Travel Blog

Hi all!

I'm moving over here: West Wind

Not permanently - just on the run up to travel, and while we're in China (and then I'll probably use it for Baby Candy updates later on). But please visit us over there and follow along!

See ya there!

-Maia

Snow Storms in China

I'm sure that most everyone has heard about the fierce snow storms that have hit many parts of China right now. Power (and therefor heat) is out, roads are blocked, buildings are collapsing under the weight of the ice and snow. We are lucky because the orphanage that Fang Fang is in, in Changzhou, is in a fairly affluent part of town and the staff there rushed to get ready for the storm. We have been assured that the children are all warm and safe. This is, of course, a huge relief. However, a lot of other orphanages, especially the ones in more rural areas, were not so lucky. Some of these places almost never experience this kind of cold, and certainly not snow. They are experiencing severe shortages of food (because crops have been killed, and roads have been blocked) an inability to provide for basic medical care, lack of heat and warm clothes and blankets for the kids. They need a lot of help. Half the Sky is soliciting emergency donations here: Half the Sky If you have a little extra cash to spare, please go on over to site and make a contribution. People (and especially children!) in China need your help right now.

Update: Changzhou SWI has contacted Half the Sky and let them know that they are in desperate need of diapers. They need 750 a day for ten days. That's Bell's bottom we're talking about, people. Please do what you can.

Perfect

We got our consulate date confirmation this morning! Which means that we got our plane tickets this afternoon! Which means that we are leaving for China exactly two weeks from today! Aaaaaaaaaa! Wow.

I have been trying to write something along the lines of all the Why China posts that were going around the blogosphere a year or so ago. Or, more urgently, especially after reading the last two posts on this site: Researchchina.org I wanted to write something along the lines of Why the Special Needs Program. Plug the XingFu program again. Plug my agency, Homeland. Because I see so many potential A-parents suffering over the incredible wait right now. I read blog after blog where people are losing heart, turning away from the idea of adoption. I see that Guatemala and now Vietnam are looking like their international adoption programs will end and/or radically change, and I suspect that China’s NSN program will slowly follow. And I see that people are angry. And scared. And I guess I just want to tell a little bit about our story, because I hope it will make some of these parents consider that there is another way.

(A warning – what follows isn’t actually a “little bit of the story”. It’s actually a really, really long story. I couldn't quite seem to cut it down...)

Just after Spike turned six, and I turned thirty-three (except in Hollywood, where, as we know, I was turning 25) Ryan and I started talking about a second child. Because we had Spike fairly young (I was 26 – which in Hollywood years made me almost a teen mother) we had the luxury of taking our time when it came to our second child. We lingered as a family of three. We really enjoyed Spike’s babyhood, we bought a house and moved out of the city, Ryan changed jobs, and I started working again (from home). I have written a lot about the way early motherhood was a consuming passion for me – and how long it took before other things outside of Spike’s cute little nose started looking interesting to me again - before I began to find some measure of balance - so I won’t get into that right now. (But I will add that a few of those years were also sort of luxuriously spent finding my way back to Ryan as my husband, and not just as the father of my child).

Anyway, though it took us a while to get there, it was never our intention for Spike to be an only child. I am from a family of nine children, and Ryan has a beloved older sister, and we both have very wonderful, and in some ways, life (or maybe I should say sanity) saving, relationships with our siblings. We wanted that for our kids. We wanted Spike to have someone to turn to someday and be able to say, “Mom and Dad are crazy!” And we wanted that someone who he turned to to be someone who would totally, completely understand what he was saying. Plus we knew that we didn’t want to stop at one child. We weren’t done with babies. So, when the time came, the only questions were how many, and how?

We still haven’t decided on how many. I think we’re taking a wait and see approach. But what we did know is that we have always, from the beginning of our marriage 14 years ago, talked about having both biological and adopted children. I came into the marriage thinking this was something I wanted to do, and though I suspect Ryan hadn’t given it much thought at that point (come on, we were like, twenty – I’m sure he hadn’t even thought about having kids at all!) he was open to the idea from the first time we talked about it. And we talked about it early and often, and it was always part of our plan (not, I will hasten to add, God’s plan, just our regular old young married couple plan). So, knowing that we might stop at two children, we decided that this next baby would be adopted.

Now, let me just say that, at this point, I really didn’t know much about adoption. I was approaching it, in the way that probably too many adoptive parents initially do, which is that it was a simple equation – we wanted a child, and somewhere out there was a child who wanted a family. And we would find each other and it would all be rainbows and butterflies forever more. End of story. So there was obviously a rather rude awakening for me coming down the pike – but I’ll get to that in a moment.

I am horrified to admit this now, but one of the first things I did was buy the book, “Adoption for Dummies.” Mainly because the first thing I do in any situation (besides finding the right outfit to wear) is read about what I’m getting into. Read, read and then read some more. Compulsive, extensive, reading. And I wanted to start basic. And I think Adoption for Dummies was probably on sale at B&N. So I bought that book, which, it turned out, was really not much use to me at all – but it did introduce me to the rather offensive term “Preferential Adopters” – that is, people who, though they are physically capable of reproducing, choose adoption over having biological children. (The term is offensive to me on behalf of all the families I know who came to adoption from all sorts of places – infertility or otherwise – because it, of course implies that they would have preferred something else – and that is a pretty fucked up way to put it). According to Adoption for Dummies –the number of people who are “Preferential Adopters” is teeny. Miniscule. Something like 2% of all adoptive parents (though I’m not totally sure I buy those numbers). And then, when you think about the fact that adoption itself is still pretty uncommon (and let’s face it, even though it gets a lot of press, and some very prominent celebrities are doing it – it is still way outside the norm), I suddenly realized we were in strange territory, and that things were maybe not as simple and easy as I expected them to be.

The next step, of course, was deciding from where this child would be adopted. China was always on my mind, because I have two awesome teenage nieces who were adopted from Wuxi. But we began by looking at adopting domestically. Now, I loathe the entire idea of a hierarchy of need. It offends me on every level to say, “This child is suffering more or more deserving because they are x, y or z.” It makes me completely uncomfortable to listen to people talk about how the American foster system is worse than the institutions of China - or vice versa, and therefore there is a right way to adopt or not. I also hate the argument that we need to take care of “our own” before we should be extending our hand to anyone outside of our country. Viewing adoption through a patriotic lens give me the absolute willies. It smacks of xenophobia to me. I do, however, agree that adopted children should be placed domestically if it is at all possible, and that racism plays a huge part of why some people adopt from Asian or European countries rather than adopt African American or Hispanic children who are in the foster care system in the U.S. (And note that I said some, not all). And I don’t think that fear of First Families is a good reason to adopt from overseas, either. I believe in open adoption whenever possible. In fact, one of the things that worries me the most about adopting from China is just how little chance my daughter will have to re-connect with her First Family some day. I think this is a huge loss. So we looked at domestic adoption first. But we did have some parameters. We wanted a baby – not necessarily a newborn, but a young child – for Spike’s sake as much as our own (we didn’t want to displace him as the eldest child in the family, and we wanted to have that time with a baby again for ourselves) and, at that time, we weren’t thinking about adopting a child with any special needs, or more than one child (a sibling group). And so we realized very quickly that because it seemed ludicrous to be competing with the ten or so potential adoptive parents that were waiting for every one healthy, white infant born in the U.S., and that we did not care whether or not the baby was Caucasian, it was highly probable that we would doing an interracial adoption.

At this point, a few things kicked in for me. I, at least, was not stupid enough to go with the whole “Love will be enough! I don’t see color!” line of thinking. I had enough education about racism and the concept of white privilege to know that an interracial (never mind international) adoption is a huge commitment. That, if we went this way, we sure as hell better be prepared to find ways to compensate for bringing a non-white child into our all white household. And what it boiled down to was this – if we adopted domestically, we would more than likely be adopting an African American or Hispanic child. And in our extended family, there are very few (as in, one, and maybe two if my sister ever gets around to getting married to her current boyfriend) people who are African American or Hispanic. However, if we adopted from China, our Asian-American daughter would not only have her two Chinese cousins (who are also adoptees) to look to, but also her granny (my step-mom) who is Japanese-American, and my sister, their Auntie Ren (who is bi-racial Japanese and Caucasian - and quite the dedicated auntie. She is around here a lot, and always willing to play Uno). Our daughter would have an Asian-American woman of nearly every generation in her close extended family. And that seemed to be a good way to begin the compensation. (And please note that I said, begin. I know that there will be a lot more to do beyond this). And lest you think I’m a total moron – I understand that Japan is not China – but I also understand that Asian-Americans, in general, share some common experiences and stereotypes. And that if my daughter ever comes home from school talking about someone who gave her grief for being Asian (whether they are invoking the model minority stereotype or the perpetual foreigner stereotype –or even just talking about her eyes or hair or the color of her skin) I can give her all the sympathy in the world, I can speak up for her, I can offer my love to her, and anger at the person who would speak to her that way, but I will never be able to say that I understand what she is going through because I have not gone through it. Because I’m white. But what I will be able to offer is a phone call or a visit with her Granny, or her Auntie Ren, or her grown up cousins Tobie and Anna. What I will be able to say is, “You know, I think your Auntie went through something like this before. Do you want to talk to her about how it made her feel and ask what she did when it happened to her?” And I know that Ren (or Granny, or Tobie, or Anna) would step right up and be an empathetic ear – someone who gets it in a way that I will never get it. She will be there for her niece like that. As will the other Asian-American women in my family. And that seemed like a great place for us to start.

So, China it was. And after mulling over a few different agencies, we ended up with a very large, Midwestern, China only agency – and they were great - very responsive, great references, helpful and friendly. We started our paperwork. We were told there was currently a ten month wait. We expected a baby home by the Fall of ’07.

Now, most anyone reading this blog probably knows what happened next. We busily gathered up all the paperwork for our dossier, we got fingerprinted and background checked, I longingly looked at baby girl clothes but knew better than to buy anything until we had our referral… and, meanwhile, the rumors started trickling in. The months started ticking up. We were hearing it would take a year or longer to reach referral, then 18 months, then possibly two years or even three (and y'all know that the rumor mill is currently hovering around five at this point). And I know that it was killing everybody else – all these pre-adoptive parents who were watching their children get further and further away from them like ships going out to sea – but actually for us, we were okay with the wait. I had finished up my first screenplay with my friend and writing partner, Y. We had picked up an agent at a very powerful agency. Things were happening. It was exciting. And I realized that if I had to wait three years to have a second child, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Ryan and I were still fairly young, I would have a chance to really establish myself as a screenwriter and make some excellent money. It would be less time paying for two kids in private school at the same time. There were a lot of reasons why the wait actually made sense for us. And you know, I didn’t really have a clear picture of who our daughter was just yet. Maybe because I already had one child, maybe because I wasn’t coming to her from a place of trying and trying again… maybe because I had grown so used to taking our sweet time about this second child – it just felt okay to wait a while longer. Even if that meant years.

And yet… I will admit, that in the back of my mind, from the very beginning… from the time that our social worker asked us whether we were open to a child in SN program or not, and we had immediately said no, there was a voice in the back of my head that said, we should. I have a background in working with kids with special needs. Every summer since I was 12 years old until I was 21, I worked at a city day camp that mainstreamed children with all sorts of different abilities. And I had learned over time, that every kid, special need or not, had their strengths and their weaknesses, and that often, kids with what seemed like the greatest “weaknesses” actually compensated in ways that simply astounded me. In fact, I had seen this very thing in my own child. Spike had a hard time pronouncing words when he was smaller – around 4 and 5. He glided over consonants – even his own name was “Sike” instead of “Spike”. And he knew he was doing it. And he was unhappy about it. And what did he do when he became frustrated by his inability to make himself understood? He expanded his vocabulary. “Spiders” for instance, became “eight legged arachnids” (all sounds he could make). A “snake” was never simply a snake- but a “Hooded King Cobra” or a “Green Pit Viper”. I watched my child do this remarkable thing because of the limitations he struggled with. I saw him become more eloquent than any 4 year old ought to be (and yes, we got him speech therapy and the problem corrected itself within a summer, but he still has a remarkable vocabulary). And saw that what others might have considered an imperfection or special need, I just saw as part of who he was - a small piece of his whole. So, see, I knew. I knew that no one child was perfect in the way that parents-to-be sometimes imagine a perfect child. And I knew that the whole concept of “perfect” was flawed. That it didn’t really mean anything when it came to your children. Because of course, if they are your children, they are perfect for you. They are the most beautiful, the sweetest, the loveliest creatures. No matter what. And nothing that anyone says about them, no label, would change that. And that voice kept getting louder and louder in my head, telling me we were wrong to exclude an entire group of possible children because of a label that had been attached to them. A label that was going to be meaningless in the long run. And so, even though we were at peace, even happy, with the wait, even though the wait was actually convenient for us, I will admit that I watched the W.I.C. list, that I looked at the kids waiting in the Special Needs Program. And that I started to turn over this idea in my head that our child, when she came to us, would come from there.

I also found this blog: The Singing Bird And I read it from front to back. And followed this woman L’s journey to China to pick up her hilarious, beautiful, charming baby girl Emerson Fu Lu. And Emme also just happened to be cleft-affected. And I saw (no small thanks to L’s wonderful writing. It really helps to have a poet describe her life if you really want to get to heart of the matter) that what she was going through – all the cleft stuff- the surgery, the speech therapy - looked manageable to me. Looked absolutely possible. And that Emme Lu – who - seriously - even through her pictures you can see what a vibrant, amazing, intelligent child she is – was not special needs at all. She was just Emme Lu. And I’ll admit that I fell a little bit in love with this mom and child and the story of their beautiful life out in the desert. And eventually I worked up the courage to write L a little note, and L was nice enough to respond, and eventually she and I struck up what is now a dear friendship to me. And because she was honest and open and frank, and totally fierce about her decision to adopt a child with a “special need” - I could imagine myself in her shoes. I could see that we could do it, too. And that it would be no kind of burden or second choice- but an incredible gift. Like any child is an incredible gift.

And so I talked to Ryan about it, and told him what I was thinking. And we talked some more. And a lot more after that. And one day, he tentatively agreed. And then, as time went on, he strongly agreed. And then he saw it in pretty much the exact same way I did. And we decided that we didn’t need or want those three extra years without our second child. We decided we were ready. So we called up Homeland (who had been the agency we were doing our homestudy through because our other agency was out of state), and told them that we wanted to go into the SN program, (we managed to make this decision just in the nick of time. We were literally one document away from DTC with our original agency when we found out Homeland’s XingFu program) and within twenty minutes, I was looking at pictures of the most exquisite, sweet faced, dark eyed, baby girl. There she was. Chang Ji Fang.

And we feel so good about making this decision. Not because we are “good people” (and I get this a lot – about what “good people you are, to take on a burden like that!” And it lights me up with anger every time I hear it. I have a really hard time keeping a hold of myself when people talk that way about my daughter) but because we are lucky people. Lucky because we opened up our minds a little, because we walked down a slightly different path - and lucky because at the end of that path, we found Fang Fang. And in exactly two weeks and three days from today, I will actually meet this remarkable little being – our beautiful little daughter. I will hold her and talk to her and smell her and tell her that she is my child, and that I am her mother, and that I will always, always love her.

And she will never be a “Special Needs Child” to me. She will be Bell. Bell JiFang. Fang Fang. She will be my daughter. My absolutely perfect in every way daughter.

And I’m writing about this - something I’ve been wanting to write about for some time now - because I hope that maybe one of those pre-adoptive parents out there – someone who is aching over the wait, who is holding onto the image of a “perfect” baby, someone who hasn’t opened up their hearts and minds and considered the possibilities, might read this – and see that there is another way, a different path. Not lesser. Not settling. Not a compromise. And at the end of that path is a child. And she is as perfect as perfect gets.