From New Zealand to Australia, from Australia to Romania, this is one incredible story of finding your children.

Words by Jessica Kramer, Editor @Ruth Magazine. Summer 2021 Edition.

In these days of social media, support and community groups for adoptive parents are going strong. As little as ten-fifteen years ago, unless you happened to have a friend already who was also going through the adoption process, it was much harder to find other parents going through the same circumstances.

Now, however, is a completely different story-and it’s thanks to these strong on-line communities that the term ”the child of your heart”, has been coined. Adele Rickerby, author of ”The Promise I Kept”, explains the term with visible feeling; a biological child is born of your body, but an adopted child is born of your heart. It was a long journey that united Adele with the child of her heart in Romania thirty years ago, and was the catalyst for writing her memoir. ”I kept a diary when I was in Romania, and I wanted to keep the historical context, the family of origin context. I would wake up in the morning with whole sentences in my head and the pressure would get so great that I would have to write them down,” she explains.

While many people have a rosy picture of adoption, Adele and Loredana’s journey was far from easy. Adele had travelled halfway around the world to Romania, alone in an impoverished country recently torn apart by the revolution, confronted with the living conditions of families and of children abandoned in overflowing, understaffed orphanages. It was there she found a baby, Loredana, who had been in the orphanage since she was a week old, writing in The Promise I Kept, that the infants gaze seemed to say, ”Finally you have arrived. I have been expecting you, waiting for you”.

The voyage wasn’t over then, however, with the adoption needing to be legalized through the Romanian justice system before Adele flew back to New Zealand for the final adoption papers before arriving home in Australia. Because of the nature of International adoptions at the time, and the ill-timed news breaking about illegal adoptions from Romania shortly after Adele returned home with her daughter, she faced rumors about the nature of Loredana’s adoption and wanted to set the record straight. ”I felt I needed to write the book to respond to criticism that I had done an illegal adoption or had “bought” Loredana from her birth mother, Adele says. “Health issues forced me to retire early, but also gave me the opportunity to write my memoir.”

The Promise I Kept was originally published in 2013, but a recent reprint has seen it regain popularity once again. “I regretted not putting photos in the original version of the book, and I had seen iconic photojournalist Tom Szalay’s photos in journals and magazines. He collated photos of Romania for me and I added some personal ones.” It wasn’t an easy book to write, but Adele describes the process as therapeutic all the same. “It was hard to write the first time, hard to write the second time. But it was like when I was in Romania and had to get on the train alone- it didn’t feel like I was being brave at the time; I didn’t really think about it. There was this real sense of urgency so I just did it.” She says.

The Promise I Kept 2020 Revised Edition is available on Amazon as a paperback or kindle.