The Things I Cannot Change

Dear Eli,

When I was a little girl, we used to go to Pittsburgh to go visit my Nana several times a year. I loved going up to her bedroom and going through her jewelry, and on the dresser, near her little cup of clip-on earrings, she had a wooden sign with the Serenity Prayer written on it:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

In choosing you, there is an element of having the "courage to change the things [we] can," but that's not what I want to write about tonight. We chose you because we want you to be our son, not because we're do-gooders who are out to save the world. I don't ever want you to think that you're our service project-- you're our baby boy, and we love you just like we love your brothers and sisters. Don't ever forget that.

I've been thinking a lot lately about waiting for you and waiting for Rose. I think part of it is because we were at the same stage in our wait at exactly this time last year, and I was a bucket of nerves. I actually told my friends to stop calling me because it made me nuts every time the phone rang and it wasn't the adoption agency.

It just seemed so damned unfair that Rose was living in an orphanage, where she was literally tied down so she wouldn't learn to sit or roll, where she wasn't fed anything besides formula, where she was cold at night and her caregivers had to split their attention on a whole room full of babies, when she could have been here with us.

None of the steps made any sense to me, and the step that made the least amount of sense to me was the LOA wait, because I knew people who got in the short line and people who got in the long line. I'm always a little bit bitter at the grocery store when the checker in the next lane goes twice as fast as mine. The whole process felt so cruel and illogical to me that I don't think I really believed that we would get approval to go to China and they would actually hand over the baby whose photo we'd been staring at for six months.

But we did get the approval, we did get on a plane, and on a cold March afternoon, Rose was placed in our arms. My faith was tested, and proven.

So that makes the wait a little bit easier this time around. I won't say it's easy, or that we don't think about you, but it's not the same kind of agonizing drag on my heart that it was last time, and I think a large part of that is because we've seen the end from the beginning with Rose, but also because I've had to do a certain amount of accepting uncertainty in order to remain sane.

The things we cannot change:

 - The fact that when you were one day old, for reasons we can only guess at, your birth family decided that you would have a better shot at life without them. We don't know if their choice was courageous or cowardly-- we probably never will. But let's try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

- Your special need. We can do our best to give you fully functioning hands and feet, but they will never look like other people's hands and feet. It doesn't matter one bit to us, and we hope that it won't matter to you, or to the people who take the time to get to know you.

- That you will spend your first year and a half in an orphanage. We saw your photo even before it was posted to our agency's website. We decided you were our son one week later. Ever since then, we've done our part, working as quickly as we could on each step. But there are lots of steps, and not everyone in charge of those steps is your mother, so sometimes the steps take longer than they might if I were in charge. But I promise you that until we get you in our arms, we are not going to let it take one week, one day, one minute longer than we have to.

- That we are going to take you away from everything you know. We got an adorable picture of the babies in your room the other day. You're all lined up for the camera, and a bunch of the babies are tackling each other. We're going to take you away from your posse of little guys, your walker, your Chinese pop music, and everything else you know. We're going to turn your life upside down. And as excited as I am to get you in my arms, I know it might not be a comforting place for you at first.

- That you have a nasty skin thing going on. I worried so much about Rose and her eating while we were waiting for her. When we got updates from her orphanage, all I wanted to know was whether or not she was eating and gaining wait. I was a little obsessed. You probably have scabies. You're shaved bald, and you have little bumps on your hands and feet. Last year I would have schemed and hemmed and hawed about how to get you the lotion you need to get rid of it, and it would have been futile. So we'll bring the lotion and treat you when we get you. It's all we can do.

- That the phone won't ring until it rings. I'll pray and hope and cross my fingers, but really, that's all I can do. This year, I hope not to alienate my friends or tell them they can only text until I get that all-important call from Seattle. And when it comes, you bet your biscuits that I will sob just as hard as I did last year when I finally got the call about Rose.

I really think that accepting the things you cannot change, of relinquishing control, takes courage too-- the courage to change ourselves. And while I don't want to wait one more second for you, I am thankful for this waiting experience for the way it's working to transform me into becoming a better, more patient mama to you and your brothers and sisters. Of course, we're only a month into the wait, I'll probably be feeling a whole lot less serene if we haven't heard a month from now.

Love,

Mommy