In the interest of keeping it real

Some of you have written in to offer support and your own experiences from the first weeks "at home". It's one of the great things about this virtual adoption community, the ability to share these unique and rather rare experiences we go through as adoptive parents. I am sure it is a bit different for each of us, just as each of our children are unique as snowflakes, but there are enough common threads, enough binding agents that we are able to sympathize, empathize, and share what wisdom we gain along the way.

I have to say that the first couple of weeks at home have been at once much, much easier than I expected and much, much harder. How is that possible? I'm not sure. I think it has to do with the illness that I've been going through since before leaving China - this illness has made the whole experience very surreal. That said, I am quite sure that it's surreal even if you're in the peak of health. But the illness has intensified the strangeness of it.

The easy part has been largely thanks to QiuQiu, who has been a real sport about the whole thing. I do not say that lightly. When I think what she's going through - this abduction by total strangers, this transportation across the international dateline and halfway around the world to another country that doesn't look, smell, taste or sound anything like the world she has known - I am amazed, astounded at her cool and her aplomb, her awesome heartiness in the face of all this strangeness. I am amazed, above all, by her ability to actually enjoy the experience.

This kid has been a champ. Her jetlag-induced sleep issues lasted four days. Four. Days. I was prepared for weeks. She was not airsick in the planes on the 24-hour trip home. She has not awakened in her strange nursery with night terrors since being home. She has taken every bottle of food that we have handed her without complaint, even those that were the wrong temperature. Even those including flavors and textures she'd never been exposed to before. She has gone along with every outing, doctor visit and family occasion with very little complaint, only fussing when she's bored or teething particularly badly.

She certainly still has a lot of attaching/bonding to do. She is one of those babies who deals with her institutionalization by becoming everyone's friend. She likes attention and isn't afraid to flirt shamelessly with each and every comer. I am quite certain that she doesn't yet know us as her one and only, permanent parents, and equally certain that she'd go with anyone who gave her a friendly smile. This is an attachment issue, just like the child who violently rejects their new parents. She likes us just fine, revels in our presence even, but she has yet to identify us as "the real thing". Still, as attachment issues go, hers are on the easy side, at least at this stage, and she has been a real pleasure.

Now let me get to the other side of the coin. During these weeks, I have awakened some mornings to a vast feeling of wellbeing, a thrill at the idea of bending over the crib of this new little creature who has been handed over to us for life, and seeing her lovely waking smile. I have known how very fortunate and blessed we have been in this child.
Withing a matter of hours, however, I can be shipwrecked, smashed on the rocks by a feeling of utter desolation. I mourn profoundly for the life I have left behind. I had a good life - better than good, and for most of that life I have had a great deal of freedom. I have seldom been tied to an office, a mortgage, or even a spot on the map. That is an enviable thing, and I have reveled in it. When we decided to adopt, I felt that I had done with that freedom what I could do with it. I felt I had used it well, but used it up. I felt it was time to move on to the next thing - to teaching and giving and being responsible for another human being. I still feel that way. But it does not stop me from mourning the life I've left behind.

Some nights during the worst of my illness, I curled on the couch in the dark and actually cried tears over my dog Sam, my road trip companion and sidekick for the past 8 years. I cried for those long, hot days on the open road which we shared, the nights sleeping on the ground in the desert, side by side, with no one else nearby, the fourteeners we climbed together, the long, solitary hikes in the snow. I cried for my solitude and my independence.

These emotions turn over as quickly as playing cards, leaving me reeling. I can't keep up with the changes running through me like water. It is a massive transformation, probably the biggest of my life. Hard as I try to grasp and hold onto the new feelings, the fleeting joy that passes like cloud shadows over my landscape, it runs through my fingers. I can't pin it down. I'm not quite all the way through the looking glass yet - I still have a leg on each side. I am not finished "becoming".

I know also that some of this is the illness. It's a tough one - one that leaves me weak and dizzy and shaking, that scours my insides and takes the bloom from my cheeks. It's an illness with a lot of pain involved, and one that goes on for weeks without respite. But I also feel like the illness is, in a strange way, a part of the alchemy that is this transformation to motherhood. I have to learn a new kind of endurance. I have to learn to do that which seems like it can't be done. I know that this experience will leave me stronger in a way I couldn't duplicate. But I also resent the hours that it's taken away from me. I resent the time it's sapped from my first weeks with Flynn. I'm a stranger to myself, so how can I become familiar to her? I also feel like I've become a stranger to my husband, between the new duties of parenthood and the weakness of being ill, and I resent that too. I resent the joy that was so easy for us in eachother's company before, and which seems to remote now.

I know that all these things will return in their time, and eventually, when this passes, the time it has taken will seem much shorter. Right now it seems forever - a seperate lifetime in the space of a few weeks.

Reading through this, I see that I haven't properly explained how it feels both much easier and much harder than I expected. When people assure me, "It gets easier, I promise!" I want to say, oh, but it's been so easy! She has made it so easy! But when I'm alone, suffering through yet another protracted bout of pain or trying to rise to the needs of a child on zero nutrition and not nearly enough sleep, I think...how can I possibly do this?

I have a feeling, ill or not, no matter how difficult or easy the transition of your child, most of you have gone through a similar experience, feelings of profound loss, feelings of profound joy, that rarefied feeling of surreality that comes with a little stranger, a small, brave, lone human being placed in your waiting arms.