*Monday June 29/09

The Great Wall of China (6), originally uploaded by g_heyde.

Today’s picture is in honour of my older daughter’s Gotcha Day. Ten years ago, today, my husband and I were standing in the hallway of a hotel in Nanchang waiting for the elevator to open. We had travelled seventeen hours to Beijing, stayed overnight and flown into the province of Jiangxi that morning. It was a warm and humid day. Jiangxi is a moist verdant province and as we circled the runway we saw rice fields and water buffalo.

We expected to receive our child, our first, the child who made us parents the next day, but on the bus we were told the children were waiting at the hotel. They’d driven with orphanage staff about five hours on a bus down from a more remote hilly area.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were told to prepare a bottle, a diaper, a change of clothes in our room, and then wait in the hallway for our daughter to arrive. There were nine families traveling together, five whose children came from that particular orphanage in the hills.

The referral had come unexpectedly early, in fact while my husband and I were out of the country in April. We arrived home to a message on our voicemail from the adoption agency, letting us know that the information would arrive by courier the next day. The problem for me was that the next day I was going to be in New York for an interview.

Every hour I called home: did it arrive? Not yet. Not yet. At last, in the airport, waiting for the plane to take me back, my husband said that it had come. I stood at a payphone listening to the name of my child, her birth date, her weight. Her birth date was guestimated. Her weight was inaccurate. It didn’t matter. This was my child and I fell in love with her, sight unseen, standing at an airport payphone, while in the background someone talked loudly on a cell phone.

We were due to travel early in June, but between the referral date and our estimate travel, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was accidentally bombed by an American plane. Politics affects international adoption; it can even stop it. We were assured by our adoption agency that we would still be travelling. China was committed to bringing the children to their homes, but there would be significant delay. We’d be going a month later–mid to late July at the soonest.

I said to my husband: we’re going in June; I just have a feeling. We have to finish painting her room.

It was June 29th 1999. It was morning. A warm day in Nanchang, about 27 C (80F) and 100% humidity. It would have been warmer if it hadn’t been a late spring. We stood in the hallway, waiting for the elevator doors to open. When the elevator stopped, five nannies came out, each one holding a baby. The vice-director of the orphanage called out names and I held out my arms for my daughter. She was gorgeous, despite mosquito bites all over. She had no teeth yet. She took one look at me, shuddered and cried.

Back in the hotel room, I laid down with her on the bed and asked my husband to cover us with a blanket. He did, and I held her on my chest, under the cave of the blanket, and sang to her until I felt her little body relax against mine.

Today is the 10th anniversary of our gotcha day. I can barely see through my tears as I write this. My daughter is sleeping now in the lower bunk of a bunk bed, her younger sister in the upper bunk. She is an amazing artist. She is stubborn. She is responsible. When she makes up her mind to do something, nothing can stop her. Mosquitoes still love her.

I am the luckiest person in the whole world. In the entire universe.

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