Beginning

When Papa Dog and I started the adoption process, our hearts were shrunken and small, or so we thought. Like idiots on autopilot, we bumbled forward. At an introductory meeting at the agency we would end up choosing, a very warm and kind woman opened her talk by warning that some couples must fully grieve any and all losses that might have brought some of them to this morning's orientation. She made good sense. And yet in some ways she was asking the impossible. Then she waved at her daughter in the back of the room, stretched over three chairs on her stomach doing her homework. Her daughter, a teenager who seemed dear and disinterested to the roomful of adults gaping back at her, waved distractedly at us and then rolled over onto her back, crossing one leg over her knee and returned to her book. The woman had adopted the girl when she was just a baby from Russia, and would return a few years later to adopt her son from the same orphanage. I wish I'd listened better to the woman's story of emotional and logistical process. Alas, couldn't. 

The image of that girl in the back of the room, who has probably heard the story of her adoption a thousand times and was probably promised a present of some kind for sacrificing another of her Saturdays to wait while her Mom yapped at another roomful of adults, was a saving grace for me. I don't know what it was that touched me so. Maybe it was their obvious and effortless and totally normal—both unremarkable AND extraordinary—connection. Maybe it was that the child half-listened to her adoption story with the same comfortable disinterest as any child would listen to her mother's thousandth retelling of her birth story. All I know for sure is that that young girl, and her exuberant and pillowy mother at the front of the room, would carry me through that first difficult round of paperwork. It was everything.

We're almost closing in on a year from when we first decided to adopt a baby girl from Ethiopia. I'm taken aback by the heart's ability to patch itself back together after a time of crisis. Eleven months later and I feel like a braggart when I tell people I'm adopting. We're five months on the wait list now and some strange beast of calm has taken over me. I don't know when the referral is coming but I'm not counting down the weeks. Right now, I feel sure the child will get here in her due time. And then there her picture will be in front of us, and we will moon over the computer and snivel and weep and laugh and say 'Hold on, hold on, we're coming, we're coming!'