We talked to our adoption agency this week on Tuesday. Our new case worker is amazing–we talked and talked. She answered every question. She was warm, personable and really attentive. She told me we could easily bring our baby home within a year. A YEAR.

I realize I’ve spent a lot of time in the deep end of the pool this week (I did title my Monday post “Entering the Grief,” which Jonathan made complete fun of). So don’t think we’re grieving this whole time–we’re so, so excited to go get our baby girl. We cannot wait to add her to our family. It’s what makes the paper chase worth it. I think the difference is that, for me, this is such a different process than adding our first two babies to our family. Then I always knew where that peanut was and, though I only knew vague things about each of them (from those preggo emails: “This week, your baby is the size of a pear!”), I could put my hands on my belly and feel them flip over or stretch. This time, the unknowns are so many that it’s hard not to dwell on them.

I’m having a little baby boom among my friends–I have several good friends and my sister-in-law who are having babies between April and August. I keep watching them and thinking, my next baby is probably going to be about this age, maybe older. If we get her in a year, that increases the likelihood that she’s already been born. That comment by the adoption case worker put me in a bit of a tail spin.

Wednesday I was listening to the Dixie Chicks CD my husband left in our car with the girls. (Jonathan loves girl folk singers with a little bit of rock–Alison Krauss, The Civil Wars, The Acorn, and Alexi Murdoch [he's a guy, but it's the style], as well as Dixie Chicks, all regular players on our Pandora stations.) We were playing through it and we got to the song, “God Speed, Little Man” and I lost it.

It’s a song about a mother singing to her son from miles away, memories of their good night books and prayers, and the chorus is a prayer over him while she’s gone. I was singing and couldn’t make it through the first chorus. I hadn’t realized that this process would bring up so many painful memories from my past. This isn’t the first baby on another continent I think about all the time.

When we left Brazil in 2003, we were “padrinhos,” or godparents, to two little boys at the Children’s Home our church worked with in a city near Sao Paulo.  There were three of them in that family and we took their sister with us most of the time. I’ll call them R, S and T. R was a ten-year-old who looked at the world through large brown eyes that were shy and observant. He was quiet and reserved and so hungry for our love. S was his eight-year-old sister, who cuddled up to anyone who would let her. T was their five-year-old brother, all sass and attitude. He couldn’t speak (his mother had given him pinga, like vodka, in a bottle for most of his baby years to keep him quiet while she worked in a brothel–he had some developmental delays). He communicated with grunts and pointing. Believe me, he could make himself understood. I loved him instantly. He loved me too. I can’t explain the connection, but he was mine from the beginning and he let me love on him the way he let few other people.

They had bounced around from brothel to the street to unsafe houses before landing in the Children’s Home. We met T the first time at a party with all the kids and, being new, he didn’t have a sponsor yet (the local church had families ”adopt” a kid like a big brother/big sister program, so that each child had a family who had a relationship with them–it was a really sweet congregation). We were walking away with T to take him out our first day when Jonathan saw R watching us from the window, his head on his arms, big eyes devouring us. Jonathan stopped and walked back in immediately. Five minutes later, we left with R as well. The next time we took their sister even though she was’t officially “ours.” We loved them and spent time with them as much as we could. Once at McDonald’s in the mall food court, an American man walked up and congratulated us on our adoption. We just thanked him graciously since it seemed too complicated to explain. It felt, for that night at least, like it might have been true.

At the church in Brazil, we worked with the youth group, so there were always people over at our house. We often had those three over to spend the night. They cuddled with me in church every Sunday morning. I can still remember the smell of T’s hair as he slept in my arms while the fans whirred in the small auditorium, a mix of fruity Brazilian shampoo and little-boy sweat. I played with his soft black curls and he slept, completely comfortable with his head in my lap.

I had loved other kids before like this, on short-term campaigns and summer internships, but this time was different. These were children whose lives were intertwined with mine. I knew their moods. I had met their birth mother. I both hated and felt sorry for her. I was young and still full of the sense of injustice. Now I just feel pity for her and the children she birthed from three different, probably unknown, fathers into deep poverty. She was a victim herself, even as she victimized those children.

There were backgrounds to these kids I can’t write about, horrible things they had seen and done that made me wary to adopt them even as it made me love them fiercely. I talked and talked to Jonathan about adopting them. He wisely refused to think about it for a minute. We had absolutely no money. Legally, we couldn’t adopt R because we were too close in age to him (there has to be 16 years difference according to Brazilian law) and we didn’t want to adopt the younger two without him. We had no home to go back to and the years ahead were full of hairpin turns as we moved constantly from one place to another. And, the clencher for me, we could never have let younger children into our home with the things these children faced. The risks were too high. I knew it with my head, but my heart has never gotten on board.

The Sunday before we left Brazil (I can barely write this memory), we ate lunch at the Children’s Home. We played with and cuddled the children till I thought I might crush them with my desire to memorize every curve and curl of their sweet faces. When it was time for us to leave in our red station wagon that had carried dozens of Brazilian children (often at the same time), I gave them each one last kiss. R looked at me with his old-soul eyes and I knew he understood. S cried in the arms of an older kid. But T ran after me, hands held out like he was going to get in the car. I had to get out and hand him to one of the workers and he kept squirming to get in the car with us. The last thing we heard as we pulled away, over the crunch of our tires on the gravel driveway, was him crying for me.

I have never, not once, gotten over that moment. Even now, ten years later, it is one of the most painful memories I have. I carry it with me, full of saudades for those babies I love.

We got two emails from the Children’s Home director about the children. One was two years later–she told us, in a statement that I think is absolutely true, that no one had ever loved those children like we did, and therefore we had to adopt them. She is one of the wisest, most gracious women I know. For her to say that broke my heart. Jonathan and I had to talk through it again. We couldn’t bring them home for all of the many good reasons we’d said. I prayed for them every day anyway. We got another email three years after that–a family had adopted only the oldest son (which breaks my heart for the younger two) and now there was no legal reason we couldn’t bring the other ones home. We had just moved to Austin for me to start grad school. Jonathan was looking for a job. We were living with his family for the summer. With no money and no home and college loans coming due, there was nothing we could do. The timing was awful.

Twice, I said no to those children. It was a wise decision for our marriage and our future family. A year later I got pregnant with Noelle and two years after that with Joy. And I still loved and loved those children from afar. We lost track of them for a few years, but have heard recently from R on google chat and facebook. He seems great in his new family. His sister is married with a baby (she’s still a teenager–sigh). T’s living with an aunt. I wonder if T would recognize or even remember me. He’s fifteen or sixteen now. In some ways it was good to know God had answered my many, many prayers to protect and educate these bright, beautiful children. In another way, I still wish we could have been the ones in their lives.

It was right, but it still hurts.

So when I was listening to the Dixie Chicks song in the car and singing along with my well-loved, well-adjusted, sheltered little girls, I wasn’t singing to them. They have been with me every day. They have never had a need unmet. They have been nothing but adored every day of their life.

I sang along in my heart to little T, now an almost-grown man. “Godspeed, Little Man” might seem silly, but I’ve prayed so often that someone would love him as I might have, that the orphanage director be proved wrong, that we’re not the only one who realized how truly special he and his brother and sister were.

And I sang along along to our next little baby, somewhere in the world right now, a little sister to very ready big sisters who will love her with an intensity that will change all of us. I taught our girls the world “Mei Mei” the other day, one of the few Chinese words I know from adoption blogs–it means little sister. We hit the rewind button to sing the song again at the top of our lungs and changed the words:

Godspeed, Little Mei,

Sweet dreams, Little Mei.

Oh, our love will fly

to you each night

On angels’ wings.

Godspeed.

Sweet dreams.

I was on the phone last night with my best friend while she was feeding her baby first thing in the morning. My friend Ann (who, conveniently, married my cousin, which makes her both friend and family) lives in Thailand. The best time for me to catch her is in the morning when she’s spending a quiet moment with her new six-month-old baby before they walk out into the smog that’s hovering over their gorgeous little town a few hours north of Chiang Mai. Their town is one of the loveliest spots on earth, a community that is built and thrives around a picturesque lake nestled into rolling green hills. This time of year, the farmers burn their crops to prepare their fields for planting. I haven’t been there when it happens, but I’ve seen pictures of the smog filling their valley like a bowl of soup.

We had, as usual, nothing much to talk about–the weather, the smog, our funny children, catching up on some friends–but we managed to talk forever anyway. These are the chats that make me so deeply grateful for the world we live in. Our kids skype each other often. I see pictures in Facebook albums of their family, taken not just by them but by various neighbors and friends, so that I get a fuller, more candid sense of their life in Thailand. But there are times when it is not enough to have these electronic means of staying connected, and one of those times is when I think about her baby growing up without me there to watch.

Her new son is the smiliest pumpkin I’ve ever seen. He has fat cheeks and he looks most like his mom, which is good after two kids that look just like their dad. He looks around at a world that he is sure was made to delight him. He has a wide smile just like his oldest sister’s at that age, as if his mouth is stretching as large as he can to express all the joy in his tiny kicking body. The few weeks we spent with them at Christmas weren’t enough. This baby has just started to eat rice cereal and he loves it. Ann was telling me about it and suddenly, I felt a strong punch of sadness.

It was, of course, related to the fact that I’m missing the early days of this baby boy’s life. It was also more than that, though. As we flitted from topic to topic, we kept bringing up our adoption and I realized suddenly how little of these early months I will know about my third child.

At the age when I was hovering over my biological baby girls, taking pictures of their every sigh and coo, my next baby will be abandoned somewhere, only to enter the long bureaucratic tangle that will lead to her being handed off to some random white strangers in an unknown hotel.

At the age when we had started to identify the parts that looked like us in our oldest daughters, our third one will be laying in a crib among caregivers that she will only know for the briefest time. My oldest daughter has my husband’s eyes, my hair, and an unexplained dimple on her cheek. My second daughter has my mother’s cheekbones, my expressions, and a joyful giggle that is all her own. Our third daughter might never be able to trace the origins of her hair or her ears or her quirkly little features.

At the age when my oldest two were expressing their likes and dislikes (the oldest has always loved fruit, the second has always loved chocolate), there may be no one who registers the funny little habits and desires of my third baby.

I pray there is, with an anxiety I’m just beginning to feel. I pray there is someone who will love her and kiss her and learn tiny things about her (God, may it be so). But even if there is and even if, by some miracle, we have a long enough conversation with a foster mother or orphanage worker to know more about her first several months, the time that is lost is so precious and so valuable, it stops my breath.

As we fill out paperwork and renew passports and notarize documents, my third child is barreling toward the most defining day of her new little life, the day when she loses every connection to who she was and flies into a new life on another continent with another family. As we begin to move forward in our process, I think about her parallel process of losing and leaving.

I wrote about this when we announced to friends and family that we were adopting a child from the waiting child (or special needs) list in China. The sadness I’m feeling has a timeline of its own and it surprises me.

When my friend Ann was pregnant with her first daughter, toward the end of her first trimester she asked a co-worker with kids when she could stop worrying about something happening to the baby. Her co-worker laughed and said, “When you die.” And it’s true–the fear of miscarriage turns into other fears for your children that grow and age as they do. And while most of us mothers and fathers don’t live daily in that fear, it is there, punctuating our time with the precious, fragile children we love.

I’m beginning to sense the same thing is true with the grief of adoption. I wonder with each day that passes if this is the day when my daughter was born, when she first giggled, when she first rolled over or sat up or pulled herself to her feet. I will never know these tiny markers of her earliest life. Nor will her birthmother, the woman I find my thoughts and prayers constantly turning to as she moves toward or just passes the day when she (maybe with the birthfather, maybe alone) walks away from a child that I will love with all my soul.

I’ve wanted to adopt for as long as I can remember. While other girls prayed in high school for their future husbands, I prayed for the future birthmothers of my children. (It’s true–I still have my prayer journals from the time, covered in daisy chains and with big loopy hearts dotting the ‘i’s.’) And I feel as much grief for her as this baby. I may never know why she is having to make this choice, but I’ve spent enough time with the working poor to have a deep humility in the face of devastating poverty or unbendable laws. It may be because of the baby’s cleft palate, her club foot, her gender, her limb differences, or the fact that she’s one child too many–some socioeconomic, emotional or policy reason will cause or force my baby’s birth parents to give her up. And my heart breaks for them too.

Whoever this child turns out to be, however the specifics of this story plays out, I have been praying over this time period for more than half my life. Then, it was always a concept, a vague someday, the details of which would be filled in later. Now we are right in the thick of the action, even though all we’re doing is filling out papers.

Because right now, in China, somewhere, the story of our next child is rushing along a plotline of horrendous grief and loss. The pain of that hits me hard at times. I bet it always will.

Tomorrow: Why We Want to Adopt

It will be a long time before we have anything exciting to share about our adoption. We’re busy in the fun, early stages of filling out dozens and dozens of forms. We have to track down the address for every place we’ve lived since we turned 18–for Jonathan and me, that’s 2 states (no big deal) and 6 countries. (Sigh.)

We’re requesting every piece of legal documentation we can about our lives. We somehow never got Joy’s birth certificate, for example, and both of our passports are about to expire. We have to prove we got married, that we had children, that we’re who we say we are. We’re drowning in details over here and while it might not be glamorous, it’s necessary. We’re hoping to get our documents to our adoption agency soon and really get the ball rolling.

We have a checklist a mile long of all of the things we’re supposed to pay or fill out or send in or send off. I’m cleaning out the office this week in an attempt to feel more on top of things–I’m definitely old when I’m avoiding all the cool SXSW traffic in order to clean out my closets during spring break.

The thing that hangs over my head the most is the Special Needs list. We have to fill out a list by checking boxes for “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” on whether or not we will accept various special needs. I’ve been researching terms I’ve never heard before, like Thalessemia Minor and all types of heart conditions. It’s extremely hard for me to clinically check boxes that may mean we’re not accepting a child, though I’m very glad that these are boxes and not children. I’ve heard stories about people who toured orphanages (this was a couple of decades ago) and picked out which children they wanted.

I. Could. Not. Do. That.

It’s easier to check a box. We’re saying no to infectious diseases. Other than that, it’s all still up in the air. WebMD and I are becoming really good friends. We covet your prayers as we make these choices. It may not be easy or glamorous, but it is leading us closer to bringing home our next little one.

I hate Wal-Mart. I’ve especially hated it since we moved back from Brazil several years ago. It’s not that I really hate it for moral reasons or because it’s killing local businesses. I’m just too overwhelmed by all the choices.

                                                                          from greenbiz.com

I see row after row of things that I should buy and suddenly I’m suffering from Decision Paralysis. Of the fifty different kinds of bread, should I choose the healthiest or the cheapest? Does the kind of bread I buy make a statement about the kind of person I am? Am I a Healthy Oats kind of person or a Seven Grain kind of person? Should I just point and choose? And that’s just the bread!

By the time I’m done, I just want to pack up and go home. Add two screaming kids to the mix and you might as well shoot me now. (I’m beyond lucky, by the way, that my husband does all the grocery shopping with the two kids, so this is not a scenario I live out very often. And we shop at HEB, which is much better.)

I’ve been thinking about choices lately because we are about to make some big  choices in our lives. I think these are the choices a lot of people make in their thirties when the “dream of the life you’ll lead someday” becomes just your everyday life. I’ll graduate in a little over a year (hopefully!) and I’ll be done with my doctorate. And then I’ll have to make a choice I’ve been able to put off for a long time; I’m so glad I’ve been able to mostly be at home with my children and still teach a little bit. But the choice ahead is looming–either I advance my career or I sideline it for a few years. I know what I’m going to do, but the choice still feels excruciating some days.

We’re making choices about where we’re going to live. We’re not planning on leaving our city, but even staying here is a choice. We dreamed when we got married that we would raise our children gallivanting around the world. But with real children and real jobs and real lives, that seems a lot more hectic than fun. We definitely want to travel internationally and possibly live abroad at some point, but we love, love, love living here near family and friends. To choose that, though, means that something is lost  as well.

We’re also making choices about the way we’re going to add children to our family (which affects the career choices I’ll make. It’s all interconnected.) This week I’ve called tons of adoption agencies. There are so many choices, about race and gender and special needs and age and region and culture and comfort level and finances. Each decision we make means another door closes. I grieve a little bit with each one even as I’m excited about the choices we’re making. Whatever we decide will be wonderful and hard and painful and perfect. But making these choices is difficult.

I want to be clear: I’m so grateful for the many, many choices that we have in front of us. And Wal-Mart feels like the right metaphor: There aren’t too bad choices in front of us, just many. I know that it’s amazing and in the end there aren’t any bad choices. But maybe that’s why it’s wearing me out; I’m probably the most analytical person you’ll ever meet. So if you talk to me in the next few weeks and I’m either dazed or I talk your ear off about adoption, know that it’s because I’m trying to avoid Decision Paralysis and make the best choices for our lives and our families. But please, don’t ask me to choose the restaurant when we go to dinner.