238,900 Miles

The moon is 238,900 miles from the earth.

It is, roughly, 7,700 miles from my front door in the USA to Luna's orphanage in China.  At this point, there doesn't seem to be much difference.

This was my cover photo on Facebook in May for Mother's Day.  'Cause, yeah... it’s gotten to that
hard place.  This has to happen, I have to become “attached” or I won’t be ready for the difficult, sometimes grueling, work of bonding that comes after this.  BUT, good grief, this is where it starts getting harder and keeps getting harder for the next many months. Poor K, he knows the drill by now. I sigh, he asks “Why do you keep sighing?”  I claw at the air and make guttural noises, “…because…China!….”  He’s done this before, too, and he knows there isn’t anything that he can say.  I have a CHILD out there and I can not reach her, can’t know or control what happens to her, can not ensure that she won’t go to bed tonight hurt or sad or scared or lonely.  This is tough.  I’m here, Luna, thousands of miles away, but I am here and I’m getting closer to you.  I promise.

In fact, besides the awful waiting, <sigh>  there is something else that is an excruciating part of the adoption.  I call it, "The Silent Computer."  I've done what I can do and I'm down to waiting on news - weeks pass, and I’m trying to convince myself,  Of course, we haven’t been forgotten. Everything is still in play. We’re just waiting on people to get their end of paperwork done, it’s not personal. She’s fine, we’re fine, the process is fine. I've worn out "backspace" and "enter" buttons rechecking email just to be sure that nothing came in while I was absent for that thirty seconds from my computer.   Weekends are the worst - two whole days where there’s not even any point in checking email but I still check it. <sigh> <sigh> I am a needy adoptive parent.

 

I told Q-Boo that I remembered what it was like when I was waiting on her, "My tummy hurt because I wanted to hug and kiss you so much but I couldn't. I feel that way about her, now."

"Me, too!" Q-Boo wailed.

So, since I can't do anything, I plan stuff.  She needs some toys.

This is Lovegood, the gift that I bought way back in December and didn't put under the tree because I was too afraid to hope.  Lovegood will go with us to China.

Truthfully, this is how most of my conversations have gone:
"Can I get that doll with light blonde hair and blue eyes AND with Asian features?"
 <silence on the other end>

So, I've had to get creative.

I found a store on Etsy where I could have Bratz dolls repainted,  Freckle Farm Dolls.  After I explained what I was doing, the owner suggested that  Moxie dolls actually make for a more accurate Asian face so I ended up buying two for each girl on EBay and having her repaint them ( and in general, restore their innocence.)

Here are the girls hanging out in the middle of the "during" phase, after she'd removed their faces and then boiled and conditioned their hair:

And, here they are in their "before" and "after" shots.  She was right, the Moxie dolls ended up being exactly what we needed.

Bratz after

 

Bratz before



Moxie before

Moxie after

  

Moxie after

Moxie before



Moxie before

Moxie after

(Honestly, I feel like I should get some sort of award for saving these dolls from their hideous "before" lives. Like, you know, I gave them back their childhoods. <shrugs> Maybe, it's just me.
Actually, Q-Boo took one look at the Bratz "before" picture and asked disgustedly, "Why are her lips so big?" hahahahaha Even a four year old gets it. Ugh.)

Q-Boo has an Asian porcelain doll that sits on her chest of drawers.  What to do for Luna?  I found another store on Etsy called  Little Doll Hospital.  The owner finds and rehabs old porcelain dolls so she was able to pretty much custom rehab me one for Luna.



 

When it arrived, I didn't tell Q-Boo what it was, I just unwrapped it and showed it her. She proclaimed, “Oh! It looks JUST like my sister!”  So, I guess we did pretty good. It now sits on the chest of drawers next to Q-Boo's doll.

I have an order in with A Doll Like Me for two dolls, one for Q-Boo and one for Luna, which will be made according to photos of the girls. They should be done by Christmas.  And then, I'm done.  Unless the girls go nuts over their special stuff, I've done enough to find stuff that looks "just like them," and, from now on, we'll just go with the flow of whatever they prefer.

When I was growing up, my dad had a collection of National Geographics on the bookshelf in his office. I loved those things. Aside from the obvious, wonderful, sunny color of the spines, were the amazing pictures and the stories of far away places.  One thing that I miss in our computerized world is receiving big, glossy, magazines every month in the mail.  On my bookshelf, right now, is a National Geographic issue, birth month and year, for every member of my immediate family.  There are eight of them that range from June 1966 all the way to July 2010 - mine has a story, "I Live with the Eskimos," and a picture of an Eskimo on the front cover.  I decided that it was time to buy Luna's.  Normally, I've been able to contact the National Geographic website and just order a back issue. They were out of Luna's.  What now?  I managed to find two on EBay and I was a bit relieved when it finally came in the mail.  Here is what it looks like:

 

 

 

I've even started Chinese classes. Luna will be six when she gets here and they tell me that she'll probably have lost her Mandarin and totally picked up English in about six months but still, I'm using her coming as an excuse for us all to learn Chinese.  I want her to keep as much of it as she can but it would also be so good for us to learn it.  That's my theory, anyway.  I've found a homeschool class connected with our local Chinese school, Yuwenbon, where the kids can take Chinese classes on Fridays, and then K-Man and I can take them on Saturday mornings. I'm already taking on Saturday mornings and then catching K-Man up in the afternoons - between Saturday mornings, there are YouTube videos that we struggle through.  (I live in a city that is full of engineers- per capita, the people here are very well educated, and in fact, it has one of the largest research parks in the nation- but I am still sorta trying to get used to the idea that we have a Chinese school in Alabama.) Kids' brains may be amazingly keyed to acquire language but mine is not. That rusty ship has sailed and it sorta leaks around the barnacles. There have been many days, after my teacher has announced the newest sound, that I've laughed out loud. I'm from the southern US, I murder my own language, what am I gonna do to Mandarin?

 

Mandarin is unlike any other language that I've encountered. When I studied Spanish in college, the alphabet was pretty much the same, with tiny deviations.  We basically had to learn new rules for letters that we already recognized, we conjugated verbs until I thought I'd go nuts, and then we had to learn vocabulary.  Rolling r's was about the hardest thing that I had to conquer- burro!  Mandarin is like nothing I've ever seen or heard. I've made a new friend in the class who also happens to be African-American (Botswana,) she knows four African languages and some other languages as well including, obviously, English.  She agrees.  Wow. You just gotta take a minute and wrap your head around it.

Mandarin has twenty-one consonants and sixteen vowels (for reference, there are twenty-one consonants in English and five vowels, depending on that pesky y) and some of the sounds we don't even know how to make in English. It is a very subtle and precise language, where tongue and mouth position matter a great deal. I've had to spend some time just learning to hear it before I can even attempt to say it.  For example, there are three different aspirated (you force air out when you say them) consonants. They sound like, " Zzz,"  "Tss," and "Szz."  There are two different consonants where the sound is the same but, in one, the teeth are together and the sound comes from way back in your throat and, in the other, the mouth is open and the sound originates from much closer to your lips.

In Mandarin there are five tones - I often joke that I am singing when I'm in Mandarin class but that I've never been able to carry a tune so this can't end well. (There are NINE tones in Cantonese which is how our guide described the native dialect that Q-Boo spoke and understood - "It's like Cantonese with a twist.") Words change based on how you say them, but they also change according to context in the sentence. So, the sound "ma" can mean "mother" or "linen" or "horse" or "scold" depending on the tone that is used.  But the same sound, with the same tone, can mean "ant" or "agate" or "horse" or "yard," all depending on the context of the word within the sentence.  Confused, yet?

There is Pinyin, which literally means "spelled-out sounds," and is where the Chinese characters are written with the Latin alphabet, but I find it cumbersome and inaccurate. The word "Qin" from the Qin Dynasty, sounds nothing like what you'd guess it would sound like simply by looking at the English letters.  In fact, I can't even really write down for you how to say Luna's Chinese name. Next time you see me, ask me how to say it. I'll bumble around until I finally get it right. Then, ask me how to say Q-Boo's name, that one's hard, too.  In fact, I'll write both their names down in the Pinyin and then, together, we can try to figure out how to get the sounds from those letters.  They tell me that I'll be able to accurately read Pinyin once I have more practice.

We'll see.

7-2-15
"Erica's Moon"
Bakersfield, California

 

"It's true...you were an orphan. It's my job to change that."

-Once Upon a Time

What an audacious and ridiculous thing to believe that you can do for someone. Change their whole life? !  But I do believe it, I choose to believe it, and I won't stop until it's done. There is good in the world, there is. Love wins. I'd stake everything on it. I am staking everything on it.