joyful joyful

I'm working on a new link labeled, “thanks.” The idea is to put together, to the best of my abilities, a comprehensive list with every person who helped YoYo come home. I hope that it serves to begin as a “thank-you” to many gracious souls, but I also imagine that even a brief looksee will prompt a double-take. If only every child knew that much love on entering a family-it takes much more than a village.

On to some sweet friends, the Gour family from Charleston, SC. They were in our travel group to China, and they brought home a beautiful little girl they named Claire. If you check out gourfamilyadoption.blogspot.com, you’re sure to see Claire and YoYo striking a pose at the good old Cracker Barrel in Smyrna, TN, as Claire and the Gours were on their way home from St. Louis. I'm surprised at how many of the “Most Important Moments” of my life have taken place in a Cracker Barrel…

And about that little boy…he is SOOOO HAPPY! He has turned a corner this week in his English skills, and he blows my mind every day. Snippets…

*He banged his knee and asked for a Band-Aid. When I told him I didn’t have one with me (because he wasn't bleeding and I really didn’t want to have to peel it off the couch 5 seconds later when he tired of it), he repeated, “No Band-Aid?" and looked down at the floor, shaking his head and murmuring, “Poor little YoYo.”

*Every time I bring dinner or supper to table, he looks at it and then says, “Thank you Mama so much!” (I kid you not, neither of us has coached this response.)

*As my parents sat with us for dinner the last time they came up, he turned to me mid-meal and with one hand on my cheek, he said, “Mama, sometimes it’s hard.” I have racked my brains to figure out where that came from. We cried laughing.

*In a trying moment, Shane gently reminded YoYo, “Everybody peepees, everybody poopoos.” YoYo appeared in the living room that evening and took Shane’s hand. “Where were you?” asked Shane. “Bathroom with Gou-gou (the dog).” Fearing what he'd find, Shane walked calmly to the bathroom to find every single toy the little guy owns lined up around the toilet. “Everybody peepees, everybody poopoos,” said YoYo solemly. “Close the door.”

Oh, and he sings. A lot. He loves to hum or la-la-la “Ode to Joy.” And he’ll sing the Barney song world without end. How can it be that we could be fit so perfectly with this little one?! I am amazed.

a touch painful on re-entry

I find myself running in slow-motion, as if in a dream where I can see something happen but cannot get to it quickly enough to effect any change. We have been home nearly 6 weeks now, and it is not hard to imagine going through days and years merely trying to survive.

YoYo is the Happy Prince, awash in song, exuberant over Teletubbies each morning, delighting in baths and slides and puppy kisses and green beans. He is a restless sleeper, running from (or to?) all that he is leaving yet can't leave behind. I lie awake each night next to him, he in his bed and I on my mattress on the floor, flinching with each of his stirrings and sitting upright to right him all night. I can't remember what I am like. I only know that I really want to love him well and to be more patient and to extend to him the understanding and shelter that I yearned to offer my art students these last 10 years.

The hardest thing is to push back the lie that my whole life was leading to this moment. In a sense, yes, of course it has been doing just that, but after this moment, there will be another, and another, and little princes need room to grow.

The most humbling thing is everything. Each moment, each memory, each of the times that I struggle to think on even just one of the things that has happened. I am utterly incapable of appropriately conveying my thankfulness, gratitude, relief, love, to any person who held our hands along the way. Of course there is no way to really say, "Thank you for giving us a family," but that is what so many of our friends have done. There is no card for this, and if there was, I would not buy it, because it would be stupid. There is, too, the fear of, "What next?" I will do my best to say thank you and thank you and thank you, and then I will see each friend again, and whatever words I mustered to carry the weight of my heart will hang for moments or longer between us, coloring the next set of actions or how well I will love them in the seconds and days and years to come.

And I will fail, just like I will fail this little one. Oh, for the moment when I will find freedom in writing that!

But thanks will come and we will find a way. I will wake up to look in the eyes of a little boy who would not have come home with us had it not been for the efforts of friends who prayed or took some of the financial burden or who made phone calls or wrote letters or encouraged. I will stumble to the kitchen in a daze, where I will prepare this little one breakfast in a space which makes me feel like a cherished guest in someone else's home, thanks to friends who put in cabinets and moulding and paint and a dishwasher and flowers and who really went a little crazy! I will go outside with him to play in a fenced yard on toys from so many loving hearts and hands. I am powerless to count those who have had a hand in this.

And the enormity of that is amazing, leading my mind to thoughts of restoration and redemption, wondering if this has been an army of love, wondering what may come of it. Is this shalom? Is it a fullening of fruit to goodness and wholeness? I'll get impatient and grumpy tomorrow, that's for sure, but what a wonder it is that so many hands would join to help one little boy, and what a strangeness that the moment demanded it.