We had just lost the first little girl we had hoped to adopt. No, not lost. Abandoned.Little Yun-yun had been afflicted with some sort of brain damage, and, already shell-shocked by the stillbirth of our daughter five years before we broke off the adoption rather than go forward into an uncertain future with a child whose ability to grow might have been unimpaired...or might just stop completely at five, or nine, or fourteen, to be with us as a toddler or an adolescent for the rest of our lives.
So we were in pretty bad shape when the neatly dressed director of the Social Welfare Institute in Dongguan (东莞) showed up at our room at the White Swan Hotel with a tiny crewcut little girl in a white jersey and teeny plastic sandals.
And that's how it went for the next week or so; she silent and distressed, we harassed and barely functional as we replayed all the miserable routines we had already gone through the first week of the journey with a different child.
It is difficult now to look at the rude, chatty pixie who loves Beefaroni and "My Little Pony" and remember that silent misery.
But she is still there, that sad little girl, locked four years in the past, and so are the we of then.
We've come far since that day, though, Little Miss, you and I and your mother, and now I can't imagine being without you, or your artless chatter, or your wriggly back-scratching confidence. Or, as tonight, when you fuss and fret and cry yourself to sleep over a foolish lost trinket. In content and in contention you are ours and we are yours, now, until we go on before you to our long sleep.
From a stony beginning we have begun to create a soil of love, and from there I hope you will grow straight and bloom brightly. For the road ahead is long and for all that there will be stony places again, and storms, and darkness I believe that we will have times to walk together in the light of love and the sun of happiness.
Happy Family Day, daughter.We love you very much, indeed.
Kids, can't beat 'em. Well, you can but then they won't come and visit you in the nursing home, LOL!
ReplyDeleteFDChief, hope I can be here when your little pumpkin is waiting for her prom date and you get the First Dance of the Prom. If they still have proms then. Keep that hip in shape, my friend, you have some dancing to do.
A lovely homage.
ReplyDeleteYes. And haunting.
ReplyDeleteIt's really both; we will always be haunted, both by the little girl we abandoned as well as the way our family life with Missy began.
ReplyDeleteBut at the same time, we have changed and grown in ways we never anticipated, delightful ways, and some that are still hard to understand. But we do love her very dearly, the little snirp.