Ransom for Israel

How Adoption Looks – 2 Years Later

There is no other life event that I know of, that is such a crazy leap.  My marriage, even the birth of my children, both had a period of waiting and prior connection. With international adoption, you walk into this room and they sit you down and time stands still. You are recalling the photo from the referral listing that you have memorized and engraved in your mind’s eye. You have assigned many things to the child pictured; hopes, fears and expectations. You work to regulate your breathing, and you try to appear nonchalant; because you know, you totally ‘got this’ and you are cool and fresh. Inside your heart is pounding from your chest and you think perhaps you might pass out.
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This was Israel’s referral picture. Dakota was his name on the orphan advocacy website called Reeces Rainbow.(www.reecesrainbow.org)

 

I remember the sound of heels clicking on linoleum, the heat pressing down on me punctuated by foreign smells and the feel of sweat trickling down my back. My entire being sat strung tight as I waited to meet the child who would soon call me mommy. It felt equal parts terror, joy and fatigue. I was so incredibly ill-prepared and thank God for this, because had I known that fear would gallop away with my mind and that I would struggle with post adoption depression; I might have missed out on Israel, a boy that taught me that hope is truly born in the darkest of spaces. 

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” Anne Lamott

International adoption is quite simply….terrifying. You are going to step off a plane, in a foreign country, surrounded by people speaking rapidly in a language you don’t understand a word of, and bring home a child who will look at you with large, terrified eyes and quite possibly loud screaming protests that usually occur in a foreign hotel room or 35,000 miles in the air on a 10 hour airplane flight. Inside you are thinking, “oh my God, what have I done….I can’t do this, I think I just destroyed our lives”
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 You will try to remind yourself that the end goal was to bring this traumatized human into your tiny, small town life and give them a family. However, these words don’t penetrate the blanket of fear that settled upon you the moment you were left alone in a foreign hotel with the scared and feral tiny tot who has now become your child.  You might be thinking, this is some scary hard shit! And maybe you made a wrong choice.
Israel was confined to this crib for much of his life prior to adoption. He was four years old in this picture and this is where they kept him.

Israel was confined to this crib for much of his life prior to adoption. He was four years old in this picture and this is where they kept him.

Israel’s pain overwhelmed me.  Looking back I can say that when you bring home such black and dark trauma, it is not something you just roll up on with acceptance and love. I struggled every day for months, and while I sat at home with Israel, his needs overwhelmed me. I would wait for my husband to get home after work, so that I could run out the door and just breathe. Israel clung to me and stole my very breath, and he followed me all day and called my name over and over, “mommy, mommy, mommy” and his claim to my heart scared me.  I was a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-achieving woman who struggled to come to terms with the falsehoods of my own expectations. I was scared to death to sit in the dark space he lived because I wanted to move ahead to a space of healing and hope. I did not want to sit with the truth of Israel, because the moment he was thrust into my arms, I realized that I had just stepped off a cliff…without a parachute or a plan. In the midst of that dark plummet, I knew that I had made a choice and that I would follow through. I faked my love for this broken little boy. I am not proud of this, but I am also human and broken; and my brokenness was greater than his.
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You see, that referral picture hid dark truth and when I met him in ‘real life’, he did not meet the image of my adoption expectations. My pictured expectations hid the emaciated body and horribly twisted spine. They did not share the fact that Israel had been operated on repeatedly and for no apparent reason, and would bear the long-term damage of a spinal canal filled with scar tissue. They hid the deep emotional wounds inflicted by neglect and abuse. And the image I built in my mind, believed the truths that I wanted to believe, because no one wants to sit in the knowledge that a child can be treated worse than an animal. No one wants to believe that orphans die, or worse that they live. And when they do live, they live without hope, in a space that is dark; waiting for someone to show up. Mostly I believed that I could easily carry this boy home and carry on with the life I had been living; unscathed and untouched by his past.
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This is Israel the first week we brought him home. His bones threatened to escape skin and he was so incredibly tiny for a 4 year old. He wore 18 month clothing.

 Over time I learned to breathe and sit in the dark space with Israel. I began to love this child who had opened my eyes to children who sit and wait.IMG_4011
 When he woke, every fiber of his being was bent on survival. His mind lived in Maslow’s hierarchy of need..food and drink drove him to secure meals and water. I know that in the orphanage there is never enough and his time spent feeling deprived had ingrained a single minded obsession to fulfill basic needs. And what was hard, was my inability to alleviate that drive. There was not enough food or water to fill the hole, because the hole was not found in his belly, it was deep in his heart.
Israel was given a cup of water to show me that he could drink by himself. You cannot see in the picture, but his little hands shook and his eyes kept glancing at me as he worked hard to show me he was worthy of my love because he could drink from a metal cup and not spill a drop.

Israel was given a cup of water to show me that he could drink by himself. You cannot see in the picture, but his little hands shook and his eyes kept glancing at me as he worked hard to show me he was worthy of my love because he could drink from a metal cup and not spill a drop.

I don’t remember the day that things changed, I imagine it was a series of moments where I showed up and didn’t bring my grand expectations. All I know is that Israel changed me. He created in me a deeper capacity to hope. He showed me that we cannot make the dawn come sooner than it is supposed to. I learned that we cannot truly understand hope unless we are sitting in the deepest dark. And what has been really interesting, is that I never noticed the dawn. It must have stole suddenly upon us, because I look and see the light is streaming in. Israel’s new dawn is beautiful and breath-taking and what he needed was a mother to show up for him each day and simply sit in his space, without expectations and trauma fixes. Because the truth is that hope is best flamed by the gentle breath of a mother, whispering words of love in the dark.

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