Russian Man meets Mother

“Alex Sturgeon wonders if his birth mother will recognize him after all these years.

Will she see his boyhood face through his scruffy beard? Will she remember what he looked like before tattoos? Is her baby boy – the one placed into a Russian orphanage at age 3 – alive and well in this man of 27?

On Friday, Sturgeon will be reunited with his birth mother on the popular Russian television show “Wait for Me.”

“There were times as kids when we brought up meeting her,” said Sturgeon, who’s flying to Moscow today with his adoptive mother and two family friends to tape an episode of the show. “We would talk about it, but we never would’ve imagined this. It still seems like it’s not real.”

Sharon Estridge and her husband, Michael Sturgeon, now deceased, adopted Alex and his twin brother, Andrei, in 1995. The boys were 4 when the couple brought them to their Yorba Linda home.

Alex Sturgeon and his brother, who won’t make the trip to Moscow, are but two in Estridge’s nest of five adopted children.

Her other three – oldest son, Phillip, and younger daughters, Carissa and Jennifer, all from the United States – have met their birth parents. Estridge and Phillip’s birth mother walked their son down the aisle together at his wedding.

Carissa, 25 and now a mother herself, found out where she got her outsized ear lobes from.

“Because all five kids are adopted,” said Estridge, a real estate agent, “they’ve always wondered this and that about their parents.”

But with adoption papers written in Russian and thousands of miles separating the boys from their homeland, finding their birth parents never seemed feasible.

In June, while waiting for a train in Fullerton, Estridge started a conversation with a vacationing family from Azerbaijan – the same former Soviet republic her twins’ father was from. The group spent the next few minutes discussing Azerbaijan and their families. The next week, they became Facebook friends.

Vugar Mehrali and his wife, Amina, later asked Estridge for photos of her sons – they wanted to see whether the boys looked Azerbaijan or Russian.

Estridge shared pictures of Alex and Andrei, as well as their adoption papers.

Using the birth mother’s name, Mehrali searched the “Wait for Me” website, which contains a database of people looking for loved ones separated by circumstance: war, natural disaster, adoption. Alex and Andrei’s birth mother had a longstanding profile.

“A miracle,” Estridge called the string of events. “There’s no other way these things could’ve lined up like they did.”

Mehrali contacted the show, and on Tuesday, local freelancers filmed Sturgeon and other family members at Estridge’s Yorba Linda home.

Sturgeon’s mother will watch the package at Friday’s taping. Her son – unbeknownst to her – will then emerge from backstage.

“It’ll be wonderful for her to see what kind of life her boys have here,” Estridge said.

Sturgeon – who doesn’t speak Russian or identify with the culture – has watched a few episodes of “Wait for Me” on YouTube. Every time loved ones are reunited, he said his stomach gets “fluttery.”

He’s anxious. He wants to know whether he has his mother’s green eyes, her height, her good teeth. Does he have other brothers and sisters?

“It never crossed my mind that I’d actually get to see her,” he said. “I’m still trying to gather what I’m going to say. I’m sure I’ll calm down as the day gets closer.”

Strong as Sturgeon appears on the surface, his sister knows how emotional meeting a parent for the first time can be.

“I’ve never seen Alex cry,” Carissa Sturgeon said. “He acts like he’s not scared at all.

“Shoot, I’m scared for him.”

Sturgeon and his fiancee, Chandler Whitney, are expecting their first child.

“You make sacrifices,” Sturgeon said, listing what Estridge has taught him about raising children. “You put your kid first before yourself. If your kid’s sick, you’re there caring for him. You give them the best life you can, make sure they’re happy.

“I mean, I turned out OK.”

 

Adopted Yorba Linda man goes to Russia, with love, to meet birth mom on TV[OC Register 10/6/16 by Brian Whitehead]

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