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.
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