Bursting bubbles
As I walk down a main street near my home, a garment in the window of a store catches my eye. Something about the
pattern and the colors immediately connects. Wait - that's the top my baby is wearing . . .
I gave up long distance relationships with women many years ago. There was something very comforting and convenient about a loved one who was not present. The distance allowed fantasies to comfortably continue without the harsh intrusion of day-to-day life. Eventually, realities would rear their ugly head, bringing the relationships to a crashing halt. After many years of these cycles, I forced myself to abandon these type of relationships and eventually met and married my wife.
When the paperwork for our adoption went to China, my wife and I were plunged into a long distance relationship together. There was a fantasy waiting at the end of this particular phase of the relationship - the fantasy of me as a father, the fantasy of my wife as a mother, the fantasy of a family. We knew that the chances were very high that this fantasy would materialize in some form, but it was so far away. And with the length of the wait, the duration of this particular fantasy, so uncertain, we just put the whole topic out of our mind.
My wife had picked up a beautiful crib from a co-worker. We originally set it up in what would be the baby's room, but it was just taking up space and getting in the way. No matter how much we looked at it, it didn't make this idea of 'baby' any more concrete. After several weeks we took it down and put it away.
The day we received our referral everything changed. After hearing just a few, almost random facts about our daughter-to-be - her name, where she was from, her age and some other vital statistics - we could feel her presence becoming more and more material in our lives. She began to sweep over us like a warm enveloping cloud of joy.
A couple of days later we got a passport sized picture of the little girl who was known as Guo YuXiu but who would become Elinor Vera when she entered our family. Although we were told not to, we couldn't help but start to draw all sorts of conclusions from her tiny picture: she looked alert, she looked curious, she looked serious.
For now, still waiting to meet our daughter for the first time, the reality of a combination of colors and shapes on a fabric in a store window is as tangible as the two dimensional image we have of her. Our 3 months of living with that picture will in turn be shattered by the reality of our daughter, whatever that may be.
I hope to be able to embrace the reality of my daughter, when she arrives and
for the rest of our lives together. My mantra will be to see her as she is. The process called bonding will be
grafted onto a new kind of love that will become a part of our lives. Our daughter will be her own person and the
beauty and joy we get from her will include learning from her unique personality and soul.
So now I can to fantasize about the end of fantasy, about the reality that I dream will enrich my life through
the being of my daughter. I have to span a great gulf - from my formless image of a dream daughter, to the substance
of her constant presence in my life. The bubble will be burst, but that popping sound will be the beautiful music
of our family.
