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.