Clementine's Story: Part 1

I have begun to write down Clementine's adoption story, something I have been meaning to do for a very long time. There is much in this story that I would be happy to forget, which is easy to do when you are in the midst of parenting. I also know that I need to remember; for Clementine's sake as well as for my own. I will be "publishing" the complete story in three parts.

Part 1

She descended like a tropical bird into a family of grey city pigeons, bringing a high wattage smile and an insuppressible booty shacking rhythm. Clementine’s depth of emotion blistered our white washed family and there were times we stared, wide eyed and dumb at our exotic child. We were a study in contrasts in every possible way and I can only imagine what we looked like to her. Even now, with the language capacity to describe things, her memories of those first few weeks and months in our home are beginning to fade. Clementine was 4 years old when we made the final trip to Haiti to bring her to Seattle. She quietly wept as I carried her from the orphanage van to the airport terminal. Her father and I made an earnest attempt to comfort her with the few words of Creole that we knew, but our strangeness could not be overcome with a familiar phrase or two. She knew that something big was going on; something huge. There was no way for her to know just how huge this day was or how much effort had gone into making it happen, but it was the day that our family lineage took a great big detour to the south.

All children start as an idea. The seed of Clementine was planted 4 years before she was born and 8 years before she came to live with us. My husband and I were working in West Africa when the spark of starting our family through adoption began a chain of events that brings us to the present. Adoption is an easy thought, full of benevolence and idealism. But the process of adoption strips any veneer away, leaving only the bones of your commitment and laying to rest most of the theories you started with. We both come from families who live lives of service so it wasn't the wildest thought, to adopt internationally. We were in touch, through 1 or 2 degrees of separation, with dozens of families who had completed adoptions but the nuts and bolts of the process were still far from our minds at this point. We slowly began to rearrange our life to accommodate our first child. This was a 4 year process that involved international moves, saving 10s of thousands of dollars by living in our parents’ spare room and piles and piles of paperwork. In the end, we went through a nightmarish adoption process that brought us to our knees on several different occasions. But in the beginning, there was none of the benefit of this knowledge.

Clementine likes pink, rainbows and coloring and in that way she is a very typical 5 year old. We have had 18 months with our daughter and everyone has had an intense season of familiarity that can only come through the intimacy of domestic life. She loves to eat just about anything but especially cheese quesadillas. She is desperate to be in charge of something or someone and her younger brother and sister are often the recipients of her leadership. She sleeps like the dead and unconsciously roams to all four corners of her bed. Clementine’s feelings towards me are complicated and conflicted. She wants my love and affection but my warmth is often met with suspicion. We have had more than a year to get to know each other, and things are certainly easier between us now, but we are making up for 4 missed years of mothering and supplying those deficiencies can not be rushed. Time is what we have now. I will be the one to watch the opinions about clothes deepen. I will be the one to extend unbegrudging tenderness. I get to teach her to tie her shoes and draw a star. I get to be Clementine’s mom, for better or worse. She is mine, in no less sovereign a way than the children from my womb. She is mine, but she is not whole, in the way that the sheltered children from my body are whole. Clementine will need to learn to forgive those who have failed her and that is important for me to remember. Many people failed her, myself included, and much forgiveness will need to take place. I don’t know how to teach her how to do this, except to forgive her myself. Forgive the chaos that she brings to my home, forgive the manipulation with out succumbing to it. Forgive 70 times 7.

And so begins the journey of adding Clementine to our family.