Wordless Wednesday

He Even Sleeps in Costume

Yesterday, I took Holden to the store so he could spend some of his allowance. What we discovered upon arrival was, for him, a Dream Come True: all the Halloween costumes had been marked down to ten percent of their original prices. Holden had twenty-four dollars in his pocket, so basically he could buy as many as he wanted, without restraint. A Spider Man costume has proven to be his favorite purchase (Holden's always loved Spider Man, but until now had only two mismatched, like-handed gloves he got at a yard sale through which to channel the hero). Needless to say, he's in Heaven. Or New York City, half-way up a fifty-story building, hanging by a thread.

Every morning, Tariknesh joins David and me in bed before sunrise, where she drinks a bottle in my arms and then falls back to sleep. An hour or so later, she's joined by both her brothers, one of whom looked strangely unfamiliar this morning.

Holden also bought two ninja costumes, but he's always jumping and kicking and wildly waving a sword while wearing them--it's hard to get a clear picture amid all the mayhem.

Waking Up

Journey to Ethiopia, Day Two: The Day We Met Tariknesh

At five 'o' clock in the morning, when the first of two alarm clocks followed by a wake-up call (we were taking no chances) sounded, I was already awake. I hadn't slept much, even after climbing into David's bed; I was still chilly, and my complimentary Emirates socks had long since bunched around my ankles like small, sagging inner tubes. I threw back the covers and swung my feet onto the floor between the two beds. I wiggled my toes around inside my sinking socks, and added real stockings, long and soft and snug to my hypothesis of what went on in first class. I tossed them into the garbage can, then donned the one clean pair--snow-white and never-before-worn--I had in my overnight bag and slipped into the new pair of shoes I had (sort-of) bribed myself out of the house with two days earlier. This was the day my feet would step onto Ethiopian soil for the first time, would touch the land I planned to give my soul to, would carry my waiting heart and empty arms to the place where my daughter and my future and one marvelous moment that would end all the wanting waited.

After a quick meal, during which David ate pancakes and I watched incessantly for the first sign of our shuttle, we were on our way to the airport. Dubai was still shrouded in a dusty fog, and the temperature was nearing one hundred degrees when the shuttle deposited us on the same granite curb from whence it had whisked us away twelve hours earlier. Walking to Gate 227 was like walking through Scottsdale Fashion Square on steroids; we could hardly maneuver ourselves and our bags through the maze of kiosks selling designer makeup and Italian handbags to what seemed like an absurd number of Botoxed people for so early in the morning. All the seats at Gate 227 were occupied, so I sat down at a nearby coffee shop and waited while David ordered us each a pastry. Before long, Betsy appeared with a new acquaintance, Alex, who was from Australia and bound for a Ugandan orphanage via Ethiopia. The four of us visited over coffee until it was time to board the plane that would carry us to Africa.

Our ride

David and I weren't seated together on the flight to Ethiopia, which was okay because the time to talk about our adoption had passed; we had talked about it every day for the past thirteen months and had said everything there was to say about the day when all the talking would come to fruition. Instead, I sat alone and reveled in the feel of the jet's rumble on the soles of my feet. I watched the screen at the front of the cabin as it updated our location every few minutes, waiting for the moment we would officially fly into African air. I ignored the entertainment system--this day felt too sacred for distractions--and glanced frequently at the picture sitting on my lap, the picture with the crease marks and the dogeared corners that I had carried everywhere since the day we had gotten our referral, the picture of the sober, saucer-eyed baby girl who I was finally going to touch in real life. I'm coming, I whispered to her. When it looked like our plane was nearly situated over Egypt, I unearthed my iPod from inside my purse and started my Africa playlist. "Hello, Mother Africa" played while I continued to stare at Tariknesh's photo and the water beneath us gave way to African soil. I looked out my window at the bright white haze and thought about David, sitting fifteen rows behind me on the opposite side of the plane. We're here, I whispered to him.

Bole International Airport was dim and dilapidated. Banks of weakly glowing light bulbs hung from stark, exposed metal rafters and gave off a thin, cold light that was mostly lost before it landed. There were few employees and even fewer passengers; it looked like most of our fellow travelers would be continuing to Uganda. David and I bid Betsy goodbye and good luck, went through Immigration, exchanged dollars for birr, then handed our passports to a beautiful woman sitting inside a Plexiglas cubicle. We waited while she stamped them, and when she handed us our visas I decided to try out my Amharic. "Amesegenallo," I ventured. There was a flicker of recognition in the woman's eyes, and her face broke into a wide, warm smile. She tipped her head back and laughed loudly, then offered me a wink. I had butchered her language, but I could tell she wasn't laughing at me--she was being nice.

"Amesegenallo," the woman replied while looking straight into my eyes, still smiling; she was everything I had dreamed the Ethiopian people would turn out to be, everything I had been told but hesitated to believe they would turn out to be. I left her station feeling buoyant, light on my feet, and walked toward the airport exit confident that it was, after all, okay to be American in Ethiopia, that I would not, after all, be hated by virtue of George Bush's mistakes or the EPA's failures or a reputation that preceded and established me as trivial, materialistic, over-indulged, and ungrateful. Things were looking up. David and I stepped through the glass exit and scanned the small crowd for someone holding a sign with our last name on it. We spotted it easily, and recognized the man bearing it as Sintayehu, our agency's lawyer and our legal proxy in Ethiopia, the man who had gone to court in our stead on the day Tariknesh was deemed our daughter. When we introduced ourselves, Sintayehu proved abrupt and seemingly uninterested in knowing us. He beckoning for us to follow behind him and another man, our driver, as they strode toward an old green Land Cruiser parked near a lamp post. Our driver said nothing and regarded us with thinly-disguised contempt. Sintayehu summoned a group of boys from a nearby curb and gestured toward David's and my suitcases, which the boys promptly scrambled to load into the back of the Land Cruiser. I climbed inside feeling like the quintessential ugly American; the look on David's face told me we were both digesting the same reality: it was not, after all, okay to be American in Ethiopia.

After an uncomfortably silent but short drive, we turned onto a dirt street that skirted a wet, green field where people were sleeping on blankets, tarps, and pieces of cardboard; where boys tended small herds of urban livestock; and where women armed with plastic cups and empty cartons filled plastic grocery bags with water from a ditch. I stared in horror, quite certain we had driven onto the pages of a National Geographic article on human desperation. Before I could digest the sight of it, the field passed out of sight and we turned onto a paved residential street and stopped in front of a black and white gate, which was quickly opened by two men leaning against a nearby tree trunk. Once open, the gates revealed a red tiled courtyard and the old hotel that serves as the orphanage guest house. I was immediately taken aback: the place was charming, with a red brick facade and white-railed balconies and an illuminated neon purple welcome sign above the arched main entry--it was not at all what I had prepared myself for. Inside, we were greeted warmly by the desk clerk, a man named Solomon, who gestured for David and me to sit down on the lobby couch and then proceeded to ask us about our family back home, our travels so far, and our imminent date with destiny. Slowly but surely, I began to relax as Solomon talked and laughed and smiled and listened, doing his best to live up to the glowing sign above his door. Maybe it was, after all, okay to be American in Ethiopia.

The orphanage guest house

After a bit of unpacking, David and I met a small group of adoptive parents from France who were the only other guests at the hotel, and we all took our seats at umbrella'd tables on an outdoor patio, where the cook was about to serve lunch. Given my food poisoning phobia, I had planned on eating as little as possible in Ethiopia, but the lack of other diners present made it problematic to decline food--and food there was: garden salad with homemade avocado dressing; bread with spiced lab cheese and homemade salsa; rice; grilled potatoes, chicken, and fish; and fried bananas for dessert. I ate it all, nervously. The cook, whose name we learned was Wendi, strolled from table to table exchanging pleasantries and accepting compliments with a humble nod and a smile while other members of the guest house staff cleared away dishes between courses and delivered drinks and were even conscientious enough to open my bottled water in front of me, a simple kindness that likely saved me hours' worth of anxiety. After lunch, David and I witnessed our first coffee ceremony (a traditional and foundational part of Ethiopian culture), and experienced our first taste of hand-ground, unfiltered Ethiopian coffee. For the second time in one afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised; it was smooth and delicious.

Grinding the coffee

Pouring the coffee

After lunch, David and I were approached by a man who introduced himself as Tesfaye and said he was our driver. Relief surged through my body at the sight of the shy but friendly smile and the freely offered handshake standing in front of me; I had assumed the man who deposited us at the gate and drove away without a word would be our driver indefinitely. Soon David and I found ourselves in the backseat of another Land Cruiser as Tesfaye negotiated his way through the seemingly lawless traffic of Addis Ababa toward SOS Enfants Ethiopie, the (French) orphanage where Tariknesh lived and waited. We approached the orphanage from a muddy road bordered on one side by the corrugated tin walls of the orphanage grounds. The branches of a giant pink hibiscus tree spilled over the top of the wall, and moss crept along its stone foundation. At the far end of the wall stood a blue metal gate. It was neglected in comparison to the last gate we'd encountered; no one stood outside waiting to sweep it open as we approached, and it was muddied with the comings and goings of vehicles in a way that reminded anyone passing through that this was a transient place, a place where no one ever came and stayed for good.

Just outside the orphanage grounds

Inside the orphanage grounds, David and I were led to a visiting room with three couches, a chair, and rows of shelves displaying local hand-made pottery, textiles, and wooden carvings. Half a dozen inflated red balloons were scattered around the room, remnants of another family's happiness. We were told to wait, and that a nanny would bring Tariknesh as soon as she was ready. I have no idea how long we sat in that room, staring out the open door at a group of boys playing hop scotch in the parking lot, watching the hibiscus blossoms tremble each time a drop of rain fell from petal to pavement. At one point, a small boy, probably three-years-old, ran into the room hollering, "Hello! Hello!" and grabbed David's hand and then mine, shaking both vigorously while smiling widely. He claimed a red balloon and raced back toward the hopscotch group with it clutched tightly against his body. He reminded me of Holden, who was sleeping warmly in the bottom bunk-bed at Granny and Papa's house; except this boy had no grandparents with warm bunk beds, only a red balloon and a twenty-five percent chance of one day joining a family of his own. At another point, David had to use the restroom and was escorted past the playroom, where, upon seeing an unfamiliar white man, kids rushed toward him and banged on the glass as he passed and one girl cried, "Papa, papa! Are you my father?"

After what could have been ten minutes or just as easily an hour, two women appeared in the open doorway. One of them was holding a baby, my baby, who looked only vaguely like the picture I had seen of her but whose eyes and ears were unmistakable. David and I immediately stood up, not because either of us planned to scoop Tariknesh out of her nanny's arms right that very second, but because there are certain chapters of life that simply can't be written sitting down, certain moments that command the respect of a silent but standing ovation. My heart pounded and fluttered and generally stumbled around inside me, but my feet carried me reliably over the worn, wrinkled carpet as David and I crossed the final five-or-six steps' worth of distance standing between ourselves and our future. The two women introduced themselves as Tariknesh's nanny and her pediatrician, and the nanny held Tariknesh while she looked us over for the first time. Her brow was furrowed in what I now know is a worried expression, her lips were pursed tightly, and she sat very still. She blinked slowly several times with long, curvy eyelashes I know suspect had been curled, and her gaze lapped from David and me to the pediatrician and back again. When it became apparent that Tariknesh would not melt down at the sight of us, I was invited to hold her, and I lifted her eagerly into my arms, my empty, waiting arms, and buried my face in her curls, which smelled like rain. The women left us, and David and I were finally alone with our daughter, who felt soft and warm and wonderful against my body.

Taking her into my arms

The worried look

Tariknesh's worry deepened at the departure of her nanny, but she didn't cry; I took this as an indication of her resiliency but later came to understand it as a silent manifestation of her resignation to being passed around (all told, she and the babies on her floor shared eight nannies), and an indication of her general reluctance to cry. The first hour David and I spent with Tariknesh passed quickly. She let both of us hold her but never unpursed her lips or unfurrowed her brow or looked at us with eyes that betrayed anything lighter than the deepest concern. She cried once and it was unlike anything I had ever heard before, a pathetic, un-exercised whimper that rasped, halting and hushed, from her body like the protests of a rusted wind-chime. She never smiled. We showed her pictures of Connor and Holden and of home, and she chose a shot of her nursery to hold onto. When an hour had passed, the same nanny who had brought Tariknesh to the visitors' room came unceremoniously to collect her, and David and I stood in the doorway watching our daughter's expressionless face grow smaller and smaller as she, with her picture of home in hand, was transferred back to her place inside the orphanage.

Saying goodbye

Meeting Tariknesh was nothing like giving birth to Connor or Holden. There were no extended family members gathered around, no neighbors bearing casseroles, no peach-colored roses at my bedside, no perfectly peaceful baby, no untempered elation. Instead, there were people sleeping in fields, and women with children huddled under bridges as it rained. There was a man with no legs who looked at me and simply said, "please." There were goats and cattle in the streets. There were child beggars and women with firewood tied to their backs and no shoes on their feet. There were farmers selling corn and oranges out of dented wheelbarrows and five-gallon buckets. There was a man drinking water from a puddle. There was, in my mind, the imminent threat of food poisoning and possible panic. There was a foreign country, and an orphanage with two hundred motherless children. There was a baby girl with an identification number stitched onto all of her clothing, who had already been alone a long time, who found no solace in our arms. There was a nanny who took her away from us for her own good. There was awe and gratitude and happiness, but also fear and worry and sadness. There was wonder, but no peace.

Despite all this, by the time my feet climbed the stairs to room 201 at the orphanage guest house that night, David and I had become parents by virtue of the same crowning moment that had made us parents twice before: we had held our daughter for the first time.

A Picture of Today

Resurrected

Beautiful Ethiopia

On the Untimely Death of My Computer

What seems like a lifetime ago (but was actually early September), my computer died. With all David's and my photos from Ethiopia on it. I died a little too, and stayed up late that night frantically emailing Mandy and Debra, with whom David and I shared the orphanage guest house, begging them to tell me they hadn't yet deleted any of my pictures from their computers. The next day when the repair man told me my computer was ruined but my pictures were salvageable, I almost danced. The only way to save the pictures was to buy a new Mac and have the contents of the old hard drive transferred onto it--a very expensive lesson in the importance of using an external hard drive that is not two sisters living in Chicago--but I didn't care. If buying a new computer meant that Tarika's face the first time I saw her and Eutabeze's face the only time I saw her and Ethiopia in all the splendor and beauty and devastation I witnessed from my vantage point behind a Canon peephole could be resurrected from the remains of my ruined motherboard, then buying a new computer was the very least I was willing to do. So, I had a yard sale and made enough money to buy a new (used) Mac that's not as nice as my old one, but still nice. I've been waiting impatiently for it to arrive since Monday. I've been drudging lack-lustered through my homework assignments on David's crappy Dell, and cursing the way it takes SEVEN-TIMES TOO LONG to navigate the Internet. I've ignored my blog and yours as well, lest I lash out in physical rage at the only (barely) functional computer I have. I've squinted at the two-inch screen on my camera in order to relive everything that's happened and then accumulated there over the past six weeks. Most pronouncedly, I've dreamed of the day when I'll once again see snapshots of Ethiopia as I saw it when I met my daughter, when I can finish telling the stories of days 2-11 of our trip, when I can finally sleep soundly at night knowing that the only pictures of my daughter's birth family are right where they belong: under my roof, in eleven different firesafe locations.

Until then, here's a picture of Tarika from today (in order for it to make its way onto the Internet, I had to snap it on my phone, send it to David's phone, and email it from David's phone to the crappy Dell). I have no idea why it's blue--I'm just happy I finagled a picture onto my blog.
P.S. Her hair's gotten long enough for a little bow up front! How cool is that?

Sad, But Insightful

Tonight, while Connor and I were cooking supper, I was telling him about how, in junior high and high school, he'll have different teachers for different school subjects and get to choose some of his own classes. Connor asked me which classes would be required and which would be optional, and in response to the first half of his question I replied, "science, math, English, history... do you know what history is?"

Connor though for a second, then nodded his head. "History is when there's someone big and strong and powerful, and they're mean."

Holden's "Into" Getting What He Wants

Holden: "Mom, I'm hungry."

Me: "OK, how about a peach and some goldfish crackers?"

Holden (pursing his lips and frowning): "Well, I'm not really into soft foods right now."

Me: "Well, you can't just have crackers--your body needs fruit too. You can have a peach, a banana, or two prunes."

Holden (reluctant but resigned): "OK fine, I'll take the prunes."

Me (handing him his food): "As soon as you finish your snack, it'll be time for a bath."

Holden (pursing his lips and frowning): "Well, I'm really into eating slow lately..."

. . . . . .

So, what you're saying is, I should postpone bath time until sometime later today next year? Well, I would, except I'm not really into dirty four year olds right now.

Pieces of Life (#15)

Sitting on the floor in Tarika's bedroom, rubbing lotion on her arms and legs while she sits facing me, naked save a diaper, astride her crumpled, damp bath towel. She squirms and protests as I try to hurry so she won't get cold, and so her hair won't dry before I can pull a shirt over her head and rearrange the curls that are only pliable when wet. Her squirming and protesting prove ineffectual, so she begins flopping forward at the waist, like a collapsible wooden toy whose inner tension cords have been released. I keep righting her, and she teeters upright like a pile of loose parts before flopping forward again, over and over. I finally finish with the lotion and begin trying to thread her alternately limp-then-flailing arms through the openings of her shirt--I fail. Tarika flops forward once more and this time I don't right her. I sigh, defeated, and sit very still, moving only to roll my eyes. She stretches her torso toward me like a droopy yoga master and spreads her arms wide, draping one over each of my folded legs. She turns her head to the left and nestles it into the depression at my lap's center. She sighs, contented, and lays very still, moving only to blink and breathe. The house is filled with silence, but not the empty kind. I can hear Holden splashing softly in the bathtub and Connor breathing deeply from the couch, where he rests with a fever. I lay my hand on Tarika's back and listen to the wind blowing, swirling around the pine tree just outside the window, gusting in different directions like autumn bluster does. Tarika's hair dries according to the dictates of her cowlicks, and I watch as her skin tightens and puckers softly into a canvas of beautiful goosebumps around the outline of my hand; she's cold, but ever-so-still. I heed the lyrics of her silence and sigh contentedly, moving only to blink and breathe, paying attention to my hand on her back, observing how her goosebumps melt along the edges of my touch, hoping the phenomenon isn't just skin-deep, hoping it's a beautiful metaphor.

One Month's Miracle

On this day last month, when David and I met Tariknesh for the first time, she was scared and silent and sad.

Today, she is:
Happy.

And so am I.

Pieces of Life (#14)

Connor sitting up in bed under a pool of soft lamplight reading Shel Siverstein poems to Holden, who cannot stop coughing long enough to fall asleep. Connor recites a few words--"I made myself..."--then waits patiently while Holden coughs before finishing the line--"...a snowball"--and makes it through twelve poems before falling asleep with the book on his lap.

Granny and Papa's Garden

Evidence of hard work

Sunlight on an old faucet

Apricot tree in the herb garden

Because gardens are a good place to sit


Garlic braids hanging from the eaves

Under construction: one tree house with a ladder that leads Anywhere He Wants

Sans Water-Wings

While David and I were in Ethiopia and Connor and Holden were staying with my parents, Connor taught himself how to swim. He was very proud of this accomplishment (so are we) and so very excited to show us that when we got home, one of the first things we did was take him to the pool:

Floating

Swimming!

Tarika and Papa swam too

Holden hitched a ride, which is what he tends to do while Connor's busy conquering the world

Journey to Ethiopia, Day One: The Day That Almost Wasn't

The night before we left for Phoenix, which was two nights before we actually left for Ethiopia, the old me came knocking: I awoke in the middle of the night convinced that I could not go to Africa. Could not ride on a plane for twenty-four hours. Could not, on account of my food poisoning phobia, eat foreign food in a developing foreign country. Could not leave Connor and Holden for ten whole days, one of which would be Connor's first day of first grade. Could not risk waking up in the middle of the night in Ethiopia feeling panicky, demanding that David find a way to get me home PRONTO, a way, necessarily, that did not involve travel by air or by sea. Something more along the lines of teleportation.

Since David is not Harry Potter, you can sense my predicament.

I'm going to make the long story of a long night filled with tall but hollow worries most people won't understand into anecdotal evidence of my prevailing sanity by skipping to its end. In the end (i.e. the morning), the thought that I might fail Tariknesh, might cower at home while her father valiantly crossed the Atlantic on her behalf to experience her culture, meet her birth family, and bring her home proved more frightful to me than any combination of food poisoning, motion sickness, claustrophobia, anxiety, and real or imagined danger. It squatted squarely in the forefront of my mind like a two-ton weight, reminding me that everything I had deemed important about my role as the parent of an African child hinged on my actually GOING TO AFRICA. So I allowed David to coax me into the front passenger seat of our car that afternoon, and I can honestly say that his promise of shoe shopping in Phoenix that evening had nothing to do with my cooperation. I was going to Africa to meet my daughter and find in myself the parent I knew I needed to be. I was going to Africa! I was exhausted and bedraggled and dressed in my oldest, rattiest clothes--everything nice I owned was packed--but I was finally on my way.

Early the next morning, David and I left for the airport. We felt elated and reasonably well-rested, thanks to the four-inch memory foam mattress pad in David's cousin's guest bedroom. Our friend Katie dropped us off at the United Airlines terminal and hugged us goodbye. We maneuvered our four suitcases down the sidewalk and through the double doors, ordered two breakfast bagels, and settled in to wait for our 9:55 flight. As we walked through the airport, ordered breakfast, and sat in the terminal, I resisted the urge to tell everyone I saw what we were doing and where we were going. Airports have a climate of excitement anyway--filled as they are with the prospects of vacations and reunions with loved ones--but David and I were on our way to meet our daughter for the first time. In Africa! We were doing something less than 1% of Americans had ever done--I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. I stared incessantly at my one picture of Tariknesh and leaned my head on David's shoulder, and together we waited for the first in a series of flights that would make us parents again.

The flight from Phoenix to Houston was uneventful. I tried to read Northanger Abbey and couldn't; Jane Austen bores me to tears. Instead, David and I watched the in-flight movie and continued to stare frequently at the picture of our daughter. The fourteen-hour flight from Houston to Dubai was also uneventful, but very enjoyable. We were fed four-course meals by uniformly beautiful stewardesses in tailored pin-stripe suits, high heels, head scarves, and bright red lipstick. Our seats were equipped with individual touch-screen entertainment systems, from which we could choose from hundreds of movies and TV shows, listen to any kind of music, tap into the in-flight cameras for a view in front of or underneath the plane, and shop for duty-free Cartier and Chanel (I don't know what went on in first class, but I'm thinking seven-course meals, complementary diamond-studded toothbrushes, and professional lap dances). When it was time for bed, the stewardesses handed out sleep masks and steaming wash cloths and hand-woven blankets, lowered the window shades (darkness would only last four hours since we were flying east), and switched on a ceiling-full of simulated stars. I fell asleep halfway through Confessions of a Shopaholic and slept like a baby.

Emirates stewardesses (photo from here--I was too shy to take my own)

Flying into Dubai was something I had been looking forward to. I had hoped to glimpse the palm tree- or world-shaped islands and maybe the world's only seven-star hotel from the sky. Alas, we landed during a sandstorm, and saw only the hazy glow of runway lights.

Sandstorm

The Dubai airport was huge and modern. There were glass elevators and three-story-high indoor fountains and Rolex wall clocks. We made our way through one of many immigration stations manned by thobe-clad men and stepped outside onto a granite curb, where a shuttle waited to take us to the airport hotel for our overnight layover. Upon arrival at the hotel, we were given vouchers for meals and a snack, which we promptly took advantage of. As we helped ourselves to the hotel restaurant's buffet, David struck up a conversation with a woman standing nearby. I didn't hear the beginning of their conversation and was never able to get a clear explanation from David of why he decided to talk to her, so I'm inclined to believe it was fate's fault we met. The woman's name was Betsy and she was from New Mexico, and she was--enter fate--on her way to Ethiopia to complete her adoption. Of her ten-and-a-half-month-old daughter. Just like us!

Over a shared supper, we learned that Betsy had been delayed an unexpected day in New York City and needed a clean outfit to wear the next day, so David and I agreed to accompany her to the mall. We exchanged dollars for dirhams, procured a taxi, and tried to glimpse Dubai through the sandstorm as we sped toward the nearest mall (there are twenty, one of which is the biggest in the world and one of which houses an indoor ski resort). Once at the mall, it was nearly impossible to find anything we could afford; everything was four or five times as expensive as in America (nevertheless, others were buying it by the shopping cartload). Despite the fact that it was ten-thirty at night, the mall was packed with people and bustling with activity. Lines of customers waited at every checkout counter and a group of kids sang "This Little Light of Mine" to the beat of African drums on a raised stage in the main foyer. What really struck me as I walked through the mall was not how expensive the merchandise was or how late the children were allowed to stay up or how rampant the consumerism seemed to be, it was how diverse the people were; it was exhilarating.

After Betsy had purchased an outfit and I had picked up an extra sweater and a scarf for my mother (this never reached you, Mom--it ended up around the neck of Tariknesh's nanny), we waited in the taxi line for thirty minutes and finally arrived back at the hotel sometime after midnight. At this point, David and I bid Betsy goodnight, rode the elevator to our third floor room, and watched a few minutes of Arabian television before climbing into our separate twin beds and turning out the lights. I laid in bed for hours thinking about Tariknesh and the fact that I would be meeting her later that day. Adding to my wakefulness was the fact that I was cold; I had forgotten to pack pajamas and wore only my underwear and a pair of complimentary Emirates Airlines socks. After several hours of thinking and shivering and tossing and turning, I climbed into David's bed, tucked myself into the crook of his arm, and finally fell asleep.

Fantasy Baseball

I could watch her eat Cheerios all day.

Couldn't you?

For My Mother

When David, Tariknesh, and I arrived home from Ethiopia at two 'o' clock Sunday morning, my parents were here waiting for us. They had been caring for Connor and Holden for the better part of ten days, and as if that weren't already enough the house was sparkling clean, the laundry baskets were empty, and our pantry had been restocked--all the way down to paper towels and cat food. The fridge I left bare was full of casseroles and sandwich makings and vegetables that were washed and ready to eat. There was an untouched coconut cake on the dining room table and a pyramid of soap on the bathroom counter (we used our last bar just before leaving). It's been four days since we got home, and I'm still discovering things my mother did for us while we were gone. For instance, I found my ironing basket empty and a bunch of crisp pants and skirts hanging in my closet; she even ironed a t-shirt or two. David found a tub full of ice cubes in the freezer. There's a bag of potting soil sitting in the laundry room for Connor's teacher, who requested it on Meet-the-Teacher Night last Wednesday. There's a new canister of salt sitting amongst the baking supplies--I had been meaning to buy one for weeks before we left.

After all my mother did while David and I were gone, the only thing she even came close to requesting in return was that I post some more pictures of her newest grandchild:

The magnificent bottom lip

Crawling

Tasting her toes


Chewing her thumb


A chubby hand (and The Lip again)


Sleeping in a sunbeam

A happy blur


A lucky girl (someday, when she needs it most, these people will do a year's worth of her ironing in one weekend and fill her freezer with ice cubes and casseroles--then she'll realize how lucky)

We're Home

Thirty-six hours after leaving Ethiopia, we finally arrived home early this morning. Tariknesh is fabulous, and going to Africa has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Until I can summon enough energy to write all about Her and It, enjoy this, my favorite picture of Tariknesh in Ethiopia.

Countdown: 1

There are not enough words to describe how I feel today, so here's an essay I wrote in June for my creative nonfiction class. Bits and pieces were taken from my blog (forgive me--I was taking two summer classes at once), but overall it sums up how I feel about our adoption.

WAITING FOR AFRICA

In one week, my husband and I will be granted official custody of a nine-month-old orphan by the Ethiopian federal government. In one month, we will take a twenty-four hour flight halfway around the world to Addis Ababa, where we will meet our daughter for the first time and bring her home with us, to America, where two older brothers, five grandparents, six uncles, four aunts, thirteen cousins, and one family pet are waiting to welcome her. That we’ve reached this point in the adoption process, this point at which our wait has dwindled to span a single month, seems surreal in light of the context of the past year, wherein it has taken multiple months to complete each task—home study, dossier, authentication, waiting—and during which I have sometimes come close to forgetting, amidst all the paperwork, fingerprinting, notarizing, authenticating, and waiting that there is a child at the end of it all: a child, and also a new life.

In retrospect, those months were worth their “wait” in gold; during them, I came to terms with the ways in which international adoption marks the beginning of a new life that is fuller—but also harder. When I initiated the adoption process last summer, I was as unabashed idealist. I acknowledged the loss inherent in adoption, but I believed there was something transcendently beautiful about the idea that sometimes it takes not only a family or a village but rather an entire world to raise a child. Conventional wisdom maintains that the ideal place for an orphaned child is within her own culture, and while I understood the thinking that leads to this conclusion, I thought the conclusion itself oversimplified love and underestimated human potential. I didn’t view the globalization of family as a tragedy; I viewed it as a beautiful movement. I hailed love that bridges biological clans, racial groups, countries of origin, and cultural comfort zones as exactly the kind of change I wanted to see in the world. I dove in.

Diving into the world of international adoption was not, despite the reckless, headfirst connotations of the word “dive” and the naivety of my own idealism, a decision I arrived at lightly. After researching adoption, I had waited three years for a particular program to speak to me, for a sense of direction to arise out of the disparate bits of information I had gathered from different agencies. Many adoptive parents choose a program based on practicality, but I believed miracles govern the coming together of family, so I was waiting for a program to choose me. During this wait, I learned things about race and racism without which I never would have had the courage to adopt an African child. Up to that point, I had struggled to understand racism in a context that didn't involve institutionalized segregation and slavery or the overt racism of individuals and clandestine organizations; I had failed to see how racism related to me, a person who abhorred America's various discriminatory traditions and believed in the inherent equality of humanity. Then, as an undergraduate upperclassman, I studied literature and got to see America through the eyes of Toni Morrison, Bell Hooks, Nella Larson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Earnest Gaines, Ntozake Shange, and Zora Neale Hurston. I got to interact with black peers on a meaningful level for the first time in my life, and I came to appreciate the extent to which they belonged to their own vibrant American subculture, a subculture that was different from the one I'd always known and naively—racistly, I now realize—assumed to be quintessentially American. I learned that while I wasn't an overtly racist person, I was ignorant about racism, and that my ignorance was partly instrumental in perpetuating the traditions of prejudice and discrimination I professed to abhor. For the first time, I recognized my own hand in American racism, and instead of shame I felt empowerment: after a lifetime of connecting racism to hooded men and burning crosses and my grandparents' generation, I recognized it as my problem, a problem I was complicating through my ignorance of the more subtle nuances of prejudice. Suddenly I saw the inadvertently racist consequences of white privilege everywhere I looked, and because I finally saw them, I no longer felt helpless to confront or begin to correct them.

So, a few life lessons, three years, and one necessarily serendipitous encounter later, I dove into Ethiopian adoption armed with a sense of purpose and a set of ideals. I knew about racism, I understood that white privilege was rampant and unearned, I acknowledged the gross imperfections of America as a place to raise a trans-racial family—all of these issues gave me pause, but none of them shook my idealism. When critics decried international adoption as unethical or unpatriotic, I dismissed them as uninspired and ethnocentric. When cynics equated international adoption with perverted consumerism, I pitied them for resorting to such a derisive opinion of humanity. But when I thought about my future daughter’s birth family, about their inevitable loss and suffering, I didn’t know how to respond. When a story about unscrupulous international adoption practices surfaced on The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism website, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to reconcile the problematic relationship between an adoptive family’s luck and a birth family’s loss or the reality of child trafficking with my belief that adoption was beautiful. I began to feel embittered; I was sure I couldn’t live with myself unless the ethics of my adoption were impeccable.

Sometime during the following November, my outlook on adoption changed. For the first time, I recognized my ideals—which gave me direction—and my idealism—which robbed me of perspective—as two different things; I realized I could be a pragmatist without abandoning my ideas about family and diversity. The more I examined the role of idealism in my adoption, the more convinced I became that it didn’t belong there, that while I could (and should) be mindful of ethics, international adoption was no place for idealism: adoption was not ideal. Love that transcends difference may be ideal, but removing a child from her homeland and birth culture was not. Placing all one's trust in an intermediary agency was not ideal. Paying tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity to adopt one child was not ideal. Choosing to adopt despite dark rumors and exploitative realities was not ideal. Child trafficking was horrendous, but so were the realities of slave labor and prostitution that too often awaited orphans who were never adopted. There was no perfect way in which to go about adopting a child who had suffered loss and grief, there was only certain uncertainty.

Realizing these things was like coming up for air. After five months of floundering under the demands of my idealism, I realized that I didn’t have to give my daughter an ideal life; I only had to love her and trust that she would believe in the reality of that love despite the ethical complexity of international adoption. I didn’t have to defend my decision to adopt internationally to anyone except for her, and it didn’t have to be a perfect defense: I only had to love her and trust that my love would fill the void between that which is ideal and that which is practical and leave her feeling fortunate instead of empty. I only had to love her and trust that this journey would lead me where it should, that there would dawn a day in Addis Ababa that would see me hold a baby in my arms for the first time, and that while our embrace would embody the troubling relationship between luck and loss and the inevitability of unfairness, it would also stand witness to the reality of love.

That day in Addis Ababa will dawn soon. I’ll watch its advent through a small, square window while I soar through the sky tens of thousands of feet above Africa, above deserts and grasslands, toward the mountains of Ethiopia. That day will find me armed not only with my ideals but also with the wisdom gained of waiting. It will find me basking in the sense of calm I gained when I laid down my idealism and let it be carried away from me on the current of a clean November wind. It will find me in a city where I’m told I’ll see poverty unparalleled; it will find me naïve about the sorts of suffering such poverty entails, but it will not find me struggling to reconcile the open wounds of Africa with the material excesses of America—I understand there is no justice in this disparity. It will find me in a country where I’m told I will experience human warmth and acceptance unlike anything that exists in North America; it will find me struggling to reconcile this warmth with that suffering, and believing that it can (and should) be done. It will find me marveling, mourning, and repenting—but it will not find me despairing. It will find me with someone else’s child in my arms, and it will find me with my own child in my arms. It will find me where three years followed by thirteen months of waiting has always intended for me to be: it will find me at peace with what I’ve done, and what I haven’t been able to do.