Flow

I have four stones on my desk at work, each etched with a Chinese symbol. The first is the symbol for courage, the second is the symbol for beauty, the third is the symbol for change, and the fourth is the symbol for river.

The symbol for river is three parallel lines etched in black ink on a white polished rock. It is my favorite of the four. It reminds me that life possesses a current, and while it's possible to direct one's course, fighting against the current is fruitless. It's best to let the current assist in one's course.

When we discovered that adopting a healthy infant from China would take two years, my husband and I asked our agency to supply us with information about any children who are older but who haven't been adopted yet due to minor medical issues (such as needing glasses or having a birth mark, for example. Depending on the country, these children are sometimes considered an embarrassment because they are "imperfect.") We explained to the agency that we hoped that the gap in our children's ages are not too wide, so that they might share some of the same interests and activities. So the agency started sending us information about older children.

Several of the children had cleft palates. I didn't realize that correction of a cleft palate requires several surgeries throughout the child's life. As the jaw and face grows, more surgeries are needed. Often speech therapy is necessary, and children with this condition may be more susceptible to certain infections. Depending upon insurance, some - but not all - medical intervention may be covered.

Another child we considered had a large port wine stain on her upper lip. The doctors we consulted thought it might fade over time, but that was speculation. We told the agency we would like to be adopt her, but another family was chosen. Fortunately for this child, she was wanted by more than one family.

Song Song's medical records arrived along with medical records for a little girl with a cleft lip and palate that was corrected. Song Song's medical condition was a kidney problem that was corrected. We sent both sets of medical records to the University of Washington Center for Adoption Medicine for review. A few weeks after the doctors had a chance to look at both sets of records, we had a meeting with them. My initial impression of each medical profile was that Song Song's condition involved more unknowns, and the other little girl had no outstanding issues. In fact, the opposite was the case. The little girl with the cleft palate would require a lot of medical care in the future, while Song Song appears to have no outstanding medical issues.

Through this review, we felt as though we were studying the teeth of a racehorse. It was necessary to evaluate the impact this child's health will have on our family. Because Song Song's health appears to be optimal, we chose her.

That said, I knew she was ours the moment I saw her picture. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just the current, carrying me along.

Race

This is a picture of my maternal grandfather in his WW I uniform. His eyes were the color of water. He was a first generation American; his parents were born in Sweden, and left that country poor and hungry at the turn of the century. They came through Ellis Island with thousands of other Swedes with the last name Swanson. I tried to locate them in the Ellis Island registry but gave up when, after an hour, I was only on first names beginning with "A."

When I was in law school I spent an evening riding in a patrol car with a City of Seattle police officer as extra credit for Criminal Procedure. The officer was Asian, and offered that it bothered him when people asked him where his family is "from." He explained that his ancestors were Chinese, but came to America in the early 1800's to build the railroads. The officer was born in the U.S., as had been five or six generations before him. No one has ever asked me where my family is "from."

The adoption agency we're using requires that families adopting a child of another race - in our case, Chinese - consider the child's feelings when others ask about the child's ancestry and when the child is old enough to inquire about it. We had to attend workshops and read materials about how a black or Asian child may likely feel growing up with people who don't look anything like the rest of the family. The agency required us to sign a statement to the effect that we promise to expose our Chinese daughter to her heritage, and the statement required us to enumerate exactly what resources in our community we might help us with this. Fortunately, Seattle has a huge Chinese population and there are many ways to celebrate Chinese holidays, to take classes in Mandarin, and to participate in the arts so that our daughter will know what her culture is like.

There are no guarantees, however, that she'll be interested in her culture. The agency related a story about one family who adopted a boy from Korea. They dutifully enrolled the little boy in all things Korean: marital arts, language, cooking, etc. The adopted child could not care less about the Korean culture, yet their biological child became obsessed with anything Korean. We don't intend to make our home a Mandarin home. We will wait until our adopted daughter expresses an interest in her culture before we become immersed in it. What we wish for her, fundamentally, is that she knows she is loved, and that she is an American.

Kate

Many aspects of the adoption process inspired in me a certain amount of apprehension, chief among them was the Homestudy. The Homestudy is exactly that - the study of one's home. In anticipation of this event, I scoured my house and quizzed my daughter on manners; any deviation from a healthy, happy household, I feared, would be tantamount to lying on a bed of red velvet pillows in a sequined bra and harem pants with a hookah hanging from my lips, opium clouds swirling toward the ceiling.

The social worker from the agency, Kate, called ahead of time to "assuage any concerns" about the Homestudy, explaining that the meeting shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, and that the purpose was to give the agency an idea of what our home looked like, to talk to any other members of the household about the adoption process, and to "answer any questions." I said I understood. Still, I thought, they need to make sure we don't keep yak in the basement or a have pit twenty feet deep from which bamboo spears are positioned skyward, camouflaged by a grassy cover.

Any anxiety I felt quickly evaporated when I met Kate. She called a few hours before we were supposed to meet and apologized for forgetting the appointment time, "but," she explained, "my car was broken into inside my garage and my laptop stolen, which contained all my scheduling information." She, too, wanted to make a good impression. And she did. She arrived on time, blond, blue-eyed, and very warm and friendly. She spent about an hour with us going over adoption basics - the type of child we felt would be a good fit with our family, whether we preferred a boy or a girl, how old we preferred the child to be. She also explained why she was asking these questions at our home, rather than asking that we meet at the agency: she needed to look at our surroundings. She explained that many people who haven't had any children adopt a toddler, but are unaware of safety issues in the home or of the type of stuff they need. She also wanted to talk to our daughter about her thoughts, which took about two minutes because our daughter, who was four years old at the time of the Homestudy, was able to see only about five minutes into the future. Accordingly, she said she felt "fine" about adopting a sister, and thought it would be "fun." Check.

Kate walked through our house, stating that we ought to put a baby gate at the top of the stairs, (duh), and asking where the baby's room would be. She also went over information that is stressed over and over again with adoptions - that the baby or child might have separation anxiety when they are first brought home. Kate was right. The meeting took only an hour and a half, and she had no "concerns" after going through our home and talking with us. (After she left I let the yak back into the kitchen).

Mommy Track

Within five minutes of being in my parents' presence, one of them will tell you that when I was little I wanted to be a "tennis pro or a CIA agent when I grew up." True, I fancied myself a person of action, either winning tournaments or fighting crime. I never looked into the future and imagined myself a mother. To the extent I thought about motherhood at all, it was in an abstract sense. Meaning that I thought it was something I'd get to one day, in the same way one "gets to" moving into a bigger house when a smaller one is outgrown or moves to a different town for a better job. I had no specific images, the way I had specific images of other feats.

The year I graduated from law school, a woman with whom I took the BAR exam started working for a large firm of trial lawyers and I went to work with an attorney that had just started his own firm advising cities, mostly so that he could do things the way they should be done and so he could spend more time with his family. When my daughter was born, I left my partners and reduced my work schedule. Thirteen years later, I my income is a fraction of this woman's; I haven't been inside a courtroom in a year, and I've not accepted any invitations to speak at conferences I attend in my chosen field. The vernacular for this state is "Mommy track."

I couldn't be happier. I drop my daughter off at school in the morning, hold her hand until she enters the classroom, and I'm the first person she sees when the bell rings in the afternoon. In between, I work about four or five hours as an attorney for a small city. From my daughter's point of view, I am a stay at home mom. But I am fortunately able to keep one foot planted in a career that I love as much as anyone could, and that has given me so much.

The woman I referred to above is in trial several weeks a year, and she is very notable within trial lawyer circles. The other day, I had to research a piece of proposed legislation, and when I went online to see who had testified against this particular bill, there was her name - she also belongs to a trial lawyer's association. She is a partner in her law firm, and trains other lawyers and speaks regularly at conferences. She also has two young sons.

When I imagine her life, I try very hard to view it in a light most favorable to her, meaning that I wish to believe she is a good mother to her sons and that they want for nothing. However, I am left wondering who takes care of them. I think she has a nanny. I would not be able to stomach a nanny. Nannys, governesses, highly-paid babysitters - they're all paid to do what mom can't get to because of her career. I can't imagine anyone else raising my children. When does my colleague go on field trips, help out in the lunch room, engage in the rather tedious task of nightly homework?

I really don't think it's possible to "have it all." No one knows who I am in my field anymore. I don't really care. My daughter knows who I am.

Cards

Last winter I sat in the parking lot of the West Seattle Taco Time, preparing to inhale the Natural Soft Taco Chicken No Cheese (320 calories) and Medium Diet Coke that I buy after every Saturday morning workout at the gym. Despite my ravenous hunger, I sat in the car for twenty minutes before going inside. I wanted to finish listening to This American Life on NPR. Ira Glass was interviewing a woman who adopted a little boy because she and her husband couldn't have a biological child. This alone was not too interesting to me. What was compelling was the fact that the little boy this couple adopted suffered from an attachment disorder so profound that at one point he tried to kill his adoptive mother with a butcher knife.

"Attachment Disorder" very generally a psychological disorder developed in children who have not bonded to a caregiver in the first few years of life. It can be corrected, but sometimes it can't. A psychologist named John Bowlby did experiments with rhesus monkeys in the 1940's and 1950's and found that the baby monkeys who were either ignored or neglected often died early. The theory translated to humans is that infants and babies require the experience of bonding to a caregiver or they may never be able to form "normal" human attachments.

The woman in the interview endured many years of abuse from this adopted boy and at one point her husband nearly left her because he couldn't live with the violence and hatred they endured every day. But for some mysterious reason she soldiered on, visiting therapists, doctors, and experts until she found a program that seemed to work. Exactly what that program was I don't recall because what the parents endured and why they chose to endure it was far more significant to me than the cure. Mostly I thought "how can I make sure that doesn't happen to us?"

Clearly many - if not most - children available for adoption internationally are healthy and well cared-for. However, the longer a child remains in an institutional setting without the one-on-one love and attention to which he is entitled, the chances that such neglect will manifest itself in some negative way increase. The child that was the subject of the NPR interview was the victim of severe abuse and neglect. He was also the product of the American foster care system, where often the most tenacious foster parents can't save these innocent casualties, compelling a conclusion that a foster child who grows up to be a happy, successful adult should be the subject of further research and study.

At the time I heard the interview, we were interested in adopting a little boy from Russia would be nearly three when he came to live with us. He had a small genetic abnormality that caused a smaller lower jaw but that usually corrects itself by puberty. After initially deciding this child should be ours, I suddenly started losing sleep and panicking, which in my experience means that I'm making decisions simply to move in a forward direction but without considering all the implications. My husband and I had a lot of unanswered questions about this child's background and overall health; while with biological children, parents play the hand they're dealt, we certainly did not want the deck stacked against us. We decided to continue on in the hopes that we would find a child with as few mysteries as possible under the circumstances.

A year later I believe the little Russian boy has been adopted. I'm definitely sleeping better now.