I've been reading the yahoo groups, the RQ discussions, blogs etc about adopting an older child. To me, A's much bigger "Special Need" is her age, not her limb difference. I'm much more concerned about how this will play into her adoption than her physical issues...
There's a bunch of different views out there:
- These kids deserve/want/need a home, and no matter what, even 3 hours before their 14th birthday, they should get a home.
- These kids at some age are too much associated with their culture, and moreso, their ADAPTIBILITY to life outside an SWI is too little to make their adoption successful, let alone an IA successful.
- There's going to be a lot of down days, and some up days, and over time it'll get better.
- This is going to be a really hard road and if you're lucky, you come out of it in one piece, but it's doable, though you'll pay the cost heavily.
- This is awesome. No one has ever had issues, do it, do it, do it!
Well, the skeptic in me guesses that the statistical bell curve most likely will put us in the middle road of all these ideas, but we're prepared for the worst, hoping for the best.
But I've been thinking about "home" as we twiddle our thumbs trying to not think about our paperwork languishing in various offices around the country...
What makes the place that instantly comes to your mind when someone utters that word to you? I don't doubt that H will think of this place as her home until adulthood. The good, the bad, the up's, the down's, my guess is this will be the place. But what about A?
My idea of home has changed over my life. There's the child's view of the house you are living in at that moment in time. Now I had a weirder situation in that my parents were divorced. Sometimes I viewed my Dad's house as my house too, sometimes not. So the notion of the little house you grew up in always being the place to return to is foreign to me. Also, no one stayed in that same house, and very few do in this country as it is.
But now, if someone says "home", I don't think of my loving parents and my childhood pets and a room with strawberry shortcake dolls in bins. I think of this house...I think of my daughter and my husband and our cats, and the pile of papers I've been promising to go thru for 6 weeks sitting on the kitchen island. And I guess I thought most people thought that way...home isn't a stagnant concept, it changes as life changes...
I have a neighborhood friend. She has a good heart, but is opposite my viewpoints on about everything. I honestly imagine her being the one who is like my SIL - the one in the family that will just . not. grow. up. and. move. on. I imagine her being the one the rest of the family mutters about when she calls mom for the 3rd time this week...she made a post on fb that made me choke on my bagel (ok, it was a handful of m&m darks, what's your point?!)...she posted that she was "going home to xxxx foreva". This woman used to travel 1/2way across the country every 3 weeks or so to visit her childhood home, before she had kids. She once told me "I wake up most mornings, thinking...I could just get on a plane and go home and be there in a few hours and never leave." And I wondered...what about your husband? Your home, your friends, your job, your...life?!
So she posted this. People asked if they were moving. She answered she could only hope so. She'd keep dreaming. Her husband of almost 10 years can see this stuff. What kind of committment has she made to him, to her two children, if she thinks like this still? I had never heard of someone who could have created this whole life and been willing to toss it for this view of what is still, really, home. And that's not even getting into the philisophical debate of if it can actually really go back home when you're 30-some years old...
So I read this post on fb last week...is this how A will feel? What will "home" be? Will it always be faraway in China? Or will she move onto a new phase of life, like many of us do, and think back to China lovingly, to the people who cared for her, but embrace a new "home."? Or will this strange country always be strange and odd to her, something that happened, and some good and some bad came out of it, but she'll never feel at ease here? When we take her back to China to visit someday will she post on fb that she's "finally headed home"?!
I know...I hope...she'll have fond memories and always feel a tie to her Chinese home. I hope she has those ties there. I do hope though that at some point she will bring up images of her room here, sitting here being a typical teenager petting her cat, annoyed that I can't drive her to the store right now because I'm shuffling thru that stack of papers that I've been meaning to sort for the last 6 weeks...when she's asked "what's going on at home today?" At least until she someday moves on to make her own home for herself.
