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.

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.