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June 29, 2004
On starting
Dear Emma:
This is strange for me, I have to tell you. I've never written a personal letter to a perfect stranger before. Of course, I've never yet written to someone who isn't yet born, either.
Perhaps I should explain.
When we decided to adopt a child, we started down a long road that's made up mostly of paper and ink. Lots of both, in an apparently endless track bound together mostly by time and hope. In about two months, all of this paper and ink will be bundled up and sent to China. There a group of skilled, well-meaning total strangers whose only knowledge of us is from that ink and paper -- and the presumption that anyone willing to take all the time, effort and expense to create such an assemblage must have good intentions -- will work to pair us with you.
That sounds funny, doesn't it? Having someone pick your parents for you.
Well, about six to eight months after the Chinese officials get our paperwork, we will be sent a picture of you. By that time, you might be six months old, or you might be a year, or even a little over. But probably still very young, regardless. What all this means is that you might be waiting for us right now in one of China's SWIs -- Social Welfare Institutes -- or you might even be waiting to be born.
Now that sounds funny. And it feels strange, too...thinking that somewhere in a country we've never seen, halfway around the world, a woman we have never met and will never know, is probably carrying the child who will be our daughter. You. Emma.
I can't even call you more than Emma Shea, because part of your name will be the Chinese name given you by the orphanage workers who will take you in and see you through those first fragile weeks and months of your life, before we can bring you to your forever home.
Emma.
Emma.
I say that name to myself a thousand times a day and try to put a face with it. But of course that's silly. I'm embarrassed to say that to me, most babies look very much alike -- small, plump people with intent, slightly-unfocused looks and a distinct dearth of hair. You will look like most of the other children you live with, with your dark hair, and dark eyes. And you will look nothing like us, with our brown, red-highlighted hair and our blue eyes.
And it won't matter a bit to us. Hopefully, it won't matter to you either, because sometimes love really is blind. Do we love you? Do I love you? Again, it seems a funny question, because what parent doesn't love their child? But all we have right now is the dream of you, and the desire...even the need to be a family of three. If we only love the dream right now, though, it only shows the strength of our feeling, that it can attach to something so vague and undefined. Imagine how much that feeling will grow when we finally hold you, warm and real, in our arms, Emma.
Emma Shea.
The name again. It comes to me uninvited at the most inopportune times. It won't leave my head for hours on end. It's like an incantation, a word of power that summons up with it a whole host of allusions and suppositions. Really, it's the only concrete part of you we have right now. Maybe that explains its potency.
There is a longstanding belief in Chinese culture that an invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet (and with my usual inability to resist a smart-aleck question, I have to wonder how something can be invisible and still have a color). Maybe it's the truth, and maybe that's why the name means so much -- it's the first glimmering of that thread. It's a pale pink glow on the horizon, just out of reach, just a little too insubstantial to be grasped by my finger, but just solid enough to be real in my mind.
Go carefully, Emma Shea, no matter where you are. We will see you soon.
Love,
Baba
Posted by at June 29, 2004 01:12 AM