I've missed my friend behind the keyboard- the one that helps me sort out my thoughts and line them up like little toy soldiers. It's hard to jot down life and condense its intricacies into small little words. Words are always so inadequate. The depth of what we are living can never just be bottled-up and poured onto a page. I imagine that after we die and are reviewing our life, our stories won't be told in words, but in feelings, both our own and of those whose paths we crossed. The emotions are what I'm trying to remember through these small words.
Life is changing every day right before my eyes, and I don’t know how to stop it or slow it down. It reminds me of the cartoons I used to draw in the bottom corner of my notebook pages when I was bored in class as a kid. Each drawing was identical to the one on the page behind it with only a tiny difference. That was the key: little changes. As I flipped the pages, slowly at first, the drawing would come alive as the small movements of each drawing morphed together.
The pages of the notebook are flipping, more quickly now than ever, except the image at the end looks nothing like the image at the beginning. And yet, as much as I miss the simplicity of that first image, I would never want to go back to it. That first image seems both just a heartbeat ago and a lifetime ago.
Having moved around from country to country so much as a child, the memories of my childhood aren’t split up by years or school grades, but by countries. Before Mexico. After Brazil. While in Colombia. I think the memories of my early adult years will always be split in two: before the adoption and after.
Tonight we sat around the dinner table and laughed about things the kids used to do as babies. The way Lauren’s scream could raise the dead. How Luke would make that weird frog sound in his throat when he tried to say Camden’s name. That Calista was my happy little Buddha. How Camden’s name was almost Landon but dad won out on in the delivery room. That Mila’s latina name doesn’t fit her platinum blonde hair but it fits her feisty personality. From the corner of my eye, I saw Hengxin silently staring down at her plate.
“It’s not fair,” I thought. It’s not fair that her scrapbook begins at age 11 and that these conversations will always be uncomfortable for her. It was the after-adoption version of myself that simultaneously lamented this and realized that this has become a normal part of our life. And it’s that same after-adoption version that feels heavy with guilt for having ever having allowed this to feel normalized. Before I would have never understood the irony of the paradox.
It was after the adoption that I couldn’t bring myself to say that we adopted our little dog, Effie. That’s not a verb that I can share between children and animals anymore.
It was before the adoption that my Heavenly Father was the silent man in the sky. It was after that he became my friend.
It was before the adoption that my Heavenly Father was the silent man in the sky. It was after that he became my friend.
It was before that I thought that love was simple. It’s after that I realize that love is one of those things that can never just be scribbled on a page and confined to just four little letters. It’s what brought a farm boy and a city girl together when they had hardly anything in common. It’s what has me folding the eighth load of laundry in a day, knowing there are still three more to go. It’s what made us go across the ocean to bring someone home that we had never met, and it’s what kept her from going back when she wanted to. It’s what I’ve pleaded with to God to give me when I didn't understand.
Yet it’s the same little word written on a page in her handwriting that means so much to me because it’s love that has made her blossom- imperfect at best- but as small and simple as that.
I remember as a child flipping through the blank pages of my journal, wondering what stories would someday fill the empty pages. Both the good and the bad have. Now I see that in those blank pages was written the story of a lost little girl, who after 11 years, found a family and was very loved. There's a story of an angry and hurt little boy who grew into a giant with wisdom beyond his years. There's a little jester who kept the kingdom laughing with his wicked sense of humor. There are three little girls, each as different from eachother as can be, with their own unique gifts to the world- the gifts wrapped so beautifully and ready to be opened. The love story from the first few pages between the farm boy and the the city girl told of how while love is fostered during the easy times, it is grown during the hard. They learned that it's their lack of commonality that made their marriage stronger than ever after 18 years. Their story is my favorite.
Life has unfolded in ways I never imagined it would and brought us to places I never thought I'd be. If there's anything I've learned about blank pages, it's that I'm not meant to be the story-writer. I never was. And what fills the pages is more beautiful than anything than I could have ever imagined.
I remember as a child flipping through the blank pages of my journal, wondering what stories would someday fill the empty pages. Both the good and the bad have. Now I see that in those blank pages was written the story of a lost little girl, who after 11 years, found a family and was very loved. There's a story of an angry and hurt little boy who grew into a giant with wisdom beyond his years. There's a little jester who kept the kingdom laughing with his wicked sense of humor. There are three little girls, each as different from eachother as can be, with their own unique gifts to the world- the gifts wrapped so beautifully and ready to be opened. The love story from the first few pages between the farm boy and the the city girl told of how while love is fostered during the easy times, it is grown during the hard. They learned that it's their lack of commonality that made their marriage stronger than ever after 18 years. Their story is my favorite.
Life has unfolded in ways I never imagined it would and brought us to places I never thought I'd be. If there's anything I've learned about blank pages, it's that I'm not meant to be the story-writer. I never was. And what fills the pages is more beautiful than anything than I could have ever imagined.
