What’s True and Not

In my previous post Double Bind, I pondered the challenges of telling the difference between adoption issues and plain kid stuff. Terra, an adoptive mother, blogger and author of Pushing Up the Sky, commented: 

“The other thing is when the dust settled we discovered all of our kids have adoption issues, even the one who isn’t adopted because she was, after all, raised with a sister and brother who were adopted and in our adoptive family.”

See, that’s just what I mean about raising a child who was adopted. It’s simple parenting, and yet it is endlessly, surprisingly complex.

Our family did not only change Hanna’s life when we adopted her. Hanna changed our lives, too. The first day we met Hanna in Nanchang, I carried her out of the adoption administration building under a blue China sky. A moment I’ll never forget for the warm sunshine, soft breeze, and deep joy of having my arms full of our child.

It’s a moment our older daughter won’t forget either, for other reasons. An instant that shaped her for years. In The Other Side of the Skies (a memoir in progress) I write about what happened immediately after I breathed in the bliss of the long-awaited moment:

I look up and Kathryn is gone. “Kathryn!” I shout, hurrying forward, my heart racing at the thought of where she could be. Kathryn darts from around the corner of the building. “Come here. Don’t do that again. You don’t know what could happen to you. You cannot run off like that.” Kathryn frowns, slumps along safely behind us once again toward the bus.

Kathryn does end up getting lost in China as I’d feared. She does not disappear physically, but she will take off with her heart in a way I had never imagined. Years later, when she’s back and we are close again the way we used to be, Kathryn will tell me about this sunny sidewalk moment when we got Hanna. It was the moment she lost her mother.

It took us years to unravel this loss. When we got home to Florida, Hanna needed mounds of attention in this unfamiliar place. But so did Kathryn. While we did our best with a terrified screaming baby, maybe we could have done better by Kathryn. I sorely underestimated the impact adoption would have on Kathryn. I failed to realize how much our family of three would have to change in order to become this new family of four.

Bumpy, exhausting times followed in the post-adoption weeks, months, years. Some of it kid stuff for sure, some adoptive. But somehow we did it; we reshaped individually, and as a family. Privately we joke that we’re all a little “Chinesey” now. In some ways we are.

Yet, Hanna has come far more toward being an American than we have been able to embrace being Chinese. A few Chinese New Year celebrations, moon cakes, and floundering Chinese lessons cannot bridge the gap.

I wonder how far across the divide our love can take Hanna.

Last night we are watching the Olympics. Hanna now has the distinction of countries and teams: The Canadians and the Russians and so on. She pouts a little looking at Jonathan, Kathryn, and me. “You are Americans. I am the Chinese.” She sounds lonely. A player without a team.

I think to tell her she is both teams. We are one team, a family. The American hockey team has a lot of Canadian players, I consider. But I say nothing, rub her head in silence for a bit.

I do not know what to say to Hanna’s statement. It’s true. And it’s not true.