Small Moons

This is a huge, life-changing, thing for everyone involved and there are a lot of little details that happen. Since one of the reasons why I am keeping this blog is so that I don't forget all of this special stuff, I'm gonna take a minute and get caught up on some of it. 

There was the waiting for our agency to approve us to adopt Luna. Even though we were the only family who came forward for her, we still had to be approved. Waiting Children have some special potential issues so the agencies want to be sure that the family is prepared for them. There was the conversation with the lady from the agency, who turned out to be a psychologist, where she and I discussed albinism, artificial twining, birth order, challenges associated with orphanages, and raising children in a transracial home, among lots of other things. That conversation ended kinda like this:
"I needed to hear you say everything that you just said."
"I know, you love these kids and you want to be sure that they have the best shot at having a good life with the right family."  Please, pick us!

There were the conversations with the kids:

Q-Boo, after several futile attempts at discussing this with her, was suddenly totally enamored with the idea. 
“(Q-Boo) what would you think if we went back to China and we got a sister for you?”
“A sister? From China?”
“Maybe.”
“What is her name? It has to be a girl name.”
“Well, maybe, ‘Luna’.”
Two beats passed while she thought about it.
“She’ll need a bed. In her favorite color.  <thinks hard for a second> Is it a little sister?” 
“Maybe, a big sister. She’ll have to share your room with you. Will that be okay?” 
She studied me intently for a moment, “She needs a big girl bed. In her favorite color.  Pink, it should be pink.”  She talked to me about this for the longest time, to the point that I began to feel like I’d jumped the gun in telling her about it, “Yes, we’ll make space for her bed, in your room but closer to time to her coming here. (Q-Boo,) it’s going to be a VERY long time before she’s here. We’ll get a picture of her, maybe, but it’ll be a very long time before we get to see her.”
“Will she be in our family forever?”
“Yes. Forever. We’ll have (Middle Child) and (Wild Child,) and Luna and (Q-Boo.) How would that be?”
“Yes!”

“Lu-na! Lu-na! Lu-na!”  She danced in the kitchen.

 She disappeared into her room and came back out, ‘Will you get Luna some clothes?” 
“Yes.”

“She’ll need a suitcase to keep her stuff in.”
“How about hugs and  kisses, she’s gonna need some of those, too," I giggled. "Okay. We’ll take good care of her, I promise. She’ll be one of the kids and we’ll love her.”

At bed time, she asked me again, “What is my sister’s name? Luna?”
“(Q-Boo,) it’s going to be a very long time before we see her. You’ll see Santa again before you see her, probably.” Looking down, she played with my neckline,  “Will Santa still remember her? Will he make sure that she has presents?”

“Yes! I promise, we’ll make sure that she has presents. (Q-Boo,) we will take very good care of her.”

There was the day, I was telling K-Man that Middle Child had asked what a Thesaurus was and that we didn’t have one so I’d used a baby name book to show him how it worked before we'd gotten on the computer to check out the online version. Middle Child had sat, listening for a few moments, and then he'd said, “We should use that baby name book when we get the new girl to find a name for her….IF we get another girl… <sigh> I really want us to have even numbers.”
“You mean like two boys and two girls?”
“No, <points at me> like THREE girls, <points at his dad> THREE boys.”
“Me too, (Middle Child.) Me too.”

There was the day that I read the book, On the Day You Were Born to the kids. It’s a book with lots of different races of people depicted and one of the kids asked me why people are different colors. This led to a conversation about melanin and adaptation, and reasons why people look the way that they look. Which was an amazing way to introduce Luna to them. The next day when I showed them pictures of her, it was a simple conversation. "Remember yesterday, when we talked about people and melanin?  Her body doesn't make the colors."  Easy. The boys ran off to play.
 

Q-Boo wanted to see pictures so I showed her the one on the Waiting Child page, “We’re going to be getting information – pictures and stuff- about her. What do you think?” I winced and waited, I knew that, on some level, I'd promised her a sister from China, she'd expected one that looked just like her, and this one didn't.

“I do not like her.  She is not a nice girl.”

“Why not?”
“I don’t like her hair.”
Yeah, well, Wild Child tried to send you back to China, too.
I sat there for a moment and pondered what to say, I knew that this was one of those important moments in life and I didn't want to screw it up.  So, I hit below the belt, leaned forward, and whispered in her ear, “She has Elsa hair.”  She got very quiet and then she asked to scroll through every kid on the page, she looked at their pictures, she watched all their videos, but she never said, "No, that's my sister," and later she requested to see Luna's picture on my phone. She carried it around with her for a long time after, and I knew that she'd fallen in love, too.

There was the waiting on our pediatrician (per our agency's request) to report on her findings in Luna's file (other than albinism, all normal,) there was the waiting, always the waiting -it was really only a couple of weeks from the time we found her, we said "yes," and the agency approved us, but it felt like FOREVER- and in the middle of it all, arriving at the kids' co-op to find that the teenage helper was wearing a shirt with the word "LUNA!" written all over it. Dozens of times, "LUNA! LUNA! LUNA!" She was probably completely freaked out by the middle-aged mom who wouldn't stop staring at her.

Then finally, the phone call that said, "She's yours," and then the moment when I opened up the Waiting Children page and saw this:



"No longer accepting new applications," that was us. <smile>

There was the day, after I'd sent in all of our paperwork to our social worker and I was expecting to hear relatively soon that she'd be coming over, and so I’d begun cleaning in earnest. The place was (and is) a mess and it needed to be deep cleaned, regardless. Spring is here, let’s get that spring cleaning done!  I, of course, started in Q-Boo's room. We made room for Luna’s bed on the other wall of Q-Boo's room and rearranged Q-Boo's pictures so that Luna would have a place for her stuff. I wanted Q-Boo to live with one half of her room already designated to Luna, I wanted her to be used to "losing" that part of her room before Luna came home. That night before bed, Q-Boo asked me how many weeks until her sister got there and we talked about how the social worker was coming to talk to us about Luna. Then, Q-Boo asked, “My sister is a little bit different, like I am, huh?” She never ceases to amaze me at how very in tune she is with her surroundings and her situation even when I am busy not noticing. “Yes, she is.” I told her, and we talked about how Luna wouldn’t have the same coloring as Q-Boo but that other than they were both “different" from us in the same ways and then we talked about how they were the same as one another - their eyes would be shaped similar to one another, they were both from China, both had birth moms who carried them in their tummies, and how they both had the same forever mom (me!) I am always in awe of how very much Q-Boo needed this and how thankful I am that life always works itself out.

Q-Boo decided that she wanted to name her “Elsa Luna.” Middle Child said that he wanted to name her, “Nina” or “Emily” (because, he said that he was “used to” those names.) Wild Child announced that he wanted to name her “Lunapooper” but really, “Pluto”
We told them that Mom and Dad got to decide.

“When I see Luna, I am going to yell ‘Yay! Yay! Yay!’" - Q-Boo

There was the day, when I was surrounded by more paperwork, that Q-Boo sat down with me and proceeded to do her own paperwork for Luna. 





Yes, it's blurred out. On purpose.

 

There was the moment when my husband declared, “You are a paperwork MOFO,” and I'd started laughing and thought, Well, then, I know that it's the real thing - he's been through this before and we both know that it's the truth. Paperwork, finding money, and waiting- if you can manage these three things without losing your mind, you can do international adoption. :)

There was the moment when I discovered the Albinism Adoptive Families group on Facebook. It's a group for families who've adopted a child with albinism. They are an amazing resource and from them I've discovered Sportsbrellas -big sun umbrellas that anchor into the ground, Blue Lizard Sunblock- made in Australia, out of minerals, and most of them buy it literally by the gallon, the bottle even turns blue under UV light which is perfect for hazy polluted days in China when you aren't sure if your new kid needs the sunblock. I've learned about sunglasses for photosensitive children, supports for low vision, handicapped placards, and that all airlines have handicap aisles. In fact, Disney has handicapped passes which equal less time in line or approval to wait in a shady place, and up-front seating at their shows for the visually impaired. Parents in the group have warned me that photos for passports in China are taken in front of white backgrounds, (yep, I checked Q-Boo's) about how our kids disappear into them, and that we have to get government approval to use a blue screen. (I need to remember to remind my agency about this.) Initially, when I'd first found this group, I'd been skimming down the page trying to get a feel for this special need and guess who I found from about a month before. That’s right, my sweetie, Luna! They'd been advocating to find her a home. <sigh> It'd made me feel very much like there was a place waiting for us and for her (and suddenly, very protective – That’s MY baby!) In fact, I found Gia's adoptive mom.  I LOVE when stuff like this happens. I get to watch Gia come home- looks like, they are about three or four months ahead of us. <sigh> It's more than I ever even knew to ask for.

I've found moons everywhere. From "Kai Lan's Moon Festival" on my kids' DVD to my friends on Facebook constantly talking about the beautiful full moons that they were seeing from their own front yards. I even forgot that the moon is a background character in my favorite book, The Secret Life of Bees. I wrote this on March 10, 2015:

Just finished The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.  Man, I love that book. If I breathe any book, if any book “gets me,” if any book understands what I am on a deep level, it’s that one. It understands my pains and pours salve on them.  I first read it in 2004 when I felt like a motherless daughter searching for hope and healing and then I read it again in  2011 while waiting on Q-Boo to come home and now, again, in 2015 while waiting on Luna to come home. <shakes head> Q-Boo and Luna -  my motherless daughters.  Of course, we aren’t all really motherless, we exist therefore we have mothers. What we have are broken mothers, mothers who, for whatever reasons, could not give us what we needed in life.  This book, it speaks to the pain that is there and it teaches the necessity of mothering yourself.  "I am enough. We are enough."  When I first read it, I identified so strongly with Lily, with her hurts and her wounds and her deep pain.  And now? Now, I identify with August, I want so much to heal the hurts of my daughters and so I read and I cry and I remember and I am assured once again, that this journey that we take is worth it. That, there are countless mothers –friends, mother-figures, teachers, kind-hearted strangers, even God, herself - out there who love all of us back to health, the most important Mother of all is the one inside of each of us. (The book ends,) “I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch.  And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.”  

Every month I am surprised again by the full moon, I just don't seem to get that it's a monthly thing. I've managed to grab as many photos of it as I can but it's usually late at night, with my camera phone, so the pictures really aren't that great.

 

3-5-15

 




5-5-15
 

 

 



6-4-15
 

 
And, then I found this.  Several years ago, I took a very significant trip by myself to Arizona. It was a special time, a trip that signified great change in my life.  I remember taking this picture,  I remember feeling captivated by the magic in the sky to the point that I'd pulled over to try to capture it on my camera, and then being so grateful that the picture came out, at all.  (A very large copy of it will hang on Luna's wall.)





3-03-09

I took that picture in Sedona, Arizona and at that moment, on the other side of the globe, in China, Luna's birth mom was about three months pregnant with her.  Our lives are intertwined,  I am sure of this. I couldn't write a blog post about my girls' birth moms, I just couldn't, the emotions run too deep. But I am sure that this life makes sense, in all of its tremendous pain there is also tremendous joy. I have experienced my own fathomless pain, that another woman's fathomless pain becomes my fathomless joy is just...overwhelming and very sobering. It's a complicated thing to sort out inside of yourself. She and I, we are connected in sacred ways. I want desperately to be worthy of my place in it all.

Breathing mindfully helps us create space in our heart. Each one of us needs space and freedom - from our worries, our regrets and our anxiety. Coming back to our breathing, and letting go of all our worries and concerns, we become as free as the moon sailing across the night sky.  -Thich Nhat Hanh

I Know Your Face

Okay, let's talk referrals.

 A referral is information. It's the complete file that has been produced about a child by the CCWA (China Center for Child Welfare and Adoption.)  In general, an orphanage decides which children that it's going to do the paperwork on and thus make adoptable. Then, in partnership with the CCWA, the paperwork is made official and the child is released to what's called "the Shared List" (agencies match their families to kids off of the Shared List) or, if the child is at risk of waiting too long on the Shared List, to a specific agency to have individual attention for home-finding.   So, a referral is a child's Chinese file, that file translated into English, and pictures!  Sometimes, when you're really lucky there's a video. Squee! 

When we requested to see Luna's file, this is what we requested to see.  "Tell us what you know about her."   When we'd asked for her file it had been early one Friday evening, our agency is in Oregon and it was already closing time for them. So, we waited all weekend and it was the evening of the following Monday when my phone beeped and I saw an email from the agency on my phone.  There I was, standing in Panera Bread Company, fighting back tears, holding my coffee in one hand and my Banana Bread in the other and rushing out of the store to my car so that I could put it all down and look at that tiny screen on my phone.  I waited very impatiently as the video  (there's a video!) refused to load, and then I gave up and opened the picture that accompanied the file.  I stared at her little face, sniffed back tears and asked myself,  Have I just found my daughter? I mean, for real?  I took a deep breath and looked up to see directly in front of me, you guessed it, another gorgeous full moon. 

Let me take a moment and say that while I do love full moons, I do not look for them, I have not ever made a conscious effort to find them. In my life, they just sorta appear like magic, I enjoy them, and then they go away. I am an artsy person, things on a schedule like seasons, tides at the ocean, and moon phases, always just seem to sneak up on me. This finding full moons everywhere that I look is definitely a new thing. While the mascot of Q-Boo's adoption did seem to be owls, the mascot of Luna's has definitely been full moons.

According to Luna's file, she was a healthy little girl with albinism.  She lived in Zhejiang Province  - find Shanghai on the east coast of China, Zhejiang is the province underneath it.  In February 2013, she was moved to a kindergarten, "...the only one... which could accept normal kids and kids needing rehabilitation. She lived with other local kids." Luna, as a child with albinism, would be one of those who "need rehabilitation." This is a pretty big deal. Most kids from orphanages do not go to school outside of the orphanage (in fact, going to school inside the orphanage is usually reserved for a really good orphanage) school costs money and most Chinese parents do not want their kids attending school with very unlucky, special needs, orphans. The fact that she goes to school in the community is unusual, the fact that there is a kindergarten that accepts special needs kids in her city is unusual and the fact that "she lived with other local kids," is something that I've never even heard of.

There was one picture. In Q-Boo's referral there were six photos of her at different ages and she was one year old when we accepted her referral. Luna is five. I have to accept that this may be the only photo that I ever of her at this age or younger, I may never have infant photos, first smile photos, first step photos, I may never know whether she had chubby cheeks or if her hair stuck up in the morning.  This is the reality of older child adoptions.  We have this one picture:

I've played with it, trying desperately to see her little face in more detail, and I've ended up with these:

Ultimately, it's just the one picture.  I've heard stories of adoptive parents, after finally arriving at the orphanage, being handed their kid in one hand and a CD full of pictures in the other.  I can hope. The Chinese version of information that we received was her orphanage file actually scanned into a computer, so we've been able to cut and paste two more photos off of the paperwork. One was  another pose of this original yellow coat picture and one was a very damaged wallet-size one of her when she was infant.  It is probably the photo taken when she was processed into the orphanage, right after she was found.  There is also a black and white photo of her very faded "Finding Page" in a Chinese newspaper.  I'd heard of "Finding Pages" but I'd never seen one. Finding Pages run periodically in Chinese newspapers after children are found, in the hopes that someone will come forward and claim the child. If the child is not claimed, and they almost never are, then the child officially becomes a ward of the state.  We've been able to match the damaged infant photo in her file to the one used in the newspaper, she's the only red-headed baby on there and you can tell the difference even though it's faded and black and white.  Luna was one of a total of twenty-four infants found abandoned and whose pictures appear on this one Finding Page, in this one newspaper, in this one city, in this one province, in this huge country of China.  The whole deal hurts my heart and I just sat and looked at the picture for a long time.  There are times, while going through this process, when the magnitude of what we are dealing with becomes painfully evident.  This was one of them.

A referral is a lot of information and it can be very overwhelming. With Q-Boo, we'd sent another email almost immediately after receiving her file, to an "International Adoption Specialist." IA specialists are basically medical doctors whose specialty is international adoption, they understand the special circumstances surrounding each country ("She's anemic, but that's normal coming out of China") and they can decipher the very confusing medical information that comes along with each referral.  We didn't send Luna's file to an IA specialist for several reasons, one of them being how we found her -she was so obviously ours- and another was because in her referral was also this video, dated January 2015:

 

What I've been able to deduce about what is going on here is that she's basically been doing adoption stuff, paperwork, etc. and now they're done. They've come to get her and according to my Chinese teacher, the woman is saying to her, "Say 'good-bye' to the Aunties." She does, and then she's told, "Go to class," and off she goes to class. This video (on my computer the resolution is great, on Blogger, not so much) was an amazing thing to have - she walks, she talks, she makes eye contact, she follows directions, they treat her with kindness, they touch her on the head as she goes by, the man takes her hand.  For all intents and purposes, she's a normal little girl whose being well treated by the people in her life. You can't tell much in a nine second video but you can tell those things. It's nice for a momma, who doesn't have much, to have and it told me, We're okay, here. She's okay.

Okay, let's talk albinism.

Actually, I'm going to give you a video to watch. It's the easiest, best, explanation of albinism and all it's possible complications, that I've found. Really, it's only seven and a half minutes long and it's very interesting.

Watch This!

According to her file, her eyesight hasn't been tested but it does say that she prefers to play inside so that's our first indication of her photosensitivity. Most people with albinism are at least legally blind - that's an eyesight of 20/300.  In a fun little twist, I am legally blind without my glasses -they actually can't tell me the numbers because we get to 20/400 and then I'm off the charts. So, in the beginning when I'd wonder if I could deal with a child with real vision issues, I'd take off my glasses, look around, and remember Oh, yeah. This is very doable. I couldn't read without help and I couldn't drive, but it's so very workable. 

It's not easy to explain. I'm not sure that I really understand it...but adoptive parents talk about seeing the face of a child and KNOWING that it's their kid staring back at them.  I would be extremely skeptical except that it's already happened to me once with Q-Boo. Luna is no different. There's something in her eyes, the shape of her lips, the way her little chin sticks out just so.  That's my daughter.  Your heart knows but your head, the one that's lived this life for a bit and knows how hugely unfair and cruel it can be, warns you desperately about getting too attached. You don't know how this story ends, DO NOT put yourself out there too far (and for god's sake, DO NOT announce this publicly until she's safe in her bed, in her room, under YOUR roof.)  And, I haven't listened to the warning signs, not because I'm stupid or because I'm not cautious but because I have done due diligence, I've covered every base that I can cover and now, I'm just left with fear.  I won't be victimized by my own fear. I just won't.  It's not easy but I choose to stare that fear in the face and proclaim, Yeah, I feel you, but you don't get to dictate my life to me.  I get to do that.  I'm not a hero, I still cower in my little corners often,  AHHHHHH.....   But, I've finally lived long enough to figure out what most wise old women know, the feelings pass and all that you are left with are your actions.  I choose to act, no matter how I feel.  And so, I wrote that email: "We want her, she belongs in our family. We commit."

And then, my soul saw you and it kind of went, 

'Oh, there you are. I've been looking for you.' 

 

This quote is in a collage of quotes that hang next to Q-Boo's bed.  Yeah, it's like that.

She Shines

In every decision of this magnitude, there is that moment where you stop pushing against the idea of it, when you suspend your what-ifs and I-don’t-knows and your what-if-my-heart-gets-brokens and you just accept it as your own. I felt it when it happened on the night of January 4, 2015: we’re really going to do this. The idea took shape and solidified inside my heart; it became real, it was somebody, she was somebody out there and I would find her. Following all the other signs, we would try for a Chinese little girl with albinism...but, I was very cautious.

At some point I'd told K-Man, "So, here's what I think that we should do. We're going to tell our agency that we want a little girl in the age range between Q-Boo and Wild Child. We're going to tell them that we want a little girl with albinism but, I really don't think that they're going to be able to find her, K-Man. Albinism, it's just such a rare thing. We're going to ask them to look and we're going to get all of our stuff together but when it comes time to send it to China and they still haven't found the little girl that we expect, then we're going to sit down and rethink this. We're going to find another little girl and then, I'm going to assume that my visions of 'blonde and blue-eyed' and finding Gia were just the things that got us to this point. We were supposed to adopt again from China and those amazing occurrences are what got us here, onto the correct path."

I'd very smartly decided that our little girl probably wouldn't have albinism. We'd take another little girl when it was time to make that decision -so very smart and logical and "real world." However, in my heart, it was another matter. In my heart, where all things work according to A-Girl World, I was going to parent a Chinese little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes...until they told me that I wasn't.

Things become real, for me, when I name them and I’d been calling her “Luna” in my mind for a while. “Luna” is Latin for “the moon.” Gia, when you looked at her, she shined. All these kids, they shine. Just exactly like the full moon, they shine so brightly that it almost hurts my eyes to look at them. I 'd been pretending in my head that they were known as “moon children” in China. They're not and I have no idea where I got this idea but there it is. ( It is the title of a play, "Moonchildren" produced in 1971, which has nothing to do with either albinism or China.)

That night, January 4, 2015, I’d taken a break from home and was on my way to pick up dinner. All the way to the store and back, I was driving on auto-pilot. It had begun to rain, the sky was dark and mysterious, I’d turned on the windshield wipers in a trance. My mind was in China, in all the questions and possible scenarios. I’d made that decision that you have to make when you are facing a world of unknowns and possible heartbreak - I would go forward until I couldn’t anymore. My heart might break but it wouldn’t be because I'd refused to act and then, I'd felt it when my heart finally gave birth to the tiny hope of her. I was imagining that the full moon would always be our “thing.” I imagined calling her out to see it and that I’d tell her, “you shine just as brightly, you are just as beautiful.” Suddenly, the dark clouds outside my windshield began to move, they separated -the darkness in front of me temporarily parted to reveal a bright, shining, full moon. Is that? Yes, it is! A full moon, tonight? I’d had no idea. I heard myself gasp and then say out loud, “It’s a Luna moon!” It was gone by the time I got home but it was there, I'd seen it. It was real. And somewhere, a very far way away, she was, too.

In my heart and in my mind, she was  "Luna"  but outside, in the real world, I never expected this to be her actual name.  We would fall in love with a picture of  a little girl, who probably would not have albinism, at the appropriate time and then we'd name and love that little girl.  But for that moment, until I had another little girl to take her place, my blue-eyed, blonde, "Luna" would be the one that would bridge the gap, in my heart, for my unknown daughter until I could find out who she really was.

And then, I went a little bit nuts trying to find her. I went back to Holt’s Waiting Children page and looked at the same kids over and over, I looked at other agencies,  I wore myself out looking at sweet little Gia and studying the words underneath her picture, “I have a family!” and I grew tired of wondering if I’d ever have my own little version. Finally, I decided to stop looking.  

I had just begun rereading the Harry Potter series and decided that I was going to put myself on a fast of all things “Luna” until I’d found Luna Lovegood  in the series.  No more looking for Luna, A-Girl, until you find Luna in the book. You will calm down, you will trust the process, you will NOT let anxiety get the better of you. Chill out.  No more looking for Luna!   For some reason, I'd remembered this to be ½ way through the first book.  Um, no. It's not.  I finished the first book and went to the second, the third, the fourth, until early one evening, WEEKS later, on page 179 of the FIFTH book, there she finally was.  I finished page 178, and sucked in my breath when I looked over at page 179 because there I saw in capital letters, LUNA LOVEGOOD.  Luna doesn’t just show up, she has her own chapter.  I'd giggled to myself.  We’re getting closer.   I took my time, I read that chapter at my leisure and then I waited a bit more. In fact, I finished it and then I forced myself to sit still.  You will NOT freak out and start looking for Luna, immediately. You will not.   Two beats passed after I'd told myself those words, and then -I swear to you that no more time passed than that- Wild Child, who'd been hanging out in the library with me, suddenly stood up and looked out the window.  He exclaimed, “Look, a full moon!”   What?

Yeah, I'm looking for Luna, RIGHT NOW!

I bolted out of my chair and turned on the computer.  The first child that I saw, the newest addition to the site, was a five-year-old little girl.  And, she shined like the full moon.

 <gulp>

My mouth fell open and I almost fell off of my stool. I mean it, the world sorta went wonky for a few seconds. She was known as "Sarah"  (they have Chinese names but legally can't be known by them so the agencies give them English names that they are known by on their sites.  In fact, some of the kids who've been with more than one agency have several names that they are known by.)  Sarah had albinism, she was five, (ten months older than Q-Boo) and she was living in an orphanage in China. She had blue eyes and, unlike white-headed Gia, her hair was very light blonde.  I immediately sent in an email requesting more info about her...and then I just called them because, let's face it, email was never going to happen fast enough.

The conversation went a little something like this:

“I offered Sarah to the families already in our system about a week ago but no one was interested. I just now put her info on our website and then I went for a walk.  When I came back, your info was in my email.”

On the other end of the phone,  I closed my eyes and I said, "Just tell me what I have to do to get her file,  I'll do it."  I thought to myself,  because she's mine.

I’d never seen a child with albinism on their website, this made two at strategic times, so I asked my agency contact about it.

She told me that, while they do see children with albinism, "every now and then," it was very rare that they’d have two in such a short amount of time, “…and especially little girls of that age….” 

<grin> 

Was it too much to believe that the "Luna" in my heart wasn't the bridge to my daughter, after all...that she was my daughter?

Application and money sent in.  Now, we'd wait.

One Day, Last Fall

(You know, right? That, before I can fill you in on where we are, I have to get you caught up with where we've been? Here we go.)

We were done, we were complete. Our family was the family that I'd always envisioned and we were getting on about our lives.  Then one day, last fall,  I was sitting at the computer and Q-Boo came to find me.  I put her off for a minute like I have a tendency to do when I'm occupied and then I looked down into her sweet little brown eyes.  She asked me some question that I don't even remember and right then, looking down into her face, it  happened.  I looked down at Q-Boo’s sweet little bespectacled face and had a flash of blue eyes behind her glasses.

It was this very visceral thing.  Everything in me felt it. It was like a bump in my nervous system and I immediately thought, What was that?  It actually unnerved me.  I don't want a different  daughter. My daughter is Q-Boo, I listened for her for over twenty years. My daughter has always had an Asian face, always.  I tried to let it go.
    
In Southern Literature class, when I was in college, we'd read a collection of short stories called, Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Conner.  I don't remember a ton about the stories but I've always carried the title of that book with me.  It's an interesting thought and it's true in this case-  my thoughts, as they rose from my consciousness, seemed to converge on this one thought: a blue-eyed daughter.   I began to give some serious thought to another adoption but it completely confused me.  The idea of "another daughter," kept talking to me, we'd been contemplating home schooling the kids and one evening while thinking about that possibility, I'd looked across the table at Q-Boo and thought, She's so extroverted, I almost can't stand the thought of keeping her home with only the boys and me.  I'd watched her eating on the other side of the table and felt myself gasp as the realization hit me, <gasp> We need one more.  We have room for one more. In fact, the more that I came to accept the idea of homeschool, the more that I became convinced that we needed that one more daughter. Another daughter, between Wild Child and Q-Boo there is this large age gap, it would be the perfect place for another little girl.
  
The idea of another little girl, it fit, but that wasn't the issue, for me, so much. It was that every time I'd imagined our possible newest daughter, I'd flash to blue eyes behind glasses and I'd see her riding her bike across our driveway with her long white-blonde hair hanging behind her.  None of this made sense. 
     
I had a Chinese daughter, if we were going to adopt another daughter it just made sense that the new one would have the same history as Q-Boo, but I couldn't get away from my sign posts of "blonde and blue-eyed."  In life, I usually follow my sign posts, they may not go where I think that they are going but I follow them.
    
Finally, I gave up thinking about it and began to search domestically. Nothing.  In a moment of complete frustration, I opened up Holt International's (our agency that we used with Q-Boo) Waiting Child page. A child on the Waiting Child page is a child that the agency thinks will wait longer  for a family- older, more involved special needs, etc.  These kids are, by far, not the only kids available for adoption but you usually have to already be in the system before you can "visit" the other kids.  I didn't care. I was really only trying to satisfy my curiosity about another China adoption so that I'd feel better about pursuing a domestic one. 
    
Holt’s waiting child page had lots of little girls in the age range that we'd want. And then, I saw Gia. In an ocean of dark beautiful faces, Gia shined. Gia had albinism. Albinism is a complicated thing but the shortened and condensed version  is that her body didn't make melanin which is needed in the production of pigment. It is a rare recessive gene condition, only about 1 in 17,000 babies (worldwide, the US numbers are higher) are born with some form of albinism. Gia was Chinese but, due to the albinism, she was staring happily out at me with her blue eyes. Her white hair flopped over the frames of her glasses, she was absolutely adorable.  I  know two families who live relatively close to me, one of them a friend from high school, who are raising adopted Chinese daughters with albinism. I've known about albinism in China for a long time but somehow I'd never connected albinism with myself.  I sat there in front of my computer screen with my mouth fallen open, a Chinese daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes.  A sister for Q-Boo, one with her history, but also with blonde hair and blue eyes. Shocked.

    
I still wasn't totally committed to this thing. Commitment to a thing of this magnitude takes time. International adoptions are things of LARGE magnitude, which I knew intimately. Adopting Q-Boo took seventeen months. Seventeen months of paperwork and heartache, seventeen months of wondering every moment if my heart was going to be broken, seventeen months of slowly falling in love with the picture of a child who I might never have gotten to touch, a child whom I was going to worry about and wonder about for the rest of my life, if the adoption fell through.  So, I was talking to K-Man and considering and trying not to get my hopes up too high. I'd walk around my living room and think about packing another child into our already full house.  But, but, but, we've already made family portraits,  I have no more room on the walls for her pictures, what will I do?  Love rearranges.  But, but, but, there is such a story to Q-Boo's adoption. We can't adopt another little girl, she won't have a story.   hahahahaha Oh, A-Girl.

    
On December 4th, our family was at our Families with Chinese Children's Christmas dinner and I opened up my fortune cookie. 

K-Man had looked over into my hand, he'd paused, and then he'd said, “You might want to keep that, just in case.”  It was the closest that he'd come to saying, “Yes,” to the idea.
    
I bought an ornament for the Christmas tree that I'd just put up and a stuffed cat present. I didn't put a name on the box, she didn't have one. In fact, I didn't put the box under the tree but I knew where it was, just in case.

On Dec 9th, I requested adoption applications for domestic adoptions, received them, and begin investigating domestic adoption through our Department of Human Resources- suddenly, in a twist, I was satisfying my curiosity about domestic adoptions before I really committed to another China adoption. I made two phone calls, one to my local Department of Human Resources and one to the state level DHR offices. Due to reasons that would fill up a whole other blog and that I shall not get into in this one, I hung up the phone, angry. Disgusted and angry. Am I wrong? Do I remember the whole adoption process incorrectly? Was it really harder than I am prepared to accept? In a complete angry fit, I'd called Holt. No, what I remembered was true. They were nice and kind and glad to talk to me. They'd asked about Q-Boo. We'd discussed our possible plans for a second adoption. Gia had JUST been placed with a family, who’d only begun the process. We could accept a Waiting Child as soon as we were ready to begin. THAT DAY, China had relaxed some regulations to make it easier and less stressful for us to adopt. Oh, wow.

I decided to broach this possibility with one of our kids. It was entirely too early to be talking to the kids, the whole international adoption process is LOOOOONG but I knew that the social worker would question them almost as soon as we started and I had to know, we couldn't proceed forward if the kids were completely against it. Wild Child, in direct contention with his nickname, is one of our more emotionally intelligent kids and he's also the one who'd had the hardest transition when Q-Boo had come home so he seemed like the logical choice.
    
On Dec 14th, he and I were working in Q-Boo's room,  cleaning, organizing, and downsizing unplayed with toys before Christmas. Wild Child was working hard, preparing (he’d searched for pieces and was hard at work assembling them all together) to surprise Q-Boo with her Hello Kitty house all put together and ready to play with.  “Don’t tell her yet, Mom. I want it be a surprise.” 

I took a deep breath and asked as nonchalantly as I could muster, “(Wild Child,) what do you think about MAYBE, the idea of POSSIBLY, getting another sister?”

A beat had passed while he'd considered it, “Well, I’d have to get used to her, like I had to get used to (Q-Boo.)”

I'd been a bit stunned by his answer. No hyper-romantic, “Oh yes, that would be AMAZING!”  No hyper-dramatic, “Oh no, my life would be OVER!”  Just straight to the point, honesty. The little dude had insight that rivaled some forty-year-olds.
    
This was followed by a conversation about orphanages and foster families and about what it’s like not to have a mom and a dad, about how even when you’re grown-up and twenty-five, you are still alone and how sad that must be.  And, what it was like when Q-Boo first came home- how he'd wanted desperately to send her back to China but now he loves her so much- and how sad and mad and scared she'd been and how hard it had been on him and Middle Child to lose part of their mommy and daddy so that she could have part of us. But, he was okay with it. He got it. He'd gotten “used to” Q-Boo, he’d get “used to” another one, and then life would go on. 

I'd stood there, in awe of the kind-hearted maturity of my seven-year-old.

And, I'd found myself wondering what in the world I was so afraid of.