Family Day

Two years ago today, Eric and I stood outside the Addis Hilton at 10 am and waited as the rattling old car pulled around the curve. Abdissa was driving, and his wife was in the backseat holding Dessi, with another child (Johannes) on the seat beside her.

She got out and handed Dessi to me. Eric took a picture. I mumbled something. We stared at our baby. OUR BABY. She was so beautiful and small and quietly unblinking. We were awkward and emotional and really, I think, kinda stunned. That this scheme actually worked. That they were going to give us this beautiful child.

Dessi then proceeded to not move (although once she kicked her foot) or smile or even cry (unless it was suppertime) for the next two days. She just watched us. (We have six hours of the most boring adoption footage ever.) Then on the third day, Dessi napped and we, as always, sat and watched. She awoke, looked up at these people who were still just looking down at her, and she smiled. Finally.

And from then on we have been on the superhighway of kicking each other and saying, Good gracious, is this amazing light really our friggin kid? Because she is just. too. much. Anything anyone could ever hope to be or aspire to, she already is.

She is 2 1/2 today. We have been a family for two years today. We can't really express how happy we are, and I know parents can be soooo boring when going on about how amazing their kids are, but it's family day, so please excuse the indulgence. Here are some random delights of the past few weeks (beach pics are scenes from last month's trip to Casamance):





Dessi says 'No poopoo here, No peepee here,' mostly after I insist that she just sit on the potty and TRY.

Her favored expressions lately are 'Pas ça,' and, alternatively, 'Pour moi.' (Not that / For me.) She also likes to look at us all mooney-eyed and say, "Daddy, I love ... and you think she is going to say 'you' and instead she says .. POOPOO! I love PEEPEE!"

She calls me honey. Sometimes hon.

Before bed we name the people we love. She says, "I love you grandma. I love you Tata Erin. I love you Daddy." Each person gets their own "I love you." It can take a while. It's worth it.




At night before we eat, Eric and I say something that we're grateful for. We're not allowed to say our family (too easy). We assumed she had not really understood the exercise. A few weeks ago we asked her what she was grateful for. She reached her hand to me and said, very sincerely, "I'm grateful for mama." Then Eric. Touching his hand. "I'm grateful for daddy."

She says thank you not only for a toy or an orange, but also after a great outing to the beach or the playground. And sometimes, just walking down the stairs together. Her tiny hand squeezing my hand. "Thank you, mama."

She loves drama. Mama, make a sad face. Daddy, make a happy face! And then there's the face of Grumpy Bird.







Last week I snapped at her. Half an hour later we sat down and I said, "Dessi, I'm sorry. I should not have yelled at you. I wanted to get your attention, I want you to come when I call you, not to run away. But I should not have yelled at you, and I'm sorry. Do you understand? Mama shouldn't have yelled at you. I am sorry. I am not going to yell at you anymore."

She looked at me for ten seconds, then hugged me and patted my back and said, "I love you mama."

About six months ago, I did the same thing (snapped, then apologized). She did the same thing, too. She wasn't even two years old then.

She hides. She goes behind the curtains in her room (which, for the record, are transparent) and says, "Where'd Dessi go?" A few weeks ago she did it at a hotel in Casamance. Here is a picture:



She sings herself to sleep at night. Sometimes for an hour. She wakes up singing in the morning. Sometimes, if I come in too immediately, she'll ask me to go back out. I think she likes to have some time for herself. (Although, God only knows why she doesn't want any during the day! Because boy howdy she does not.)

A few nights a week, we put on hip hop and dance in the living room. She has all the moves. Sometimes she will get on her back and spin around like the brakedances used to do. (You know. In the '80s.) She loves dinosaurs and looks for them everywhere around town. When we walk up to the lighthouse on the weekends she will point to each mashed-in cow patty and exclaim, "Dinosaur poopoo!"

I used to call her my plum blossom, which she couldn't say so she calls herself Plumplum. Mama, you hug your plumplum? Mama, Dessi is your plumplum.

She is a light beyond all lights to us, with an almost heartbreaking tenderness and vulnerability and compassionate joy for life. Her beauty shakes me awake every day. We are pretty lucky people. These days are good.

Easter 2010

So, these eggs are ... where?

Easter was a mama fail, li'l bit. All the little children had these sweet little baskets that their mothers had decorated for them. Dessi had a red beach bucket that I found rolling around in the car as we pulled up, late, for the hunt. Which we ended up missing. (They started exactly on time! Who does that?!) We had to have our own private hunt with eggs I borrowed from another mom. Nice.




Luckily, she is incredibly adaptable.

We told her they were dinosaur eggs (she's so into dinosaurs right now. I don't know where that came from. We've been reading Where the Wild Things Are, and I think maybe she thinks the monsters are dinosaurs.She's always gasping excitedly and pointing in the air or in the grass and shouting, "Dinosaur!" Then she tells me all about it, the yellow eyes, if it's big or small or blue. So I bought some 3" dinosaurs and hid them around the house. We were sitting in her room reading and I looked up, gasped, pointed to the doorway and said, "Look! A dinosaur!" She was duly freaked out. It was not cool.)

Here she is, showing off her bounty.






After the hunt we went next door and swam with Erin and Terri, great friends who were married last week in Paris. Dessi LOVES this woman. Just can't get enough of her.

My finger's stuck

This is how the child entertains herself so that her parents can read the newspaper for a little while at night. Do you hear this crazy language she is speaking in the second video? She sounds like she belongs at the Star Wars bar. The book on her head, I have to say, she got from me. Because the women here carry stuff on their heads all day long and so they look absolutely gorgeous just walking down the street, all things in alignment, proud and muscle-y and beautiful. Which leads me to ... I have been trying to walk with a book on my head. I do it about as well as our Dessi girl.

I've been thinking about these videos, waiting for them to load. ANd I've been thinking about how these little 30-second snippets worthwhile enough (in my mind, anyway) to be videotaped are actually just common things -- random moments on a random Sunday evening. And the actual abundance of these moments that we read the paper through or cook dinner around or, just, whatever, it's almost heartbreaking when one considers how rapidly a week, and then a year, and then a lifetime, can just pass by. There are so many of them now, and before I know it she will be off to college.

Which is to say, we leave Senegal on April 30th after a 2 1/2 year post. We are off to DC for two weeks, then Montana for two months, then Cote d'Ivoire in the fall for the next chapter in this wacky little book of ours.

Baby Thieves

Really? I am stunned.

I occasionally tune into Ethiopian blogs that occasionally (or constantly) fret about the possibility that Ethiopia's adoption process is corrupt, that people are harvesting children (which is when adoption agency employees go to remote villages and say, "Who wants to give their baby a better life in America?! Line up here!" Etc. (It's wrong and illegal to do it.)

I just have always thought that no system is always perfect (not that I would ever excuse such tactics or anything underhanded or sneaky, but that things go wrong because they always go wrong, and then you fix them as soon as possible and as completely as necessary and you continue on) and ... just, there are SO many orphans in the world. Nobody needs to trick birthparents into giving them away.

But, and yet, people have. Maybe not in Ethiopia, but in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Guatemala. And apparently, at least one organization (damn Christian World Adoption!) is, at the very least, doing some things that have twice (that I know of) led journalists to believe they're lying and stealing and behaving badly. In Ethiopia.

Really?

We are waiting to adopt our second Ethiopian child. We are, like, eighth on the waiting list.

So. We received a notice today from our agency detailing the US Embassy's newest policies regarding orphan declaration. It looks like it will slow things down for us, but I'm for that. Slow it down, do extra research on the child's history, and make sure it's all perfect. Eric and I are in this process to help, not to grab for a child that has a place with someone else -- our dream would be that there is no orphan for us. And until then, we and our baby will wait a little longer to be together, and it will be for the best. But the DOS letter's first line is: The Department of State shares families’ concerns about recent media reports alleging direct recruitment of children from birth parents by adoption service providers or their employees. (This is the aforementioned child harvesting.)

I wanted to find out what recent media reports these were. I knew of one of them, about CWA, and whether the reporting (from a film crew in Australia) was rooted in fact or not I could not tell, but there were so many things that were factually wrong and it was sensationalized enough that I thought the whole piece was basically not credible. The DOS letter isn't clear if reports that led to the new State Department policy concern practices in Ethiopia -- my guess is that they're about Haiti. But anyway, a little bit of research brought me to other blogs where waiting parents are in a panic -- apparently this is how it started in Vietnam and in Cambodia months before those countries were shut down.

This is not how we want this to go -- and not for the sake of me being eighth on the waiting list, either. I worked for several months across three years in an orphanage in Cambodia in the years after the adoption ban was in place. There are children collecting in orphanages with no hope of forever families or of any kind of future in Cambodia. There are toddlers by themselves on the streets of Phnom Penh, begging for food. In Cambodia, I know the issue that pushed it over the edge involved agency employees who were giving money to birthmothers. Of course, that's just wrong wrong wrong, but being in Cambodia, I can see how it could happen innocently enough -- imagine a single mother with four kids, she has a baby and gives it up for adoption. She's struggling to feed the kids she has left. I think anyone might think, well, if I help her now, maybe she won't need to give up any more of her children.

Of course you can't. You can't help. But I think it's pretty possible that the Cambodian situation was borne of something like this (this is what I was told, anyway, by people who ran the orphanage where I volunteered, who knew the American who went to jail. Yes, went to jail.) In fact when we go back to Ethiopia Eric and I intend to find Dessi's birth mother and to connect with her and to let her meet Dessi if she would want to. We have toyed with and dismissed, though, the idea of sending her to school or trying to help her. Which is so right and just so wrong, too. How am I going to explain to my soon-to-be-12-year-old daughter (this being Dessi; I'm planning ahead) that we never did anything to help her birth mother? I don't know. It's hard to explain to myself, really.

I just can't believe the situation in Ethiopia is so corrupt or so far gone that it would come to a ban. But ... And ... I'm torn between knowing that the vast majority (like, 99 percent? I really believe it's something like that) of those children really do need homes and knowing that our agency (Children's House International) and their people in Ethiopia (the Thomas Center and the loving and amazing Abdissa, whom I just KNOW is a straight shooter) ... I'm torn between feeling safe in the path we are on and feeling ... just yucky. And just not sure what's going on. And wishing someone else but my mother-in-law read this blog anymore so that someone would leave a comment and say what they know or what they think about it all.

...

...

For the past five minutes I've been sitting quietly, thinking. The bottom line is that anything unethical immediately needs to be corrected, but the fact that something has gone wrong somewhere doesn't mean the whole system (or even a double-digit percent of the system) is rotten. Ethiopia absolutely needs a way to place children with adoptive families. It's easy to be reactive about this, but Eric and I have done our homework and we absolutely trust our agency and their representatives. As lame / not-enough-ish as it sounds, we have done what we can to ensure our involvement does not contribute to anything but the good. We absolutely know that there are abandoned children who need homes. I would never voluntarily get off of this path of international adoption.

A needle pulling thread

Here's our gal. I can get her to do this all day if I agree to show her the footage after each song. Sorry my voice is a little loud on this one.

MOSI

Here we are during a December visit to Tampa' Museum of Science and Industry.



Running off without us ... she never used to be so bold!



Joely after his victory (he and his mom assembled this)



This was a really cool exhibit -- you stand in the dark, then the light flashes and it leaves your shadow printed on the wall behind you! Very fun.



With her cousins after a nice meal at Panetta's.



And this is Dessi on the merry-go-round after an afternoon of Christmas shopping. She's never liked these very much before, but this time she looovveed it. She was so full of joy, really. A beautiful two minutes.

Long Week

We've had a string of little dramas in the Young household this week. One particularly crap standout began when Dessi and I were walking through the garden and came upon our cat sitting contentedly beside a pile of feathers. Former bird. Bad, bad cat. Then I saw a teeny baby bird, dead but uneaten, next to the cat.

It took me 15 minutes to find the nest, tucked in the farthest reaches of the bouganvilla's wiry boughs. It was so careful and secure, lined with down from the mama and twine and irridescent feathers from what might have been a peacock. There were two sweet, precious nestlings still warm and tucked away in there. Something about it -- the perfection of it, the care she took, the optimism of it. The idea of her being killed on her way to find or bring food ... it just broke my heart completely open. I cried for days. I am crying still, four days later, writing this.

(Here we are on a happier day):



I sat on the porch and watched for two hours, just to make sure that the feather pile had indeed been their mama. No other bird came, and it was getting cold, so we scooped out the nest and fed the babies ourselves. They ate less and less as the night wore on. By the next day they seemed pretty doomed. Too stressed, I guess, by me and my unbirdlike handling of things.



I put the box outside with a warm heating pad in it, and they both had hopped out and skuttled away within a few hours. Maybe they're alive even now, but I highly doubt it.

In the grand scheme of things, I guess it is no big deal. Some birds are dead, a home is wrecked, and a cat is fed. The cycle of life, the impermanence of all things, blah blah blah. I cause more harm and live with less integrity than my little cat, I am sure. (However, the cat is getting significantly fewer cuddles these days.)

My point being, this is just the way things are and I need to find a way to cry less instead of more as the years go by. I'm 40 years old, fergodsakes. But it's heartbreaking. The whole lot of it. The whole lot of us.

OK, maybe this is about more than the little birds. As a mama myself, and about to be mother to another, and the circumstances of what happens in the universe before these children find their ways to us ... it's not all lost on me.

On the other hand, it was really, really sad. Just for what it was. Just as things are.

I'm heartbroken.