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ln less than a week, we’ll be in Addis Ababa, meeting this little boy, this small Dagim. I can’t even describe how terrified I am. I deal with rapists and drug dealers and crystal meth makers every day, and none of them scare me like this twenty-two pound boy.
One thing S. and I are both scared of is rejection. We’ve stored up all this love for this boy, but he’s a toddler now –he will recognize that everything he knows and likes is being taken from him –but he can’t understand language, so we can’t tell him all the things we want to tell him.
I’ve certainly been lonely in my life. And maybe a lot of only children are a little sensitive to rejection from their peers. Who knows what shyness is or where it goes? I’m not shy in the classroom (teaching), but in my personal life, I’ve been accused of a silent and daydreaming detachment.
I know that even if Dagim IS wary of us –he would be a little fool if here weren’t scared of two strangers—I know that over time, we will be everything a family is. I know how Shasta is when she’s in love with somebody. That little boy doesn’t stand a chance.
I once heard a recording of Louis Armstrong talking on the stage.
He told the story of being a little boy in Louisiana, and how his mother once sent him down to the river to fetch some water. He said he got down there, saw an alligator, dropped his bucket and ran home.
His mother stopped him on the porch and he said, “Mama, there’s a gator down there! He’s big and mean!”
And his mother said, “Son, you go down there and get us some water. Don’t you know that gator’s as scared of you as you are of it?”
Louis Armstrong laughed: “I told her, ‘Mama, if he’s as scared of me as I am of him, that water ain’t fit to drink!”
Today is Monday. Next Monday, we meet Dagim. I am Louis Armstrong!
Shasta really said it all, on her site.
I’ve really just felt drunk with all these great and lovely valentines we’ve received in the last few days. So much love in this world, and so close to us . . .
I did have a moment last night . . . Shasta asked me to look over an immigration form she was preparing to fax to Ethiopia. Where it said, “Father’s Name” and “Father’s birthday,” I thought to myself: “Oh #@$, she’s goofed. She put my name instead of my dad’s . . .” And then I realized that I was crossing over to a new part of my life and I was sad and happy at the same time.
Our little boy will be Dagim Grant Huntington. One name from his birth mother, one from Shasta, one from me.
I took her picture before she left. She is three or four times as pretty in real life, but I’m still new with the camera.
Yesterday, several of Shasta’s friends made her feel like a lucky sun (warm with love) . . . I dropped her off at Aubrey’s condo in the late morning and picked her up a few hours later. She sat like Alice at a tea party.
(not a mad one, but colorful and scented with lavender)
(no angry queens or hatters)
(my metaphor completely breaking down)
(I think, from the descriptions I’ve had, it was an un-mad tea party –thrown, not by Lewis Carroll or even Jane Austen, but with a mixture of glamour and wit and magic, like an episode of Sex-in-the-City meets Charmed meets The Gilmore Girls).
Anyway, Georgia, Christy, Aubrey, Nicole, Steven, Katrina, Victoria, Lexie, Elizabeth, and Erica –thank you for giving Shasta such a beautiful morning. She was beaming about it afterward. She could hardly sit down, because of her happiness.
This is a picture from a week ago, when our friends Jim and Steven came over for a picnic. This is just to reassure people that Shasta doesn’t obsess over the adoption twenty four hours a day but actually takes a few seconds each day to smile.
This weekend, she smiled a lot, chez Jennifer and Jody. We sat by their tiny (five foot, inflatable) swimming pool and ate and drank and talked. Their lovely little zoo (three chihuahua and two Chinese crested dogs) was so well-behaved, it was like something out of a Disney movie –each dog with his or her own personality but the whole group –I don’t know, Jody and Jennifer like a friendly Shrek and Fiona with a miniature squad of donkeys at their feet. Well, that is, if Shrek and Fiona were played by two stars from the WB.
Yesterday at work, I got into a political discussion with some co-workers. We were discussing gay marriage and one of us said that no matter what most political and religious leaders would have us believe, most people really “don’t care.” It was not, to his mind, the end-of-the-world issue people make it out to be. Jennifer said no, she DID care. She wanted everyone to have the same rights. I said that I cared, and that it was a fairness issue. “If you want to get married in a church,” I said, “then you have to play by the rules of the church. But if two people want to go to city hall, then it should be for any two people.” I reminded my co-workers that when my parents got married, it wasn’t legal in every state either –because my mother was Chinese-American and my father was white. Around this time, an older teacher said, “I just can’t do it, I can’t be politically correct any more. Look, I don’t like gays or towel-heads. There, I’ve said it.”
By “towel-heads,” he meant not just Arabs, but the Asians who run several local gas stations.
This morning, I got up in my usual pre-dawn dark and thought: I really don’t want to go to work today. I’m tired of my co-workers, my students, and thinking about adoption. I’ve still got my health. I just need to feel healthy.
So I’m going to take a sick day and go with Shasta to the Y, where we’ll swim and read books. I’ll climb out of the water and hold my wet face up to the sun. The big bright afternoon will fill my thinning hair with summer. Max said the other day, “I can’t wait until you get a kid and can’t work out every other day. Then you’ll look forty!”
I can’t wait either, brother. But life is still good, all the same.
No real news or great things to say, except that I have been surprised by happiness several times recently. Shasta has filled our kitchen with wonderful, home-cooked food again. I’ve had some good laughs at work with the mischievious MAX. I got an Arts grant that will enable me to take some time off work and write this summer or fall –I hope to combine this with the arrival of our little boy.
Lately, I’ve felt a little incompetent –very ungifted at daily tasks or grown up life. I don’t know how to change the brake pads on my car or how to cut and lay tile for a floor. I should fix things like the broken lawnmower cord. I’ve asked myself: what can I do instead? What am I good at instead? And the answer is, well, I’m not a popular or respected writer or intellectual. I’m not distinguished in my profession. I have trouble drawing mouths. What am I good at? I have some ability for remembering old Spider-man stories, Arthurian legends, and biographical details of Davy Crockett. I can listen. I can do more push-ups than most forty year olds I know. Not a very practical skill set.
But it occurred to me recently that these things might be very useful for a father– that, probably, these things can make me a good dad, and somehow, I’ve done something right after all. My father never showed me how to work on brakes, but he told me about Hercules when I was little. He taught me not to make fun of people for things they couldn’t change (like the way they look). He gave me his copy of On the Road. He insisted I have a dog when I was a little boy. He taught me to ride a bike. He pointed to the world and suggested I might fall in love with it, like he did.
