* I keep thinking about a lady, whose blog comments I read. In an effort to appear younger, she'd colored her hair blonde right before leaving to go to China to pick up her child. Her new Chinese daughter had fought and screamed and cried so much and for so long that, in the middle of the night, they'd finally called the interpreter back to the hotel. Eventually, the interpreter had gotten the little girl calmed down enough to figure out what was wrong. Seems that, in the orphanage, the kids were threatened with a witch coming to get them if they didn't behave -kinda like our version of the boogieman. It also seems that, in Chinese folk tales, witches always have blonde hair. That poor new mom had had the best intentions but had gotten slapped around by a culture that she didn't understand. Worse, that terrified little girl had been faced with living an actual nightmare and had been screaming at her new mother, "You will NOT eat me!"
* I read an update on a little girl on the Love without Boundaries site. But it was the story that they'd included, in passing, about the young woman in the photo who was holding the little girl, that still haunts me. The young woman had grown up in the orphanage and the orphanage had scraped together enough money through sponsorships to send her to school and then to college. After going to college and becoming an accountant, she'd done the impossible. Then, she tried to get a job and found out that, because she'd grown up as an orphan, no one would hire her. All the companies that she'd interviewed with were afraid that she'd bring them bad luck. So, the orphanage had hired her as their accountant because no one else would. Seems, in China, once an orphan always an orphan.
* I keep thinking about another little girl whose picture was also on the Love Without Boundaries site (my agency's site? I forget.) She'd grown up in a foster family but did not know that she was a foster child. She'd thought that she was a biological child of her foster parents until, at the age of ten, someone else in the family (an aunt? an uncle?) had told her the truth, you're an orphan. When she was twelve, her foster family took her back to the orphanage and said that they couldn't afford to keep her any longer.
The orphanage had discussed options with her, you can stay here in the orphanage or we can try to find you a family - it would probably be an overseas family. What do you want to do? What she wanted to do was go back home with her foster mom. That was not an option. (The foster mom did stay and try to help with the transition, so she was the one who said, "You can't come home with me.") So, finally the little girl agreed, "find me a home." The orphanage was scrambling to find her a family before she turned 14 and aged out of the system. She'd be stuck in the orphanage permanently if they couldn't find and place her in an adoptive home within two years and IF they could find one, it would probably be thousands of miles away in a country and culture totally different than her own. I can NOT imagine that poor little girl's heart.
* Every one who should know is telling me that Q-Boo will be TINY -other adoptive parents, my very, very good friend Thao who also just happens to be Vietnamese, (even my in-laws,) everyone. They should know. But the measurements that I've received for her repeatedly from China do not agree with this, they say that she is a normal (for an American kid) sized 2T. But the one thing that I've figured out is that these measurements could be canned. They could just be sending me "normal American kid" measurements but haven't really actually checked her. So, I dug out my "Growth Chart for Southern Chinese Girls" - amazing what you can find on the Internet, huh?
According to this growth chart, Q-Boo is in the 50th percentile for height (in other words, about average for kids her age and ethnicity) but literally off the charts everywhere else. I mean OFF the charts, BIG! Which basically means that she'd have to be short(er) and fat with a big head - <giggle> she doesn't look like this in the photos. Hmmmmmmmm ... This should be interesting. Any body want to take bets? Tiny or BIG? I'm betting tiny. I'll let you know.
*There is a way that the knife cuts and I bleed poetry. It may not be good poetry but it's mine- sometimes, the deeper the emotion, the easier it is to express myself in snatches of phrases instead of paragraphs.
Bird-Daughters
Flea-bitten and weak
Pelted by rain
Huddled down in my darkness
Naked and feeble
My ankles fused in place like sticks
Pressed against the wall of the nest
Resolutely refusing to peek
Past the rough edge, afraid
To trust that the air would keep me
From the stony ground
The wind whispered lies
And I believed
Because it was easier
Arms outstretched
like wings, sinews scarred and toughened
wrapping tighter than I'd thought possible,
muscles pulled and plucked
but tempered, from lifting myself
toward the sound of you
singing to me over miles of ocean
and piles of paperwork.
Gotcha!
And, we both fly free.
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