Article Contributed on: 3/31/2008 4:57:09 PM
It's out of our hands, now.
Here, we begin the stutter-step process of doing absolutely nothing, while waiting for everything to happen. Our dossier is in China, and somewhere, deep in the recesses of the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, some poor clerk is looking at documentation, checking figures, and comparing watermarks to make sure we're kosher. Once this is done, of course, we'll get our travel invitations, and a few short weeks later, BAM! We'll be off to China.
Four of us.
Our travel party will include me,
The Wife,
The Girl, and,
The Wife's Mom. I'm 6'5,
The Wife and
The Girl have blond hair and blue eyes, and
The Wife's Mom has red hair. Oh, and we'll be roaming about the streets of Guangzhou with a 20 month-old Chinese
boy. We're pretty much a walking circus act waiting to happen over there. Yeah...we'll
blend.
None of us have ever traveled internationally, so we're all pretty excited about the trip, to say nothing of the fingernail-gnawing desperation we feel about JUST. BRINGING. HIM. HOME. We're all pretty much confirming each and every "nervous traveler" stereotype one might have, of course, between our buzzing about, trying to figure out what to pack, wondering what hideous infectious diseases are lurking about in China, just waiting to claim our vital organs, and keeping track of the
slight cultural differences between the US, and the homeland of our son. We'd rather not touch off any kind of international incident if we can help it.
We won't even go into our prospects for actually learning any meaningful volume of Mandarin before we set out across the Pacific...
And so, we wait. We wait, we watch, we pray, and we banish all of my stuff to the basement, so the poor kid'll have a place to sleep. We prepare
The Girl for the journey to big-sisterdom (something she swears she's
totally ready for. Color me skeptical...), and we give sympathetic, knowing glances toward our cat, who remains blissfully unaware of the hell that's rolling his way. Think you do a lot of hiding, hissing & poofing now, do ya, bub? Oh-ho-ho...
Each adoption journey is pretty radically different. Our daughter's had its own vibe, of course, and
The Boy's is shaping up to be altogether different. The common threads, of course, are love, and the absolute, unshakable certainty that - just like any other parent - you'd crawl over a field of broken glass for your kids, if need be. Of course, when you're headed into the waters of international adoption, you're actually asked to do far more than that; you've got to rest your hopes and hearts on the tender mercies and competence of not one, but
two government bureaucracies.
Takes a strong stomach, kids.