My daughter and I reclined comfortably together at a park yesterday, beside a calm lake in which Chinese men, bent with age, stood stirring the water around their boats with long oars. A thousand Chinese faces passed us by, upturned at the sunny sky and squinting at their beloved kites in the wind. Some of the kites were fighting it, dipping and wobbling, wrapping around the tops of trees. But some of the kites positively soared, as if their strings didn’t exist at all.
This is where we live. My daughter’s birth family might be only miles from us for all we know. And yet we’ll never know, for she was laid on a street corner in a box when she 6-days old, give or take. Sometimes I look at the faces around us, and I wonder “Could any of these people be her people? Is that lady in the red sweater her mother’s cousin, who moved from the village to the city to get married? Is that one her father’s brother, a migrant worker, living in a shanty beside the construction site, working his fingernails off in order to send a small amount of money home to his wife?”
And then I look at my daughter, with her soft brown cheeks bitten red by the March winds, and her bright eyes dancing from kite to kite, and I feel so connected to her that I could cry. In all this big world, she and I came together, mother and daughter. We are an island in a sea of relatives, and because of reasons we will never know, we are related now, too, in the most wonderful way imaginable.
Adoption.
Take part in the miracle if you can. It will leave you in wonder for the rest of your life.
Beautiful post. 🙂 🙂