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.