Father's Day times four

Stamford Advocate, June 15, 2008

Lou Aronica clearly remembers the moment when his first child was about to be born. He was 30 years old, unsure in his career and about to get into a cab to take his first wife to the hospital. As he got in the car, the realization of impending fatherhood sank in, and he found himself silently pleading for more time. He remembers asking himself, "Can we slow this down?"

Yet three hours later, as he cradled his daughter Molly in his arms for the first time, the pendulum swung. "It was like, 'Oh my God, I can't imagine anything better than this,' " he said. Almost 19 years later, contrast that experience with meeting his youngest child in December. Once again, he got into a car. But this time he wasn't headed to the hospital. Instead he drove to the airport. There he would pick up his wife Kelly and meet their new daughter.

The Aronicas had adopted a 3-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Suddenly, there was a new twist to fatherhood. It began in January 2007. Lou, a 50-year-old successful publisher and science fiction writer who worked from home said he increasingly sensed an emptiness in the house. His two children from his first marriage were on the cusp of adulthood. Molly, 19, was at college in Chicago, and Dave, 17, was about to leave the nest as well. Meanwhile, Abigail, 9, his youngest child with Kelly, a 40-year-old nutritionist, didn't need as much attention.

The couple decided they had room in their life for another child, and they wanted to adopt. After weeks of exhaustive research, they set their sights on Ethiopia, a country where foreign adoptions have surged in recent years. Most famously, the actress Angelina Jolie adopted a girl there in 2005.

But that, Lou said, had nothing to do with the Aronicas' decision. What appealed to them was Ethiopia's family-oriented culture, along with stories from other parents who had adopted children from there. "We had heard a lot of good things," he said.

Not only is the adoption process in Ethiopia known to be relatively smooth, it also is shorter compared with China or Korea, two countries that recently tightened requirements for eligibility. According to Vicki Peterson, executive director of Wide Horizons for Children, the agency that handled the Aronicas' adoption, the wait time can be less than a year for a child who is 3 and older and one to two years for a child younger.

A social worker prepared the couple and their children for the process, determining their readiness by interviewing each family member.

After starting the process in February, Lou and Kelly finally got the call in August. The agency informed them that they had pictures. They quickly drove to the West Hartford branch, where they saw the thin and frightened-looking face of a toddler living in an orphanage in Awassa, a city in the southern region of Ethiopia.

Christine Millette, the social worker who met with them, remembers their reaction that day. "They were excited. They had a sense that this was now real," she said.

Kelly made the trip to bring their daughter home, meeting her family members and learning more about the lush and expansive countryside where she was born. The new mother and daughter bonded instantly. "She claimed me as mom, and there was no looking back," said Kelly.

Once again, Lou had to wait. On the day he drove to meet them, he said he felt nervous. This would be the fourth time he was becoming a father, but he said he knew this time it would be different.

"When you're starting at three, there's a whole history there that you're not associated with and that you have to learn," he said. "Kelly was going to have this person with her, and I wasn't sure how to relate to her and how she would relate to me."

Her name would be a reminder of how to approach this new kind of fatherhood: His daughter's Ethiopian name is Tigist, which means patience.

The awkwardness that Lou was worried about lasted about 30 seconds. By the time they brought her home and showed her to her room, decorated in bright hues of orange and pink reminiscent of her homeland, she was romping around and playing with both of them.

Last Friday afternoon, Tigist merrily paraded about in a red, white and blue swimsuit. Bright-eyed and outgoing, she giggled, chatted, squealed and sang. She approached everything with curiosity and delight, as when Ronnie, the family dog - half Labrador, half chow - came bumbling over for affection, or when she handled a tape recorder for the first time, or when her father playfully grabbed her by her ankles and let her hang upside down.

The family has been changed by the experience. The kids dote on their new sister. Kelly is fielding advice on how to care for African-American hair. Lou has started to learn how to cook some Ethiopian dishes. Fittingly, Tigist's first English word, Kelly said, was neither mommy nor daddy, but "delicious."

For Father's Day, the family will do what they do every year: Spend time together. Only this year it will be one member larger, and they are all the closer for it.