I had known all weekend this would be the day -- three blissful days of certainty at the tail end of 39 months of painful unpredictability. Agencies had received referrals from China on Friday. Most quickly notified their waiting parents. Ours was more cautious, taking the weekend to translate and double-check the documents before sharing their precious contents.
We’d been told to expect a call around 11:00, so I busied myself all morning, walking the dog and picking quart after quart of strawberries from our prolific backyard patch before showering. When the phone on the kitchen counter rang at 11:15, I jumped for it and put it on speaker so Don could hear.
Deb said we had a daughter and she was “a little chunk.” She was almost 11 months old and lived in Yifeng, Jiangxi Province, China. If we were ready to see our daughter’s face, she would email the photo.
Don and I hurried downstairs to the office. With shaking hands, I opened the message and double-clicked on the attachment. A small, perfectly round face appeared in the center of the screen -- looking right at me, with an intensity and composure uncommon for an infant. It was almost as if she’d been daring the photographer to capture her essence.
She looked nothing like what I expected. Preparing for this day, I’d viewed oodles of referral photos online. Most were juxtaposed with shots of the same child years later, revealing a remarkable transformation. Frail, sickly infants beside hale and hearty grade schoolers.
But there was nothing sickly about this baby. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were full and unblemished, and, in the full-length photo we received by Fedex the next day, her little fingers were so chubby there were creases at her knuckles. We learned she weighed 22 lbs. at six months -- she was not frail; she was a force.
Her beauty took my breath away. She was perfect. Don said, “A key characteristic of beauty is symmetry, and she has it.” Not just beautiful, she was an old soul -- calm and wise beyond her age.
Her name was Zhuang Lu Yi. Zhuang, the surname of all the babies at her orphanage, Lu meaning “road” or “journey,” and Yi “to recollect.” A suitably serious name for such an earnest little one: “Remember the journey.”
Deb said we would receive a Fedex packet with more photos and paperwork -- always the paperwork -- the next day. We could expect to travel to China in five-to-seven weeks.
After calling our parents with the good news, I plugged the little information we’d received into a pre-drafted email message, attached the headshot, and broadcasted the announcement to family and friends. Congratulations rolled in all afternoon, along with reactions to the photo.
“She’s a Buddha baby!” gushed Georgette.
“She looks intense and will be a handful,” assessed Amanda.
And, my favorite, from Don’s best friend Jim: “She looks as though she will solve global warming.”
Ironically, on the day I accepted the greatest responsibility of my life, I felt tremendous peace. The previous years had been torturous, as the wait time to be matched with a baby stretched ever-longer and Don and I continued to grow older. Were we doing the right thing, both for us and our future daughter? Should we drop out and accept that it wasn’t meant to be?
But every time we discussed it, at my instigation, Don insisted we wait a little longer. He knew how much being a mother meant to me.
And now, under Lu Yi’s steady gaze, I was ready to step into the role, feeling prepared for whatever lay ahead. The joke was on me. What an amazing journey it's been.
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