One Year Today and "Witch Crap"

It has been one year today since we were LID to China for our second adoption. One year, and it feels like there is no end. Or rather, the end will come because we will both be too old in the CCAA's eyes to adopt again, even if we are supposed to be grandfathered under the old rules. We really are lucky we got to adopt the first time, in my opinion. I do have a lot of sympathy for those who haven't adopted even once yet and may yet be affected by the new rules.


I know there are many others in our boat. The frustration is hard to take, as I witness their posts on APC daily. However, as I have said on my website... instead of wanting it so much it has driven me crazy, I have given this whole thing now over to God. I prayed the other night and just simply said if this is to be, then you will see that it happens. If this is not what we are supposed to do, then we will be raising one really great daughter, and I am forever grateful that she is ours to love and spoil.





Case in point... last night she had a dish towel she loves to hold on to and sleep with. She had bunched it up in a big ball and was pretending it was a witch. She said to me, "This was made with witch crap."

She was trying to say witchcraft. I can't tell you how much I laughed.

Then this morning, I got up around 4 am (couldn't sleep) and went downstairs to take care of some things. She woke up around 5 am and began crying because I wasn't in bed with her. When I got there, she wiped her tears away and then laid down with her back up against me, and fell fast asleep. As long as I'm there, she is fine. I know I'm probably romanticizing this - but I wonder if this is how she was abandoned... she went to sleep with her mother there with her, and then woke up alone and in a strange, cold place. The brain is a funny thing... it stores memory or impressions of things that we can't possibly pull up into our consciousness, but it's there none-the-less. And it affects us on a level we can't even fathom.

No one can tell me a newborn is just a lump that eats, pees and sleeps. I remember when my brother was living with a woman who had given birth while they were together (to someone else's child - he began living with her while she was about 4 months pregnant and knew the child wasn't his... but that's a whole 'nother story to tell). My brother had talked to the child when she was in the womb, so I have no doubt she heard his voice. When she was born, he held her in his hands, and I would watch him talk to her - and she would respond with excitement and what appeared to be a pleased look on her face. She recognized his voice.

I, on the other hand, would talk to her in a similar fashion, but she would furrow her brow, because I was totally foreign to her. She'd never heard my voice, and even though I slightly resembled my brother, she knew darn good and well I was not him. So I know that even newborns can have some kind of memory or recognition, and that it stays with them.

So, although I don't really know the circumstances surrounding her abandonment, I don't think it is totally unreasonable to think that she remembers something of the fear that must have been present when she realized there was no mother who would come when she cried.

Am I crazy for thinking this?