Folks, somewhere in my boxes of photos, or in our fellow adoptive parent's group of photos, I'm sure there are pictures of this...
Ten families in a Nanning hotel conference room signing papers... Chinese papers, American papers, replicates of the same words in different languages. It was a harried scene with our guides trying to guide us through the process. It was crazy. It was surreal. The room was spinning... We had babies on our laps.
But when Omegamom passed the paperwork to me and I looked down at the blank space that awaited my signature, for a millionth of a second, perhaps for the only time in my life, I didn't have any doubts, I didn't have any regrets, I didn't have any fears, I just knew that I was one signature away from being home.
I think of all the things that led up to that signature...
After Omegamom and I decided to adopt internationally, we dithered across the globe. South America? Africa? Europe? Asia? We talked about each part of the planet, cussed and discussed each country's adoption system, and weighed out the pros and the cons. It was an intellectual and ethical pursuit, which is a dammed stupid way to start a family.
It should be about love.
I was lost. I was confused. I was driven but I didn't know where I was driving too. It was hard.
Then, in the middle of one night, I woke up knowing that my as yet unborn child was Chinese. She would grow up to be smart, beautiful, sassy and outspoken. We would have good times, bad times, and times where we both wondered what the fuck was going on. In our hearts, both of us would know how it feels to loose a parent before we knew that parent.
What really struck me in the middle of that night was that I could see her face and feel her heart and my heart intertwining.
It was this face and this heart...
Sometimes, you wake up in the middle of the night and get things right. After all these years, my greatest happiness is to laugh with her while listening to falling water. Granted, we don't do it as much as we should, but both of us know that we that we can.
That's the important thing... knowing that when you need to, you can.
