what's all this, then?

Maybe it's happened to you, and perhaps it hasn't. You look back at what you've written within a year or a recent week--and you think, "What? No really, what?" I'm sure that I know what I mean when I write, that I'm trying to wring out some sense from my teaspoon-dense black hole of a brain, but seriously.

I thought of everything I ever wrote when I heard the good Doctor (Who, that is) exclaim, "Here we are at the end of the universe, and you two are...BLOGGING!"

And so am I. (And so is she.) I'm standing at the edge of the universe I know, peering at this land of adoption, parenting, and special needs, and I'm writing about what probably will be the smallest parts of it all. It's clear to me now that I don't even know how to use the time in between the finding out and the getting to weave a good cliffhanger. I mean, really--what kind of suspense is there in reading, "I don't know how to get things ready" for the 15th time? I can't begin to tell you what measure of suspense resides in thinking it for the 115th time. In a day.

I didn't send out Christmas cards this year--I overplayed my hand. I kept stalling, thinking "BIG BABY NEWS" was just round the corner, any second, wait for it--and then Christmas was over and I hadn't mailed a single card. And to top it off, I got an email yesterday listing two families who chose children from the same waiting list in which we found young Master Youyou-- they received their "Seeking Confirmation Letters" (that's Chinese beauracracy for "Ok, he's yours") on Dec. 21. Egads!

So, no Christmas cards, no presents to my son who is not yet my son but who really truly is my son, good ultrasound results, and tantalizing photos of the foster home happily celebrating Christmas. The best present? A crisp new photo of young Mr. Suave, casually lounging in the ball pit.

That's my boy.

what next?

How does one prepare? There's a bed from Ikea, a cabinet standing sentry, a handful of toys, blue paint on the walls...

We're editing photos from Tibet, hoping to send letters to all who helped us travel last March. It's a diversion, a way of navigating time when it is interrupted. In a few short months our lives will completely change, but here I am at midnight, writing while my neice, nephew, and in-laws sleep, with pie settling in my belly as my son wanders toward lunch on the other side of the world.

And the questions of our holiday guests..."Is he small for his age?" "Will he get to keep any of his toys?" "Can he drink milk?" "Can he speak any English?" They're from loving friends and family who are honestly and wonderfully hopeful with us...and some are echoes of the same questions that keep me awake at nights, wondering when and how I will know, wondering how long one can live in parentheses.

We have friends who adopted from Guatemala, and they had a nightmare process...they know how long almost and not yet can be. They were courageous and persistent, even and especially when there was no getting their son home as a reward for their faith, nothing that could change the agony of their wait while their daughter asked when her brother would be home. Now he's here, and for the first time in over a year, I have seen them exhale.

So I can't complain. I don't know yet what we'll do, how we'll live. It's one thing to see the photo and to know that this will be, is indeed, our son, and yet to know that numbers don't add up yet. And then I'm asked, "Are you sure you should pay all that money to get one that's broken?" If I'm willing to listen, I can hear the fledgling love in that voice as well, I'll know we're both wrestling with the mighty question of how far one can force the hand of God. Where does that plan, begin, and if the kindgom is at hand, how present is that truth? Sentimentality is prone to undermine faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Not wished for--there are no stars to light this way--hoped for. The hope is some kind of tiny glimmering light when all else is gone. Is it the beginning of Shalom or the fulling of the fruit? Is it the flower in the crannied wall, roots and all?

a house divided...or at least stretched

This Christmas will go on record in our wee upstart family as the busiest-strangest one. Currently, we have applications out for a number of grants and we're working with a unique outreach organization in an effort to complete the financing of this adoption and the initial medical expenses we'll incur immediately upon returning to the States with our son.

Our son. It's weird to write that. I have no right to do so, really, as we're still at the mercy of the CCAA and its approval system before we can make that sort of claim. That's why everything I write here is accessible by invitation only. How can I think about him yet? When is it safe--for us, for our family, for him--to call him our own? He is our own, in so many ways, and he is not our own. Almost and not yet.

In the meantime, Youyou has visited Shanghai, where he received an ultrasound to assess the health of his lonely kidney. All is well, I learned, after waiting up until 4 am for the third straight night after the ultrasound was done, compulsively logging in to my email nearly every hour in hopes of seeing, "He's ok." He is ok, and as I went back to his foster home's webpage for what must have been the 100th time, I stumbled into a whole new section of archived information about him, including his first photo, taken shortly after his arrival at BlueSky. He was only a few days old, and clearly not well, and my heart swelled until it flowed from my eyes as I looked, and I suddenly realized, reading, that we are so far away from each other. There is something in the process that is not unlike the relationship a teenager develops with her perception of a rock star as she scrounges the web for every morsel of his life and likes, one-sided, groping, a figment of the imagination.

BlueSky celebrates Christmas, and they had posted photos in years past of celebrations. I was suddenly aware, as I looked, that I know--or hope--who and where my son is, but I cannot send him anything for Christmas. We cannot send him anything until we receive the final approval from the CCAA, and now it is too late to send anything that will arrive in time. Does he know of this? Does he know of us? What does he understand of it all in his toddler mind?

It is so all out of my control, beyond my means to act just yet, and this is hard. What should I hope for? In what direction must I turn my thoughts? For more than two years this little prince has lived, has flirted with death and returned with a smile, has charmed his caretakers and doctors across the globe, and we did not know, and our thoughts and energies knew nothing of him and did nothing to aid him. Now we know about him, and we read his story and collect his photos and carry them like icons, but he cannot be ours yet, and our energies and thoughts, though they have emerged from ignorance, can do nothing new to touch him directly, save to arrange what we can for his transport here. All the while, we speak of the Advent. How profoundly bizarre. How wondrous.

yikes!

So, yesterday was the first time in weeks--ok, months--that my husband didn't work at school on some project or other. We celebrated by having our very own financial summit. It was exactly the thing we had feared it would be, the sort of "!" that we'd studiously avoided for six weeks now.

We came down to facts, pushing aside dreams of chubby hands and catheters and latex allergies for a wee bit. And we reached the conclusion that it can't be done. Once that smiling little guy arrives, our income drops by more than a third, and we'll have negative $10,000,000 a month without even counting the cost of novelties like food, gas, or medical supplies.

So, I guess our little prince will have to start out eating grass, because, after all, that is a natural diet, very high in fiber. He'll get here in winter, presumably, so he can suck on icicles to fight off bladder stones--hey, that reminds me of stone soup! I'd almost fogotten...

I wonder if e-bay will let me sell my soul...I have an empty peanut-butter jar. Shane calls it my Depression-era hoarding, but I just knew that jar would come in handy someday.

May we see your photos, please?

I have entered a strange new phase of this adoption journey, one that is the sort of surprise that truly is unexpected and not perhaps calculated as a possibility that one doubted would really happen. Although I have this concept of many people playing roles in Youyou's journey, that cloud of witnesses is beginning to mushroom somewhat, and I feel like an Arctic explorer looking at an iceberg poking up from the water, trying to fathom its size.

Strange emails have begun to arrive--make that emails from strangers. They're quite friendly, in fact. One came shortly after I enrolled in a bladder exstrophy support group in hopes of gaining new information to ease our preparation for this young prince. A few hours later, the executive director emailed back to say that she knows of our son, has photos of him, had in fact entertained certain notions about expanding her role in his story. Then came today's email from a woman on the East Coast, who hosted Youyou and his ayi when he came for surgery at Johns Hopkins this summer. She wrote to give congratulations and to express her hopes of seeing Youyou when he comes home with us. She has photos, too, and she advises that we will both delight in and be exhausted by this little boy.

These are but two emails. I feel much smaller just now, as though I am but the latest person to step into a much larger story that has been heard round the world by many others. How old will he be before he begins to grasp the depths of his experience and its impact on so many? It makes me want to hold him close just now, perhaps to turn the night light on and to sit and listen. What do we think we're doing?

This just in!!

Oh, the wonderful-ness of tasty new photos! I just got a handful from some amazing women. And I marveled...

I am amazed at seeing this little group of children running and playing in a park, activities which stand in stark contrast to the stories most people tell about international orphanages and foster homes. I came to adoption, I admit, with low expectations regarding the quality of care my child-to-be would have had--mostly because there are so many children and so few workers.

And now here is this child, with his 1 in 400,000 challenge, with his single kidney, only 6 weeks after returning to Beijing from surgery in the US, struggling to climb an inflated slide and getting help from a friend. T. wrote that he tried to climb and was passed by kid after kid--he is still recovering his upper-body strength--and he was getting frustrated, turning repeatedly to look at the nannies from the foster home. They remained still, snapping photos, capturing the story of his perseverance and rescue from a 5-year-old friend, reveling in his triumphant smile and his pride at conquering the heights before sliding back down, sending it all to a nervous woman hundreds of miles away who has no idea what is to come.

It makes me wonder what Mary thought. There was this moment, this blinding annunciation, the assurance that this was indeed the hand of God, the revelation of the Divine to His children and their children, the hope of rebirth--and then there was morning sickness and dizziness and family suspicion and Joseph's doubts and distance and nine long months of waiting, waiting, waiting...did she despair at how to get ready to rear the Son of God? What did she try to prepare for? Did she want her house to be in a certain order that was different because of the manner in which everything had unfolded? Was she horrified when everything started to happen and she couldn't get to a better place than a stable for the birth of God's Son? Did she feel that she had failed Him? What could she make of any of it? Was she harder on Joseph because of it?

They couldn't even know what was coming--the tribute, the stories, the flight for safety, the fear, the joy...did they come to trust that they could only live each day and that God was sovereign? What kind of blur was it? How many apologies did they make?

This bearing and rearing of children is too much for mere mortals...but look at that smile.

almost and not yet

Disoriented is now a funny word to me. It means that one is not centered, not right, not oriented. I am currently disoriented. I think that I might be oriented by February, perhaps even January, but in the meantime, I am not centered. I am at odds and am having trouble finding beginnings and endings.

How does one prepare to become the parent of a toddler with daily medical needs inside of 3 months? When will I be able to know what size colostomy bags to buy, and where might I be able to find them, and now that our insurance has changed, by the way, what measure of trust can I have in their dependability? I can't even get the dog hair vacuumed in the living room regularly, and we're out of trash bags, and tomorrow's lunch is looking suspiciously like catsup sandwich. What the heck do we think we're doing?

The questions are there, bidden or unbidden, teeming below the surface like a thousand toothed fishes watching, waiting. To stir the water is to unleash a mighty offensive, one that could easily devour everything down to the last stitch and stem. Is it any wonder that the past ten days have found me reeling to catch my balance and taking meds to counter the vertigo that has mysteriously materialized to plague my too-brief minutes? I am disoriented indeed.

And then come photos, new photos, of this brave little boy that is almost and not yet ours, struggling up the side of an inflated playground slide. He is loved, of that there is no doubt, perhaps spoiled--could nomenclature like "our little prince" be a clue from the foster home as to the fragility of our futures? So loved, so doted on, so willing to take risks, so smiling...

I cannot yet find in myself the rush of emotion when I look at him. I think, "Youyou," and yet simultaneously, I think of all that must be done, and there is a distance, as though I can talk about his sonship from only an academic standpoint. The exception is the other day, when I was leaving the house for school. I paused to look into his room, a room in waiting, a space in which there is only air and not breath, and I reached inside to touch the freshly painted wall. "Someday, he will try to describe the color of his bedroom," I thought, and then was the moment that I had a son and he was real, and as suddenly, the moment was gone and I had to run to teach the children of others.

gong xi fa chai

1994 was the Year of the Dog, the second Chinese New Year I was aware of. The first, in 1993, was the Year of the Rooster, when I was in London. Somehow, I heard about the party near Leicester Square and threaded my way through a mob of faceless pushing persons cramming narrow streets. To make my way down an unseen sidewalk as a cell might travel a clogged artery was as fascinating as the celebration. Every now and then, I could work my way to the edge of the mass to see a cart of oranges, a "lion" dancing up to eat cabbage, a calligrapher swaying.

The Year of the Dog found me back in Kentucky, finishing college. I’d forgotten until a Malaysian student bounced into the studio with a bag of oranges, brightly announcing the New Year and giving everyone fruit. I asked her what year, and as she answered, our instructor barked fiercely. My face streamed with juice and pulp from laughing.

Tian You was born in the next Rooster Year, 2005. There are no newborn photos of him-no one constant person from birth to hospital to orphanage to nuns could bear witness through a lens to his journey. The foster home assumed the task on his arrival. Their first photos were tenuous as his health, and then there emerged what John Berger might call a likeness, as the little boy in a bed in Singapore smiled with laughing eyes, his legs bound so that his incessant playfulness wouldn’t re-open his enormous hernia.

When Tian You went to Singapore in December 2005, Shane and I saw change coming. We had begun the adoption journey, and we realized we must go to Iraq. The two seemed at cross-purposes, but we were convinced otherwise. We’d been involved with a school in the Kurdish region. For years we’d been asked to work there, but we were unable financially to make the commitment. Finally, the opportunity arose to host a day camp, and we jumped. Christmas found us sending letters to friends and colleagues, asking for support in the monthlong endeavor that would take place in the coming summer. Our adoption plan was to be finished with homestudy and dossier, merely waiting for a referral by that time.

New Year came, the Year of the Dog. Tian You was in Singapore, and surgeries to correct his exstrophy and close his hernia had just been completed. His legs bound, he smiled as his ayi took pictures, first of him laughing, then of him holding one of the little red envelopes given to children for New Year, then with his hair pulled up in a wet pointy shape, surrounded in his bed by oranges and red paper lanterns. We shared oranges wrapped in red paper with friends at the Nashville Chinese Association party, unknowing that across the world, our son was being cherished like a prince by his ayi.

blessed by heaven

In his first few months, Tian You was shuttled back and forth through a series of hospitals and specialists in Beijing. Americans are quick to judge China for its disregard of human rights, but in a strange twist, this little boy was attended at several hospitals before being allowed to go with his caretaker to a facility in Singapore for lifesaving corrective surgery. Surgery to correct a deformity that, had it been diagnosed in utero in the States, would most certainly have led to an abortion. China valued the life of this child enough to allow him travel and attention for a birth defect that would have at best profferred a slim prognosis just 5 years ago; it is knowledge that could, perhaps, be instructive.

Tian You, or Youyou, as his ayi calls him, was born with cloacal exstrophy, a birth defect so severe in his case that it is seen in only one out of 400,000 births. At birth, a bilateral hernia revealed his bladder and intestines, he had only one kidney, and his genitals were affected. There are several stories about his arrival at hospital and elsewhere, like underground legends. "He was left in a shoebox in a police station." "He was found on the side of the road." It's as if every story of origin one might hear about an orphaned child in China became Tian You's story, his origin.

In the end, it was the nuns who brought him to the foster home. What happened in the spaces between is unfathomable, untraceable. The foster home named him "Blessed by Heaven" hastily as they sped in a car to another hospital in Beijing, where he stayed for weeks before he was returned to his ayi in the foster home.

It seemed that nobody in China quite knew how to help this little boy, who smiled weakly in his photos despite his still-gaping wound. The woman who co-founded the foster home where Tian You lived had done so after adopting her own child, a little girl with massive abdominal issues. With care and proper medical attention, the little girl thrived, and her mother decided her arms must be opened to more children. She hired caretakers, wrote for grants, took in children, raised funds, launched the dream with her partner, a retired doctor...she was tireless in her efforts.

She was tireless in her crusade to save Tian You. It was decided that Tian You would be sent to a hospital for women and children in Singapore, and that there, his wounds would be closed and his body mended.

The Little Prince

His name is Tian You. He has an impossible story, which begins with being rescued by nuns from "the side of the road" (many things can be read between words in the stories from China), travels through Singapore and the United States, and returns to Beijing. He is waiting for us to pick up the thread, but he doesn't know it, because he is only two.

I don't really know where to begin with our adoption journey, save to say that in a sense, it began when Shane & I first married. We talked about children from the very beginning, and from the beginning we knew that we wanted both biological children and adopted children. We envisioned an enormous brood, and we'd farm, or travel, or complete graduate study in England, or take to the stage, or something. Then Shane's post as an associate minister ended. Abruptly. Too abruptly, in fact. Months later, we migrated from Kentucky to Nashville, with $15 to our name and frost inside the windows of our unheated truck as we drove, unknowing.

Nine years later, we were trying to piece together finances, knowing that we'd soon need to leave dreams of acting and painting murals to work harder than most have to in order to start a family. The whole time, we sort of thought that we'd fall into biological children the way that most of our friends have, by way of surprise. The ongoing joke was all that we'd done to ensure pregnancy: getting a puppy, having no insurance, having no job and no insurance, living on someone else's floor for months...our methods were foolproof. It was certain that we'd have a child, make mistakes, and learn from them to feel safer as we ventured into adoption, with all of its unknown quantities.

But children didn't come, and it was that one day, nine years after migrating, eleven years after getting married, that the doctor called with test results. We would not have biological children. Ever. It was at once the sort of moment that made you feel terribly alone in the entire universe alone, and yet inseparably, immutably, irreparably together in that alone. He said, "It's Good Friday." It was, in fact, Good Friday. "I'm thirty-three, and I've died, and now I'm waiting for Easter to come."

Ten days later, Fu Tian You was born. We had no idea.

my compulsion demands it

i've spent two hours, after all...

Two steps back

Change can take place so quickly in an international adoption. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know you existed. Now, you're my son. Bizarre-not unlike science fiction. But as I reeled today, trying to take the next steps to bring home this one child, I remembered something that happened earlier, and its memory was muted, and I knew that I would have to intentionally return to it. That is difficult, because, as Doris Lessing so aptly observed, we tend turn a thing into story even as it unfolds, rendering our lives and our memories a series of fictions colored by who we were at this time or who we danced with that night or what was had for dinner or what we want the story to be...I am overwhelmed by my inability to tell what happened without interpreting it as I tell it, as if I am validating every action and thought with some transcending seal.

Nevertheless, the memory came, and now I sit on my couch and attempt to recall…

We were traveling, in Iraq, from one city to another. It was hot. It was always hot, but I liked that. I did not like that our driver was smoking incessantly. I focused on the landscape in an effort to avoid carsickness as we hurtled down the hot street with the windows up in the smoke-filled car with a single cassette blaring its Iraqi folk tunes for the seventh time round. I saw endless sheep, brush, small donkeys standing stock-still with their shepherds' baggage draped across them, large watchdogs at the invisible line between one territory and the next. I rarely saw the shepherds. The mountains were immediate and harsh.

Perhaps because we had been talking about parables, and probably because I was trying to contextualize this land and its strange familiar names—mostly from the Tanakh—I found myself thinking about the “Parable of the Lost Sheep.” Communism and Capitalism, neo-conservativism and liberalism collided in my head. Why seek out one lost sheep if there’s an entire herd intact? What about the greater good? What about acceptable loss? Margins of error?

And yet it nagged at me. There was not a system of governing or economy that I could summon that would affirm the decision to leave a large group of healthy individuals in order to find one that may or may not be dead or die soon. It made habits of highly effective people seem tainted, perhaps demonic. To value an individual in that manner, to that extent—I cannot yet comprehend. I looked at the sheep, and I was frustrated, because they were irreplaceable in that landscape. What if the lost one was stolen or eaten or trapped? What of the ones left behind? What kind of story is this?

It unsettled me, and I sat up straighter, and by the time that we stopped in Erbil to see its ancient walled city, I was grumpy, because I wanted to be unclouded for that old city. We drove up the wall as far as we could, and stood at the feet of a stone Imam, and strolled into a courtyard where a tablet in cuneiform stood open to the elements, pigeon guano streaking its sides. It told of Darius and Nebuchadnezzar, according to the translation. I raised my eyes to the opening in the outer wall, through which I could see the city bazaar, littered with tin roofs and satellite dishes.
I am back on the couch now, and I am shifting to warm my feet. I cannot know why I conjured that moment this morning. I think that I have told myself that story—of being frustrated with the parable—so many times now that I have interpreted it and have assigned it a place in my meaning.

I have conditioned myself, apparently, to recall that moment, those sheep, that cigarette, the conundrum, and to assign it a place where it serves not to answer but to interpret another event. I do not understand why a shepherd would leave ninety-nine to find one, but it is why I will leave teaching art to high school students and trying to get them to ask questions for adopting a child from another country who may or may not need surgery immediately and who may or may not be in need of a transplant someday. At least, that’s what it seems like at this moment.

Where do babies come from?

When a man and a woman love each other very much, sometimes they want to have a family together, and so they decide to have a child. First, they save up all of their money and pay off all their debt. Then they go to a building where people work who can find babies. They talk to the people, and they tell the people everything that ever happened to them, including any times that they were sick, how much they love their parents, what they think about discipline, why they think they should have a baby, and what they think about God. Then if the people think that the man and woman are nice enough and have good answers to all the questions, they let the man and woman give them a lot of money to find a baby. The man and woman have to get papers that prove they were themselves born, married, educated, fingerprinted, poked by a doctor, never scolded by the police, and they have to get letters from people to prove that they are a nice man and woman. Then, when all the papers are stacked up, the people in the building mail them off to another country, where lots and lots of babies need parents. For a long time, the papers live in an office, and then one day, they are old enough to be able to exchange for a baby. Then the country picks out a baby and calls up the man and woman. The man and woman buy plane tickets and fly to see the baby, and they hope that they know the right words to say to everybody and they take more money to hand out to everybody. Then, if everyone in the whole world is happy, the man and the woman are allowed to bring the baby back home on the plane with them. But they are not a family yet. They have to look for another person who can listen to their whole story and take another stack of papers to court, where the person talks to a judge who wants to have some money so that he can prove that the baby really should belong to the man and woman. And then they are a family. And that is where babies come from.