasn't so that she could have a kid. It was so I could. "
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