A daughter is waiting After all this time, there comes a peace to know the call is nearSunday, October 14, 2007
By GINA HANNAH
Times Business Writer
gina.hannah@htimes.com
In this two-part series, Times staff writer Gina Hannah writes about the two-year process she and her husband went through to adopt a child from China. The series will conclude next Sunday.
For the past hour and a half, the electronic reader board above our heads at Hong Kong International Airport's Gate 66 has flashed a destination of Changsha in Mainland China. It is in Changsha where our group - 15 couples and one husband whose wife has to stay home in the States - will meet the dark-haired, doe-eyed little girls who will become our daughters.
We're dragging with jet lag. A few of us have what we can only assume is food poisoning. We meander about the gate, sipping bottled water and nibbling on granola bars. Some of us fire up laptops, taking advantage of the airport's free wireless Internet service to e-mail home.
One of the husbands, a man from Knoxville named Kelly, notices the reader board no longer says the flight from Gate 66 is going to Changsha. It's headed to Tokyo.
A voice crackles over the loudspeaker in a language we don't understand, then in English we can't hear well. Kelly goes to the check-in counter and learns our flight is delayed and changed to another gate at the opposite end of the airport. My husband, Pete, and I look at one another and sigh, then join the others, gathering our weary bodies and our luggage and heading to our new gate.
It's just another minor hurdle on our journey to become parents.
Choices, decisions Our journey began long before we set foot on a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong. It began with the hopes and expectations most couples have when they decide to start a family. But the months, then the years, passed us. We celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary, our 40th birthdays.
We watched as friends welcomed one, two, three babies into the world. We envied them. We saw other friends choose to remain childless, focusing their energy on their careers, travel, each other, at peace with their decision. We envied them, too.
Drugs, hormones, surgery didn't help. A reproductive endocrinologist gave us a definitive answer: My insides were too tangled for a healthy pregnancy to take place - at least not without more surgery. Then, with the help of more drugs and hormones, "maybe" I would conceive. "Maybe" I could carry the baby to term. Early labor could mean emergency surgery and permanent damage.
We decided I wouldn't have the surgery.
We would, however, create a family. Adoption would be our choice. We contacted agencies, joined online parent groups, asked questions. We considered different countries. We weighed the pros and cons, made a decision, changed our minds, then changed our minds again.
Our ultimate choice came from my husband's family's past.
Paper pregnant At age 87, my mother-in-law still recalls scenes from her childhood in mainland China - the steep hills, the rickshaws, Tung Ting Lake, the largest lake in central China. Her parents, Pete's grandparents, were missionaries in Hunan Province, from the time my mother-in-law was 2 until she was 9. She still remembers being evacuated during the anti-Christian movement in the 1920s.
"Wouldn't it be neat if our child came from the same place where Mom lived?" Pete mused.
During our research, we learned that we could specify which region of China we'd like our child to be from, but it could delay our referral, because there was no guarantee when the paperwork for babies in a certain province would be processed. Among the orphanages that care for the millions of Chinese children - mostly girls - who are abandoned because of the country's one-child policy, many don't participate in the government's adoption program.
We tell our home study social worker that we will accept a child from any province.
Our agency tells us the wait from the day our paperwork is logged in by the Chinese government to getting our referral is six-to-eight months. About six weeks after referral, they said, we will travel to China to meet our child and bring her home.
The paperwork takes several months to gather. Our dossier, which will be sent to China for review, includes our home study, medical exams, financial statements, reference letters, employment letters, background checks, child abuse clearance forms, birth, marriage and divorce certificates.
Each document must be notarized, certified by the county clerk, verified by the Alabama Secretary of State, then authenticated by the U.S. Secretary of State. At the end of the process, a cardboard box holding copies of our paperwork weighs 11 pounds.
Our agency translates our dossier into Chinese and sends it to the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, or CCAA, China's government office overseeing adoptions. Two weeks later, we get our log-in date: Sept. 12, 2005. The clock is ticking; we are officially "paper pregnant."
Unlike with a typical pregnancy, I can celebrate with a big glass of wine.
'Rumor Queen' We calculate that we'll travel in the spring of 2006, maybe as late as summer. We start buying baby books and toys (it's difficult to buy clothes for a child whose age or size you don't know). We wait. And wait. And wait.
Spring and summer come and go. We add 1,000 square feet to our house. We paint. We buy more toys and books and stuffed animals. We answer questions from well-meaning friends and family as best we can.
We ask our agency about the lengthening wait. There are no firm answers. We join online waiting-parent groups - and rumors fly.
Toward the end of each month, I keep vigil, watching CCAA's Web site, which is changed once a month to reflect the latest cutoff date for referrals ready to be sent. We wait for any nugget that might help us get a grasp on when we'll be able to bring our babies home.
Waiting parents have cyber slumber parties, gathering at computers from across the United States, Britain, Australia, France, Spain and Scandinavia, sipping coffee, tea, wine, martinis, depending on our own personal time of day. We chat on a Web site created by a woman we know only as "Rumor Queen," a woman who is waiting for her second child from China and is, apparently, good at crunching statistics.
She looks at the length of time between referrals, the number of referrals in each monthly batch, and tells us it doesn't look good. The referrals are based on our log-in dates, and each month, fewer log-in dates are included in the batch.
One night, I dream that I awake very early in the morning, go to my laptop and see that the new cutoff is Aug. 9, 2005, just about a month away from our date. A couple of days later, I wake up, fire up my laptop, and peek at CCAA's site.
There's a new cutoff date.
It's Aug. 9, 2005.
'The Call' It's a surreal feeling, the peace that comes from knowing something you've been waiting for so long is about to happen. A comedian I heard once referred to it as the joy of being "next." Because we know on which dates the Chinese government logged in dossiers, we know that we're coming up to bat. We celebrate another Christmas childless, but without the grief and emptiness of years past. Relatives come to see our bigger house. We stock the bar and throw a New Year's Eve party - the last one of its kind we'll be having in a while, we figure. There are still half-full bottles sitting on our bar when we get The Call. It's Jan. 4, 2007.
Other parents have told us about The Call. "You have a daughter!" a joyous voice on the other end of the line says. Or, sometimes it's "You have twins!" Even more surprising is the occasional "You have a son!"
Our caller's voice has a slightly different tone, more cautionary. I think her name is Jan. As she speaks, I want to reach through the phone lines to grasp her meaning.
"Before I send you any information, you need to know that this little girl is older than the age range you requested," the woman says. "She's 20 months old."
Nearly 2!
"If you don't think you can accept this little girl, you can turn down the referral and your dossier will be put back in with the next batch," she tells us.
We hang up the phone. We remember our training, where we learned that sometimes the longer a baby has been in an institution, the higher the risk of development and attachment problems. We talk. We pray. We weep. We pick up the phone and call the woman back.
This is our daughter. Send us a picture.
We get our photo Jan is sending us a picture of our daughter via e-mail, and our Internet service is out. We're upstairs, in the hallway. Pete waves a laptop over his head, trying to patch into our next-door neighbor's wireless service.
I'm doing my best to write down a birthdate, height, weight, location, all with trembling fingers. I have a list of questions recommended by other parents, concerning health, living conditions, dietary needs, clothing sizes. I manage to ask none of them.
But we get our photo, a small thumbnail headshot, and this much we know:
She is beautiful.
She is healthy.
Her name is Fu Li Bian.
Her birthday is May 26, the day after mine.
And she is waiting for us, in Hunan Province.
