Unsinkable

Today John Seabrook was on Fresh Air talking about this piece he wrote on recently adopting a child from Haiti.  His new daughter’s name is Rose, which funnily has the same kind of meaning for his family that it does for ours.  And I thought his interview, and the article in the New Yorker, were really wonderful.  He did a great job summing up some of the most uncomfortable and ugly things about International adoption, as well as some of the lovely things.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff more than usual for the past week or two.  This is more than a little bit due to Mother’s Day, and carrying my silent gratitude towards the woman who gave birth to my beautiful and amazing daughter.  In the process of getting gifts for some of the favorite mothers in my life, there is an absence, and a conversation I really still haven’t had with my daughter.  We talk about adoption, about Ethiopia, about our skin colors, and the things that make us the same and different.  (Rose reminded me today that even though her skin was the same color as her dad and Dillon’s is the same as mine, at least she and I are both girls.)  But I don’t know if the six-year-old that I brought home almost four years ago remembers her birthmother or birthfather.  Or what she remembers and knows about her adoption experience in a non-abstract way.  She can tell the story of how I went on a long plane ride to bring her home, but I don’t know (and may never know) how much she remembers before the first time I saw her, standing in a group of kids shouting happily “mommy! daddy! mommy! daddy!” in a kind of mantra as the car pulled up at the care center in Addis.

My heart aches (in a good way) thinking about how amazingly fortunate we were to make our family the way we did.  I often look at my kids and really can’t believe how wonderful they are.  They are two peas in a pod, and (most of the time) best friends.  Don’t get me wrong – they totally make me crazy a lot of the time, they take forever getting ready in the morning, they each urgently have to use the single bathroom in our house when the other is in there, and they can be completely obnoxious sometimes.  But, for the most part, they make me count my blessings every day.  And everything fits together so beautifully that I have, most of the time, forgotten that Rose was adopted.

Of course, not really.  But it just doesn’t even occur to me to think about it for weeks at a time.  So, a couple of days after Mother’s Day, it occurs to me that I probably should have used the occasion to celebrate this person that I’ve never met, but who has given me the most wonderful gift I could imagine.