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Since we got our court date, I’ve got the worst pre-date anxiety ever. I can’t shake the fear that we’re going to get stood up somehow. We’ll be standing on the sidewalk in front of a cosmic movie theater, checking our cell phone, and, despite all the plans, we’ll be seeing that movie alone. A lot of people don’t make it through court the first time, but I hope we do.
I’ve been kicking away some other negative thoughts lately. Some of it related to the politics of international adoption (people who think all adoptions should be within a country, not outside) and race (people who think transracial adoptions are naive and doomed) and age (an author who is big on the idea that toddler adoption is filled with attachment issues).
In this huge dogpile of pessimism, the only interesting stuff I’ve heard was in a New York Times article: “An examination by The New York Times of the 2000 census — the first in which information on adoptions was collected — showed that just over 16,000 white households included adopted black children.”
I would have thought this number was way higher.
Anyway, the article points out the difficulties in transracial families –but I finished the piece and thought, “You know what? I don’t care.”
I believe the world is a mystery and good things happen. It’s easy, it’s so easy, to criticize everything. And to think of reasons not to love people. In the end, I love reading and thinking and– to some extent, sometimes, I even love politics. But adoption is about people, not ideas. It’s about children who need love. It’s not naive to believe in transracial adoption. It’s naive to think that your politics are so right, children need to suffer because of them. Who would want to grow up in an orphanage? Who would want to grow up without parents? What kind of person would wish that on kids just to satisfy a smug and vicious belief system?
Life is complicated, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it. People can believe whatever they want, but I prefer to believe that love for a child can’t be the wrong color.
Anyway, I feel all right these days. I look at these pictures we’ve gotten and all the nay-saying becomes a quiet, distant noise like a neighbor’s dog. The photographs (a little boy, teetering back and forth on his tiny legs) remind me that we’re all people and nobody knows what kind of men or women our sons and daughters will become. But we are made for love anyway. Shasta and I are ready to fly to Ethiopia and meet this little boy who is getting bigger every day . . . We can think of nothing else.
S. and I took a few minutes this weekend to try to NOT think about Ethiopia and our family (but we also worked on the nursery)(which looks great).
Saturday we watched DAN IN REAL LIFE, which our friend Steven had recommended. I found myself REALLY liking it, probably liking it more than I should. For one thing, and the only reason I mention it here, it is subtly very adoption-friendly. It’s all about a big holiday with all the grown-up brothers and sisters bringing their spouses and children to the mother and father’s house –which made S. and I, both only children, very thoughtful –but then, without a word of explanation, one of the kids is Chinese. No one ever says a word about it, but this little girl is part of the family like everyone else.
So there’s that going for it. Also the great Juliette Binoche. Shasta is a big fan of everything SJP and so we have seen the very similar movie THE FAMILY STONE several times –but, personally, I liked this better.
People have been perfectly lovely about emailing us photographs of our son. I wanted to surprise S. by having some made into prints and giving them to her for Mothers’ Day -so I went to CVS and did their little kiosk (if I’d have been in Columbus, I’d certainly have gone to Tim Cooney’s shop because the prints he made of our referral pictures were terrific. I’ve been carrying those around everywhere.)(A few nights ago, I met Max’s wife for the first time and found myself crossing the room, saying, “Jennifer, I’ve known you longer than five minutes, so that means I have to show you my pictures”).
Anyway, at CVS, I ordered my prints, then stood around and read magazines while they were processed. The Indian woman at the counter got busy with another customer, so another cashier came up. This clerk was black, in her early twenties, and she glanced at the photo machine, saw the prints of my favorite boy, then asked the first clerk what she should do with them. The Indian woman gestured at me and said to give me my prints. The second woman looked at the pictures again and then said, “No, what do I do with THESE.”
The Indian woman said, “They’re his.”
So the second clerk put them into an envelope and rang me up. I looked them over at the register and said, “Wow, they came out great. Don’t you think?”
And the woman smiled and said yes.
So, Friday, the sky opened up in a gentle, awkward rain and I drove home in it, my heart like a basketball in my chest, all my breathing somewhere far below behind my navel, like somewhere under the ocean, while my head was as big as a planet, full of every thought I think I’ve ever had and yet, really, just one thought because Shasta had called me and said, you’ve got to come home, we got the call.
And home, that day, was my hometown home, the house where my parents live and where I celebrated Thanksgivings as a kid. We were visiting my folks. I parked under a tree in front of the house and ran in the front door. Then we were all upstairs at my parents’ computer, looking at pictures of a beautiful little boy.
Our son.
And anyway, it’s been a crazy weekend. Because Shasta and I keep taking these pictures out of our pockets and looking at them. We’re bumping into things. We can’t put anything away. And I’ve gone over each one, pixel by pixel, on my computer screen. We’ve gotten wonderful emails from everyone we know -thank you, thank you, thank you-and I feel great, but it’s all mixed with a little bit of sadness because I feel sorry for everyone I love, sorry for everyone in the world, really. Everyone except us, because we are the ones this little boy is coming to join. Maybe this summer? He’ll be sleeping down the hall from us. In the little room Shasta’s been preparing. I feel bad for everyone in the world because you’ve all been so good and kind with us but this kid with enormous brown eyes and sharp thoughtful eyebrows and his worried little mouth -he’s not Santa and can’t be everywhere. He’s coming to live with us, and I don’t know how you’ll live without him.
