Friday, February 12, 2010

Double Down


I am fortunate in many ways, but sometimes the pattern of my life is downright karmically charged. Serendipitous if you will.

With Delaney's arrival, Justin and I had to eventually make a choice whether to keep our name in the hat so to speak for our original China adoption ( see 2007 archives) or call it a day and officially pull out (pun intended!) of the process. We received another bill from our adoption agency recently for $1800 dollars which would allow us to stay in the program and I presume enable them to keep paying their staff to send us letters about how it is still taking a long time to adopt from China. This last bill came at a particularly tight time for us and after a lengthy discussion, we decided to let it go. Let it go. I like the phrase because in my mind I picture a balloon on a string. It's so easy just to open your hand and let it go, almost a relief because the balloon is straining so hard against the string and your hand is sore from holding onto it for so long. But once it's gone that's it. You can't reclaim your released balloon and you can't jump back into the adoption process. You have to start again from the top. By sending my agency more money I was buying myself some time before a final decision had to be made, essentially letting the ballon out on longer and longer string, dragging out the decision interminably.

To let this process go was very easy to verbalize and then do nothing, especially not sending in the check for $1800 dollars. But inside, I suffered. I have two accordion folders, red for Russia and blue for China. China's began in 2005 and Russia's in 2006. Both are packed full with paperwork, documentation, copies of documentation, receipts, instructions, years and years of work and dreams. It was hard to let go and a year and a half after Delaney's birth and our decision not to adopt, I can't quite bring myself to throw them away. One day.

All of which bring me to the topic of serendipity and fortune that I started this entry with. Because my close friend Jennifer completed her adoption thesis after three years of hard labor and was rewarded with a beautiful Korean baby girl flown into my very own Hartsfield-Jackson airport fresh from Seoul via Chicago, via San Francisco. I got to watch the completion of an adoption in a front row seat, close enough to touch. And it was so very cathartic for me to see the baby, so frightened, so confused, and so beautiful, coming down the airport hallway and into the lives of her waiting family. I had pictured this scene for myself many times and in many different ways. I got to wonder about her birth mother with Jennifer and what she must have gone through to reach this decision. And then sympathize with Jen about Scarlett's foster mother who had loved this little one for 11 months and then let her go into a better life. Listen and speculate about the plans and fears and joys that go with parenting an adopted child that was really going to come home.

And then poof, the three years are gone and there she is in the airport, in your arms, in your LIFE. I am doing a rotten job of describing it. But it's just extraordinary to come from a place so far away, a place filled with paper and interviews and money of course and waiting and wondering and nerves and frustration. Then it's over and there is a baby. Your baby. And in watching this union from the sidelines, I could let go of my balloon completely. It was exhilerating and cathartic and I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. Twice.

2 comments:

Jen said...

Can't. Speak. Choking on tears.
Beautiful. xxxxxoooooo

Jennifer said...

POST SOMETHING!!!