The phone call I'd been waiting for arrives early on a spring morning.
	"Melissa, we know who your baby is going to be," says Lillian
Zhang, a woman who directs China Adoption With Love in Brookline,
Massachusetts. In a few weeks, she would become my guide when I traveled to
China to meet my daughter and bring her home. 


	"Your baby's name is Chang Yu Xia, and she was born on September
10, 1996," Lillian tells me. Quickly I calculate her age: Tomorrow she will
be eight months old. Even as I'm figuring this out in my head, with my hand
I am reaching to my desktop, trying desperately to locate a scrap of paper
on which to write this new and important information.


	"How do you spell her name?" I ask, after discovering to my dismay
that an old envelope will have to suffice. "And what does it mean?"
	Slowly Lillian recites the English letters, explaining as she does
that the first part of my daughter's name simply tells us the town where
she is, Changzhou. After all, Chang Yu Xia has no family name. She is an
orphan.


	"Beautiful colorful jade, that's what her name means," Lillian
says. Later than morning I write in my journal about this child who is
lying in a crib twelve time zones away from me. Now I know her name, but
her features and personality are left for me to imagine: "I wonder if you
have green eyes like mine," I write, realizing how focused I've suddenly
become on the color jade.


	Chang Yu Xia was abandoned by her parents as part of China's
population policy that allows only one child per family. No one knows, or
ever will know, if she was her mother's first baby, born to parents who
decided, as many in China do, to reserve their precious slot for a boy they
one day hoped to have. Or she could have been her family's second child, a
child whose orphaned fate was understood during her mother's pregnancy.
Either circumstance must be excruciating for birth parents as they go
through the emotional and physical steps of abandoning their babies,
leaving them to be cared for by strangers.


	Some mothers in China, I've been told, apply a plant's toxin to
their daughter's skin. By doing this, they create a mark like a birthmark
which, to their eyes, will be forever distinguishable. The mark speaks for
these mothers' absent voices: "I did not willingly abandon you," it
proclaims. "And when one day I see you again, I will know you as my child."
Swaddled in blankets, and sometimes accompanied by a note, a mother leaves
her infant in a public place, on a park bench or near government offices,
where authorities soon find her and bring her to an orphanage. It is
unlikely that a parent will ever see her child again.


	Several weeks before I left for China, I was given a postage-stamp
photograph of my daughter's three-month-old face. In that picture, which
the Chinese adoption officials had sent to Lillian, the baby's
basketball-shaped head pops up out of a loose-fitting and tattered red
sweater. Her unfocused gaze makes it appear as though someone startled her
at nap time. I carried this photo with me everywhere I went.


	Ever since June of 1996, when I began the process of adopting a
child from China, I had wondered how the Chinese adoption officials would
put me and my child together. With thousands of babies in need of adoptive
families, how would these officials in Beijing select the girl who would
grow up in my house, as my child, in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Along with
the pile of documents I'd been asked to submit, the Chinese requested a
photograph of me. Now, as I gazed at this tiny image they'd sent back to
me, I knew I was developing a strong attachment to this baby, convincing me
that she and I belonged together.


	This extraordinary feeling of connectedness didn't easily translate
into words. Nor was I even certain I understood all of the emotional
exchanges that were transpiring between me and the photo of this little
girl. However, as I showed her photo to friends and family, I declared my
certainty not by saying things such as "we were meant to be" or "I know we
belong together" (though I believed both), but by jokingly describing our
physical similarities. "Look at her," I'd say. "You see how much we
resemble one another." Friends nodded politely, but didn't know quite how
to respond since my hair is blond and my face has Caucasian features. "See
those fat cheeks, double chin, and thin hair," I'd say, prompting them to
look again at my daughter. They'd laugh awkwardly, a bit fearful of fully
acknowledging my face's pudgy tendencies. Still, in this exchange I felt
they'd sensed this unspoken connection.


	Lillian also surprised me on a different morning by calling to tell
me that my daughter's name wasn't Chang Yu Xia, as she'd thought it was. It
seems the Chinese character had been a bit blurred in the initial fax. Now
that copies of my daughter's records had arrived, Lillian could accurately
decipher the character. "Her name is Chang Yu Lu," she told me. It felt
strange to hear my daughter called by a different name, especially since,
in my mind, I'd already made "Xia" a part of her American name. Besides, I
didn't like the sound of "Lu" with "Ludtke," which is my last name and soon
would be hers. So I decided to keep the name I'd associated with her from
the moment we had been introduced: She would be Maya Xia Ludtke.


	Ludtke is the name I was born with. It is also the one I asked a
judge to legally return to me after I was divorced following a brief,
unhappy, and childless marriage during my late twenties. I had never
remarried, so my family name has remained mine. Now, at the age of
forty-six, I was about to become Maya's only adoptive parent. It occurred
to me more than once that since I am on my own, I will pass on to my
daughter the last name my parents gave me, something women rarely do.


	In thinking about this, I recalled a conversation I'd had with
another unmarried mother. She had remarked on this circumstance as we'd
talked about the divergent paths women in our generation are taking to
motherhood. While in her early forties, she'd given birth to two boys on
her own, each the product of anonymous donor insemination. What seemed to
astound her most about her route to motherhood was that she'd created a
family by herself (albeit with the help of purchased sperm) and now her
sons would carry on her family's name. "I mean, I passed along my family
name," she exclaimed to me one day. "That's not supposed to be something a
girl could do."


	Now I was about to do the same thing, just as hundreds of thousands
of other unmarried women who belong to my baby-boom generation are doing as
they have or adopt children on their own. From 1984 to 1994, government
statistics tell us, the rate of births to unmarried women between the age
of forty and forty-nine increased by 88 percent; for unwed women
thirty-five to thirty-nine, the rate of increase was 82 percent. Similarly,
many well-educated single women - who are economically self-sufficient and
determined not to allow their chance for motherhood to slip by - are
adopting children in this country and abroad. On my trip to China, the
group I traveled with returned with eight babies. Four of these mothers
were unmarried, and one was partnered with another woman who adopted a
Chinese baby several years before.


	One afternoon in China, a shop owner inadvertently focused my
attention again on this subject of passing on my family name. I was
ordering two "yens," ornately designed cylinders on which Chinese
characters spell out names. People use them as personal stamps. The order I
placed was for my parents; one would say grandmother, the other
grandfather. I thought they'd be something my parents could use when they
wrote letters to my daughter.


	"Are they your parents or the father's?" the saleswoman asked me,
looking toward a male friend who was visiting me that afternoon.
	"My parents," I responded.
	As she drew the characters to be carved, my friend, who speaks
Chinese, explained to me the significance of my answer. "You see that
character," he said, pointing toward it. "That means they are her outside
grandparents."


	"Outside?" I asked him. "Outside of what?"
	"Outside of the family," he replied. "You are the mother, so your
parents are considered your children's outside grandparents, the ones who
aren't in the main family. Other symbols would describe her paternal
grandparents."


	I asked my friend to instruct the saleswoman to come up with a less
formal designation for Maya's grandparents, thereby removing the symbol for
"outside" from their yens.


	In the midst of this brief episode at the store, the clash of
cultures hit me hard. Here I was, a single American woman adopting a
Chinese girl abandoned because of her gender, and her birth mother's
heritage held an outsider's status within her own family. Not only do
Chinese women not pass on their family's name to their children (even in a
hyphenated version), but the notion that they could lead independent and
self-sufficient lives and raise children on their own, if they chose to,
remains wholly alien.


	How extraordinarily different are the possibilities my daughter
will be able to embrace, I thought to myself as I walked back to the hotel.
Had Maya remained in China, to be raised as an orphaned girl, her life as a
woman would have been circumscribed by the extremely tight boundaries
society set for her at birth. After all, if women are viewed as "outsiders"
within the cultural institution which matters most in China - the family -
imagine the life prospects of a girl  with no family ! Quite likely Maya's
destiny would have been to perform some kind of menial labor, such as
carving boxwood combs in a Changzhou factory. But I believe that no matter
what occupation she might one day have pursued, any attempt she might have
made to carve out a distinct and pronounced identity for herself would like
have been thwarted.


	In Maya's new country, however, the array of choices presented to
well-educated women (something I'm assuming she will be) can seem, at
times, overwhelming. As New York Times contributor Mary Cantwell once
cogently observed in writing about the decision-making of contemporary
American women, "We have choices about what we do but not about what we
desire." Indeed, the absence of marriage no longer stands as an
impenetrable fire wall between women's sometimes intense desire to become
mothers and their ability to transform that desire into reality. This is
not to say that women who make this choice dismiss marriage as irrelevant
or undesirable. Rather in talking with many such mothers I've learned that
they saw marriage as sadly unattainable at this critical time, whereas
motherhood wasn't.


	As my own experience attests, making this decision to parent alone
is not done hastily. Between the time I began to think about having a child
on my own to when, at the age of forty-six, I first held my daughter, nine
years had passed. Many women seek counsel from therapists or rely on the
close company of friends to listen and offer advice. Others seek out
support groups; some link up with Internet listservs and communicate by
e-mail with women wrestling with similar issues. I confronted my questions
- most of all my concerns about not providing a father for my child - by
discussing them with other unmarried women, many of whom were already
mothers. Out of these visits I wrote a book about my journey of
decision-making and theirs, pairing what we, as women, decide to do with
our lives with what researchers who study these family changes are learning
about the consequences of our decisions. (The book, On Our Own: Unmarried
Motherhood in America, was published by Random House in September.)


	One woman described to me how she'd once dismissed as impossible
the idea of having children on her own, but the notion refused to go away.
Growing up in what she calls a "very nuclear family," she told me that
she'd had a very difficult time envisioning a different arrangement. "I was
saying to myself, 'Of course, I can't have kids because I'm not married',"
she told me. "But then it was like, 'Well, wait a minute. Is this really
true?' Once I let this idea that I didn't have to be married seep into my
consciousness, it was like I was able to hear people saying to me, 'Well,
maybe you should.' Maybe they were saying things like this to me before,
but I'd always ignored their promptings."


	Her words resonated with me. My childhood was spent in a similar
two-parent family; my father went to his job as a university professor
while my highly educated mother remained at home to raise their five
children. As most children do, I imagined my family life would resemble
theirs, albeit as the years went by I added twists that awareness of
feminism gave me. But such a circumstance was not to be. After my marriage
failed and then another serious relationship ended over the issue of
children (I wanted to have children, he didn't), I finally collapsed into
an intense period of grieving for this family I'd never have. Only after
this happened was I able to accept the likelihood that I'd never give birth
to a child in the conventional way. This acceptance eventually transformed
itself into my willingness to push forward with motherhood on my own.


	I've come now to appreciate how fortunate I am to be a
well-educated, financially independent woman who lives at the time and in
the place I do. Unlike even highly educated women of earlier generations,
my ability to become a mother doesn't begin nor end with marriage. This
awareness came more sharply into focus when a woman I visited with, who
adopted a child by herself, shared with me a conversation she'd had with a
childhood friend, a single woman who used an anonymous donor to help her to
conceive a child. Both grew up in a community in which nuclear families,
like the ones each of them grew up in, were the norm.


	As the two came to the end of a path they'd walked on together as
children, her friend remarked on their good fortune. "Isn't it
extraordinary that we live in a time when having a child on our own is not
only attainable but acceptable?" she told her former childhood companion.
"If a woman wants to have a baby badly enough, she goes out and finds a
way."


	My way took me seven thousand miles from home to an orphanage in
Changzhou, China. And when Maya and I returned to our home in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, our journey as a family was just beginning.



Melissa Ludtke '73  is  author of On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in
America (Random House).






This article originally appeared in Wellesley  magazine, the quarterly publication 
of the Alumnae Association of Wellesley College, and is reprinted with permission.