“Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels;
only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
–William Faulkner
Our official wait for our daughter Amelia began on an island—the island of Great Chebeague, off the coast of Maine.
In the summer of 2006, we mailed our thick adoption dossier to China. Then, just a few days later, we packed my parents—weary and wary—into their big ol’ Buick, strapped our bikes onto our Mini Cooper, and caravanned south from Chicago, through Indiana on Interstate 65. We cut across Kentucky, drove down into Tennessee, and eventually deposited Mom and Dad at my brother’s house in Knoxville for a three-week stay. The next morning Peter and I took a sharp left and headed northeast.
We needed this holiday. Badly.
We had barely begun to heal from infertility and our first two miscarriages and more than a few adoption disappointments. We had been sharing a home with my parents for almost a year, helping my mom through cancer surgery and chemo and radiation, and making sure my disabled dad was fed and bathed and cared for as best we could while Mom was sick. Peter had just finished his second master’s degree. And, we were utterly spent.
Certainly, we wanted to finally move ahead with our new adoption dream. We wanted to turn the page and look ahead and begin again. But, somehow, we felt stuck. We were each still bound up so tightly in our individual fear and anxiety and exhaustion and pain that like two mummies, side-by-side in our coffin of a car, we began that road trip….
I originally wrote about our wait for Amelia a couple of years ago here on This Odd House.
I’m honored that this piece is now featured in the September edition of The Redbud Post.
to read the rest of the story and to read several other powerful articles
about loving a child you did not birth.