Almost a Year Gone By

For some reason recently, I’ve been feeling the need to re-read all our blog posts from the weeks leading up to our trip to China. You see, we left for China on May 23 last year, so as I live through the end of the school year at Trinity and all the anticipation that summer brings, I remember vividly the whole host of emotions we were feeling last year at this time, and I’ve felt a deep need to reconnect with some of those feelings.

I remember Mother’s Day last year, the nostalgia of spending that day with two children for the last time. Next year on Mother’s Day I’ll have three children, I remember thinking, and now here it is Mother’s Day 2013 and I DO have three children.

I had a little yearning moment earlier today too—which caught me off guard and left me pleasantly surprised. I’ve admitted on this blog that in the past several months, I’ve felt a great deal of frustration with China as a country and what I feel like is the lack of care they showed for Matthew’s development during his months in the orphanage. We’ve been somewhat overwhelmed by his delays and what they might possibly mean long term, and in the midst of all that, I’ve felt angry at China for not doing a better job offering him developmental opportunities while he was still in their care.

I don’t hate China or anything—I’m just frustrated about the reality of our world and that country, and what happened to my child as a result. I know, from all my blog reading, that it’s a common feeling for adoptive parents to feel who bring children home from international orphanages.

But today I had a very different feeling. I got to slip away after lunch today to do a little shopping, and I decided to head up to the outlet malls that are about 10 minutes north of our house. They are a common destination for Canadian tourists, particularly Chinese-Canadian tourists, it seems. In fact, today probably 50% of the people walking around up there were Asian, and most of them Chinese, at least from my viewpoint. I was in line at a store when two women, a cashier and a customer, struck up a conversation. The customer told the cashier that she wasn’t from the United States, and in fact that she wasn’t from Canada either. She said she lived in China. Then the two women began talking Mandarin to each other.

It was a warm day. I could smell the residual cigarette smoke from the outdoor, covered walkways of the outlet mall, drifting into the store where I stood. And the women before me chatted back and forth in Chinese. In that instant, I had a deep and lovely yearning for China—for its landscape, its language and its people. In that moment I felt something deeply familiar and nostalgic, and my heart longed for my son’s first home in a way I had never felt before. I missed China with every bone in my body—and I realized that because Matthew is part of us, China is too.

China is SO FAR away from Everett. Maya and Sam ask regularly when we get to go visit, and I wish I could tell them we’d go sometime soon. We WILL go to China someday as a family, and hopefully more than once, but it’s expensive and a long way to travel with small children. So we probably won’t get back to China for at least 8 or 10 years. But the reality of that makes me sad. I wish it was closer, so we could pop over and visit. I’d love to show all three of our children the beautiful place where Matthew was born—and I’d give more than anything to visit China when we weren’t there to pick up a child. It was such an emotional and complicated trip for so many reasons.

I wouldn’t want to go back to last time this year—Even though our trip to China was an amazing adventure, I’m so grateful that we’re on this side of the journey. Matthew is home, his surgeries are done for now, he’s growing and changing, despite some concerns about his developmental delays. We are grateful to have him in our family.

I do feel grateful that we live somewhere where Asian people make up more than a small percentage of the population. Our Chinese-American son will be able to look around and see people who look like him right here in Everett. We won’t have to travel all the way to China for him to have that experience.

And on this Mother’s Day, I give thanks for all three of my children and the journeys we have taken and will take together as a family. Sometimes people say to us, “what a gift your family has given to Matthew,” and I think to myself, No, what a gift Matthew has given to us.

For as my mom has said on more than one occasion, “Matthew needed a family, and our family needed a Matthew.” What a fine blessing it is that we have each other in this life.