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.