(Originally posted Friday, April 28)
Dear Willa~
It was “Middle-Aged Ladies in Track Suits Day” at the Lee, MA service center on the Mass Pike.
Your dad and I are on our way to Boston. Christian and Mollie are at home with your grandmother, who has been visiting for the past month or so from Florida. On Tuesday, she’ll go back home, and then drive her car back up here for the summer.
Dad and I have gotten an unexpected day away - driving to Boston to stay with Stephen and Lisa and see Stephen’s band open for Cake at MIT. We’ll get to go to a couple of real restaurants and see Cambridge and act like irresponsible adults for 24 hours or so.
You’ll see from the date of the previous entry that it’s been a while since I’ve attended to these letters. The only excuse I have is that, between then and now, we managed to move from nearly the southern extreme of the country to nearly the northern extreme. Yes, we could have moved from Key West to somewhere in Maine, but we’re just not that brand of overachievers.
Instead, we’ve come from Pensacola to Fly Creek, where we’ve got our 15 acres and 6 chickens. It’s been a hectic few months, to say the least.
In the meantime, we learned that our dossier was logged in at the CCAA on March 20.
One morning last week, just after waking up, I had a memory of your father telling me we should look on the so-called “waiting child” list to see if you were there. That morning, I could not remember whether I had dreamed about your father’s suggestion or if he had really asked me.
Later that afternoon, I asked him.
“I’ve asked about that before, but not recently,” he told me.
“I must have dreamed, then, that you told me to look at the lists.”
“Then maybe we should look at the list.”
So that is where we are now. We have begun to research our agency’s Waiting Child program.
In the language of Chinese adoption - and probably of adoption in general - there are two broad categories of children who need families:
+ No Special Needs - NSN - meaning children with no identified physical, emotional or developmental issues that would require medical intervention or treatment.
+ Special Needs - SN - a broad designation that could mean anything from a birthmark to cerebral palsy and everything in between and beyond.
We have begun our research on the types of “special needs” that are commonly described: Cleft lip and/or palate, heart conditions, hepatitis, albinism, genital ambiguity - the list is long and can be very sad. And reading the list is an exercise in brutal self-examination.
With every description I read, I ask myself, “Could I do that? Could I handle it? Would I be the right parent to help a child handle that?”
Sometimes, the answer is yes, sometimes I just don’t know.
I remind myself, however, that most families that include someone with “special needs”* don’t have the chance to cast a vote in such matters. These are things that just happen in families. Your child is born with a heart condition or without a hand, and it becomes just like their eye color or most ticklish spot. It’s part of the whole child. You might wish things were different - easier - for your child, but you never wish you had a different child.
*The very notion of a “special needs” child is pretty relative when it comes to children who find themselves available for adoption. Can it honestly be said that any infant who was abandoned and spent more than 6 months in an orphanage is totally free of “special needs”?
If you ask me, we all have special needs - needs that can baffle or even exhaust the people who care for us. And it is in the act of providing for those needs that we get to experience something holy.
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