Resilient

Definition of RESILIENT

: characterized or marked by resilience: as a : capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture b : tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

Last week a licensed, trained and paid-to-know-better person told me “children are resilient. Your son will adjust to any decisions you make for your life”.

To be honest, that statement angered and hurt me. I quickly told her, “you don’t understand. You don’t know what he has experienced. You didn’t see him in May when our time was limited to 15 minutes a day. You didn’t see how he pushed me away at bedtime and continued to push me away until just two weeks ago. You didn’t hear him as he cried and howled in anger and pain for hours after going to bed. It has been six months since I heard my son say ‘I love you, Mommy’.” At this point I cried and I told her, “every day for six months when I have told my son I loved him he shook his head vehemently and said ‘no, Mommy, I don’t want it’”.

Over the weekend I watched my son chase, and catch, a ginormous chicken. I watched with a mix of amazement and fear as he turned to me and yelled “Mommy, I caught it!”. After he safely put it down and walked back towards me I couldn’t help but think of how tough he is.

I started thinking about what it means to be tough or resilient. If Duc had gotten scratched and pecked would I still have thought he was tough for catching that chicken? No. Chances are I would have forgotten the fact that he caught the chicken, I would only remember the visit to the Emergency Room. I would have remembered his cries of fear and pain and not the momentary awe of doing the unthinkable.

And what of resiliency? Isn’t being resilient just another way of saying survivor? And isn’t that just another way of saying something didn’t kill you? I have to be honest, I want more for my son. I want him to be able to say he did more than live through something.

Chance

I don’t believe in the fortunes found in Chinese cookies, but you will still find them all over my house. Inspiration, at times, in a slip of paper. This one is wedged in the medicine cabinet in my master bathroom. I see it every morning when I wash my face and brush my teeth and it is the last thing I see before I go to bed. Sometimes in my rush I gloss over it. And over time it has a way of slipping into the background the way wallpaper does. But I notice when it is missing.

This reminds me to live in this moment. That every moment I have a choice. Turn left or right. Maybe even go back. Stillness is as much a choice as motion.

it is a reminder that my life is not yet set. I am still living and my circumstances don’t cage the desires of my heart and the choices it makes.

It is a reminder that amazing and beautiful things come from choices—and chances—sometimes I see exactly what I want and other times I see exactly what I need to see.

It is a reminder that every once in a while I need to have faith, take a step, however small, and take a chance.

My Favorite Boys

My two favorite boys. I love to see the way they interact with each other. The way they look at each other. The devilish grins they exchange. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked over and caught my dad teaching D something he shouldn’t know. I love the expression on my dad’s face when I catch him. I’m glad that I have had the opportunity to see my dad like this.

One of my favorite photos of my dad and grandfather was taken when my dad was about 10 years-old. The boys are looking at each other from the corner of their eyes. I found out later that Grandpa was actually tickling or scratching at the back of the head hence the sideways expression. I’ve caught Duc doing the same sideways look a number of times over the last month. And one of these days I will capture that image as my grandma caught it with her “boys”.

‘I will always come back for you’

Over the last two years I have found myself re-writing my son’s birth and relinquishment story.  There was a part of me, I am ashamed to admit, that hoped that I was one of the families that had doctored papers.  I wanted to believe that my son’s mother walked into the orphanage, kissed his forehead and signed the appropriate paperwork relinquishing her parental duties.  I wanted to believe that she was strong enough and loved him enough to make sure that he was never alone—that he went from her arms to the arms of the orphanage staff.  I wanted to believe that he felt safe and never felt alone.  That he never felt abandoned.

  

The more time that passes the more I realize that his paperwork was most likely very accurate.  The truth is, at some point he felt alone and he felt abandoned.  He felt scared and he wailed a panicked cry.  Perhaps it was that cry that drew the orphanage staff to his location.  I can only hope that his mother waited outside the gates in the dark until someone saw him and carried him inside.  If so, I can only imagine how she handled the anguished cry of her newborn.   Perhaps it wasn’t her that brought him to the orphanage.  Maybe it was a relative or a friend.  Either way, my son carries the scars from that time. 

 

Even after seeing how he gets upset when I leave him, I still can’t find it myself to feel anger towards his mother.  She made the best decision she could for her and her family at the time.  It frustrates me that I will likely never learn her identity because of the choices she made, but I also realize that if she had done things differently I would have never known him. 

This week a gentleman shared that he and his wife were planning on adopting once her body was no longer able to handle repeated pregnancies and c-sections.  They were interested in international adoption.  I told him what I knew.  That adopted children are NOT the same as bio children and they react to the same situations differently.  People view my son as a poster child for adoption since he is so well adjusted, friendly, loving, and happy.  But no child gets through their childhood unscathed—adopted or not.  And for my son the panicked cry every time I leave him, even if only for a few minutes, is not a ‘stage’ as most parents try to reassure me.  This is him.  Dealing with feeling abandoned.  It is me feeling frustrated and scared that I can’t make it better. 

 

Family

I am not naive and I doubt anyone would say I am obtund.

At the beginning of each day my son is my son. He is not my flesh nor my blood, but my feelings for him are not directed by blood or biology. He is my son. I live every day aware, painfully aware at times, that he was born of another woman’s body. I wish I could have given birth to him, taken credit for his beauty, his brains and his wit. I wish I could have made it easier, but then we wouldn’t be the people we have become. It seems strange to me at times when I remember that I never watched him slip out of my body, never saw my body grow and change. My heart has changed though. My love and my intensity has changed.

My son doesn’t yet understand adoption. I talk about Vietnam and the beautiful woman who carried him below her heart for nine months.

For now my son is blissfully ignorant that “mommy” in our family has more than one meaning. For now he doesn’t have to question what “mommy” means to him. At the end of today and the beginning of tomorrow we are simply mommy and babe. Some days I wish people saw the same thing I see—a family. Not an adoptive family. Not a single mom. Not an adopted child. A family. No more questions. No more nosy looks. Just us. A mother and her son. Family.

‘night night

A few weeks ago Duc had the stomach flu. The first night he vomited in his sleep and never cried out. It freaked me out so bad that the next night I insisted that I needed to see him all night. Since I don’t go to bed at 8 pm I put him on the couch so I could watch him. I really enjoyed having him so close. I enjoyed watching him sleep and I discovered he talks in his sleep. The most frequent word? Mommy. The rest were nee-nee (the name he gave his pacifier), Saige and Si (his cousins).

God, how I love this boy.

Enigma

Two years ago today I saw my son’s face for the first time. I remember everything about that day. I remember the dragonfly socks—part of a matching pair for us—that I wore in memory of my grandma. I remember working in the “command center” while supporting a new application implementation at work. I remember the call. And the tears. I remember calling my mother and the sound of the gravel gritting under her feet as she sprinted for the car. I remember feeling absolutely enamored and completely confused.

My son is, in some ways, as much as an enigma today as he was the first time I saw him. I was expecting a scrawny, sickly, pale, unhappy child. What I saw was a chubby baby with the most beautiful golden brown skin that I had ever laid my eyes on. In one of his first photos I saw a happy giggling baby, but in subsequent photos I saw something else. A child that looked somewhat desperate, his eyes searching for something he couldn’t verbalize. At the time I looked past all that not seeing what I didn’t yet understand. Three and a half months later I walked into his orphanage, picked him up and both of our lives changed. Instead of crying he held my face with both of his hands, smiled and held my stare as I cried. As the days turned to months I realized that he was looking for a family. The before and after photos on the mantle paint a different picture of his life in an orphanage.

I know my son better than anyone else alive. I know his favorite color (yellow), I know that nothing in life makes him as happy as Opa & Oma, race cars, helicopters and ambulances. I know the expression he makes when he feels unsure about someone that approaches us. I know how ornery he is and what words will make him laugh until he throws his head back and giggles a high pitch little giggle that only little children can do.

Yet I find myself looking at him and aching for all the things I don’t know. For the questions I have and the questions that he will someday have. We often get comments on how similar we are—same evil giggle, same infectious belly laugh. We are both ornery. We have the same horrific cowlicks and the same strange hereditary ear birth defect (until the international doctor told me it was a birth defect I just always thought of it as a family trait—and don’t bother comparing our ears in this picture because you can’t see it). People can say all those things and more, but I know those things belong to the faces of two people I have never met.

My birthday was this week. My friends and family know the worst thing they can tell me is “I know what you are getting for your birthday!”. It makes me crazy, the unknowing. Even if it is a good thing it still makes me crazy. And every once in a while I feel that same crazy when I look at my son. I hate the not knowing.

And because I can’t leave you without something fun, check out this video. I almost blew lemonade out my nose when it came on the TV. This is so Duc.