Preface
A hair stylist tipped my head back and told me ever since she was six, she wanted to style hair. Apparently it would surprise us to know how many people become aware of their life focus/purpose quite early in life. My desire to become an adoptive parent, as I have written earlier, began with a childhood dream. Reaching adulthood, I, still at the teething stage of maturity, tried chewing like any curious puppy on a couple of what might have been initiations into the world of adoption.
One of the winters I lived in the Canadian north I shared a 2-room squatter’s log cabin with a school teacher of elementary children who spoke little English outside the classroom. I, with a higher calling of course, was ‘doing God’s work’, financed by a religious community back home. I was receiving from them something north (a blatant pun) of $100.00 per month which to me, in the seventies, seemed enough for food and the roof over my head. Who knows how much my roommate was covering. I in financial naiveté never noticed. I was the protestant fundamentalist equivalent of a hippie, though so otherworldly that while for most free love was more physically vigorous, mine was, like I said, otherworldly.
One afternoon I was going through the motions of language study while my roommate spent the day addressing the needs of 40 clamouring, Chipewyan- speaking children. I was interrupted by a knock at the door. A man, maybe in his twenties, stood in the porch; in one hand, he held a baby girl under one year old and in the other, a baby bottle. The baby was wrapped in a blanket: thank God for little mercies. The man, her father, held the baby out to me, telling me her name was Gladys. As I absolutely unhesitatingly took the baby from his arms, I did have the presence of mind to ask how long he wanted to leave Gladys with us. “Oh, a day, or a week, a year…”, he squinted as he slipped back out the door.
This was a Friday afternoon. My roommate with plans for a child-free weekend, came home to find me dragging a dresser drawer out on the floor next to the kitchen table, turning it into a make shift cradle – ‘enthusiastically’ she quite generously observed. Finances, wherewithal, and most seriously, legalities never given a moment’s attention, I was fussing over what to do with a name like Gladys. Gladys’ young mother had her priorities more clearly in order. Within a couple of hours, she came to the door to ask if we had her daughter; with not another word she walked over to the drawer on the kitchen floor and lifted Gladys into her arms. In a small town, word mercifully travels quickly. The aborted first attempt to follow my dream summed up by my roommate: “Even you were relieved you’d dodged that bullet.”
A few years later I was visiting someone who lived above the market in a provincial town in the Philippines. A visitor came to the door who may have heard an ‘Americana’ was visiting. My coping skills in the language, Tagalog, were not enviable, but I could pick out enough words to know the person in the doorway was asking if I would like to buy a child. Buying a child was doable in those years, with apparently little legal difficulty within the local community. It was quite another thing for an expatriate on a work visa. Maybe my prefrontal cortex was by then in the final stages of development or I had heard some scary stories for I had sufficient good sense to say, “Salamat po, pero hindi naman”. (“Thank you, but not really.”)
What you know of me so far is that I was at best comfortable with no stable income or clearly articulated reason for actually living a life on earth – something Joe and Josephine Normal think is foundational. I had daydreams but played out each day as though only life after death had value. I felt like a hapless bystander to life active around me. Generously you might call me a late-bloomer. OK.
‘In the fullness of time’ as it says in Galatians 4:4 of the old King James Bible the finances, wherewithal and legalities began to fall into place, and I could now begin to present myself as a viable candidate for adoption. I could begin to act on what seemed to me to be simply what I must do, rather than continue to dance around a romantic notion. I secured sufficient financial independence and I accepted a date with a good man, Dave. The poet and Instagram personality, Yung Pueblo, encourages people to find “a partner who supports your dreams”, not an essential in adoption, but wow for lots of reasons, a very good thing. Jessica O’Dwyer, writes of her process in adoption in Mamalita: an adoption memoir. For O’Dwyer menopause arrived at 32. In time, she decided to adopt. The last sentence of Chapter One: “But first, I wanted a husband.” I agree! We started planning for adoption quite literally on the first date and so we took the next steps together. For most, these steps are paperwork, orientation and about two years of aborted adoptions; a few possible adoptions fell through before we were offered Yasik.
I am writing this post to preface the story of our adoption as family, a story I will write on the template of Joseph Campbell’s interpretation of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Even the vague and naïve experiences above can be seen as part of a template for such a journey. The Hero’s Journey is extrapolated from ancient stories as an explanation for why people have human experiences. As I understand the human experience as interpreted by myths like the Odyssey and many others, we as humans encounter shipwrecks, monsters, deep sleeps on some island and conflicts in our search for home, a stable life or to learn how to be human. Maybe as was Odysseus’ experience, many of us for a vast variety of reasons, do not take the most direct route to return to our homes or places of maturity. Perhaps I took the slow boat to find what I wanted to experience in my life. In Book 3 of the Odyssey, Athena puts Odysseus into a deep sleep in a cave. I too may have gotten stuck on some island and put into a deep sleep. I do know I certainly have always felt I didn’t fully awake or fully begin to experience life until I began taking realistic steps toward adoption.
Now, with this blog I will look back on Dave and my experience with adoption. Perhaps what I am coming to learn now I might resonate with those who are considering becoming, have become or are still in the middle of being birth parents, adoptees, and adopters, or are like myself, looking back to seek understanding, hopefully continually learning a better way.
