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.
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