Six Years Ago Today

(Author's comment: This is a re-posting of a Facebook note that I wrote last year, except that its title then was "Five Years Ago Today," because I'm not clever enough to do anything else with the title. More people are on my Facebook now than there were then, and hopefully some read the blog sometimes, so I've reposted. I've made just a few minor edits. If you read it last year, you don't have to re-read. Unless you want to.)

On February 28, 2005, I was sitting with a busload of other parents at the Civil Affairs Office in downtown Guangzhou--nervous, sleep-deprived, a little fried, but anxious and happy. My buddy Kellie and I had arrived in Guangzhou the day before and were a bit jet-lagged. Thankfully, we'd taken what amounted to a red-eye flight from the U.S., and thanks to the magic of Tylenol PM, I was actually able to sleep on the plane. Kellie and I were in a roomful of soon-to-be-parents, about half of them first-time parents, and I was the only single mom in the group. There was a positive but undeniably weird energy in the room. Everyone was anxious and happy. A whole room full of relatively large, relatively chubby (by local standards) white people were fidgeting nervously, breathing deeply, waiting for a group of slight, cheerful, businesslike Chinese orphanage workers and adoption officials to bring in our little girls. Some parents had taken years to get to this moment and were already on the verge of tears. Some, like me, were probably trying not to wonder whether this was in fact such a great idea after all. And then they came. One at a time, by alphabetical order of the parents' last names, those amazing women brought in little screaming armfuls, pointed smiling at the big dorky teary-eyed white strangers, and said to the babies they had raised, "Mama! Baba!" I have to suspect most of the babies must have been thinking, "Holy crap, you have GOT to be kidding me!" And then, finally, I heard "Mao Huan Li!" And my girl came into the room.

She was, like most of them, sobbing in inchoate toddler rage and fear. They had all come up on about a six- or eight-hour train ride from their orphanage in Maoming, the only home most of them had known. They were all identically dressed, including Thalia, in an outfit I still have. A burgundy Winnie-the-Pooh hooded jacket with matching pants, a pink sweat jacket underneath with duckies printed on it, and adorable little yellow shoes, which in Thalia's case were about a size too small. She didn't much want to look at me for a few minutes, and instead clutched her completely-pulverized package of animal crackers and looked around in desperation for one of the orphanage caregivers, for familiar arms she loved. This was weird, this was scary, and she didn't like any of it one bit. She wanted to go home. She didn't know at the time that "home" was no longer the large, bustling Social Welfare Institute but a cold, snowy place halfway across the planet, very unlike the semi-tropical city where she'd spent her life so far.

I don't know much about the first fifteen months of her life. I know a few things. She was born on about November 30, 2003--maybe a day or two earlier but surely not any more than that. She came to the orphanage on that day and appeared to the intake staff to be just hours old, so that was marked as her date of birth and that was that. She was at some point very shortly after her birth placed in a cardboard box, and left at the gate of a middle school. She was wearing a one-piece sleeper and had a light blue baby blanket with cartoon characters on it tucked around her. These are things I know courtesy of some kind bureaucrat who noted them in official orphanage records, along with the name they gave her. I remember the first time I read that information, in the otherwise-exciting weeks after I got my referral and before I traveled to China. I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. It still makes me tear up--the thought that my baby was left, maybe in the night, maybe in the rain, in a cardboard box. But the fact is that she wasn't simply left somewhere to die. She was left, at some significant risk to the person leaving her (since abandoning babies is illegal) in a very public place, where someone would almost certainly find her and take her to one of several large, reasonably-funded and well-run Social Welfare Institutes. This tells me that whatever brought the birth mother to that point, she was at least hopeful that things would turn out OK for this girl.

I don't know, and really can never know, what her birth mother's situation was. I can make an educated guess. Entire books have been written about the phenomenon of Chinese baby girls being left out in public for various reason, most stemming from China's infamous and still not officially acknowledged "one-child" policy. It's reasonably likely that Thalia's birth parents were married, and may well have already had a daughter--in many places, couples with one daughter already are permitted a second try for the coveted son. Once in a great while I picture, sort of involuntarily, a woman laboring in exhaustion through childbirth, hoping with all her soul that her baby will arrive with a penis. If she has a boy, she can be his mother. And then after who knows what period of time, she sobs in exhausted, anguished defeat when the beautiful, healthy, five-pound baby arrives with a vagina instead. Again, though, I almost certainly have no realistic way of ever finding out her story. What I can know for sure is that this unknown woman was poor, and felt she had no other option. I try to ascribe relatively noble motivations to her, but the fact is that I will never know why she left her--and my--baby in a cardboard box for someone else to find.

And so six years ago today, my Thalia had a very rough day. She lost the only home and caregivers she'd ever known, people who looked like her, and was thrust into the arms of a stranger who didn't look or sound right at all. She spent the next couple of days mostly limp, flat, and sad. She did cling to me like a monkey, primarily I think because I fed her rather than out of any affection (and she ate like a horse), and she slept and cried. But then, gradually, after a few days, she relaxed a little. Got up the energy to get mad sometimes. Then, oh Lord yes, she even smiled. By the time the three of us were ready to board the plane back to the U.S., she was happily running back and forth between Kellie and me, giggling sometimes. And once we got back to our house, she became instant buddies with her new big sister and even got over her trepidation about the doggie fairly quickly.

And now, of course, she doesn't at all remember that day six years ago that I will never forget. She runs around like a maniac, charms her many friends, bear-hugs her parents, snuggles when she's tired or cranky, and farts for her sister to shrieking laughter from both of them. I wonder, once in a while, what I would say to the mystery woman who gave birth to Thalia if I ever met her. Thank you doesn't begin to cover it, and feels a little strange. I'm sorry is grossly inadequate. What would she like to know? That she is so smart that her Kindergarten teacher said she was maybe the best reader she's ever taught and her art teacher once called her a legend? That she's a great athlete, solid muscle, forty-five pounds of dynamite that one of the other soccer dads once called "The Dominator?" That she's left-handed? I don't know what I'd say. Maybe just, I hope you have peace, and because you did what you felt you had to do, the girl you had to leave really is OK. Really, she is. I hope you are, too.

The fateful day.


Happy at Halloween