On Missing Beginnings

Hi everyone,
Pat and Kath are having trouble posting from China, so I'm more than happy to do the honours for them! Hopefully there will be more news soon!
Carolyn (mom to Maeve's foster sister, Kennedy)



Composing this blog entry at 4 AM on our second Gotcha Day ... We're still in Shanghai at the moment!

As Maeve is still struggling with time zone adjustment, we all got up at 3 and gazed out our hotel window at another vast pre-dawn Shanghai vista. It's an early beginning, and our thoughts at the moment are turning to great beginnings, great expectations of the day ahead.

In a few hours we'll be departing the hotel, heading to a smaller in-country airport for the flight to Nanchang and the meeting with our youngest daughter, who no doubt will be pretty upset by the transition into our arms, our family. Hopefully Maeve's presence and cheerfulness will help assuage Elspeth's fears and confusion about being handed over to us! It's going to be a bit of a bumpy ride, but that's par for the course so far on this trip!

This blog almost missed its beginning due to problems with electronics adapters, etc---but that's the least of the issues we've faced. We've already had a Titanic near-miss with an iceberg of sorts, a scrape along the bows of our first morning in Shanghai, rivets popped, putting the whole ship and journey in jeopardy ...

We're pretty sure we've navigated past all that, though, so hopefully there'll be no rough patches later today, outside of Elspeth's understandable grief over being parted from her foster family. (Though how that will manifest remains to be seen: inconsolable crying, silence, anger, fear, any or all of those combined.) One thing is certain: she'll be missing the familiar faces and voices of the people who've taken care of her since the day after her birth, her life's lost beginning.

I've been thinking a lot about missing beginnings during the week leading up to our Wednesday departure for Shanghai---largely because last week I came across a set of scribbled notes and quotes from a talk that Kath and I attended more than a year ago. The talk was given by an adult international adoptee named Dr. Bart Ballard at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Ballard was adopted from Vietnam way back in 1974, more than thirty years before Maeve`s adoption.

At first I didn't think we'd learn anything from Dr. Ballard's talk relevant to Maeve's adoption, much less Elspeth's adoption. But I jotted down some of the things he'd said. And by the end of the long talk---several hours long, with an intermission, coffee and muffins---Dr. Ballard was describing what he felt was a universal element to the adoption experience. (My re-discovery of my notes on Ballard's talk prompted a long-overdue letter to Maeve's adoption group, to share some of the quotes I'd written down).

Ballard summed up what he felt was universal among international adoptees he'd met (this was his area of academic study) in the following way:

Child adoptees generally develop a powerful curiosity when they reach teenage years or early adulthood: 'a need to know the whole of our life story.' Dr. Ballard spelled out this need in numerous ways, describing how he'd been possessed by his own uncontrollable curiosity in his late twenties, and how this urge led him to search for other children who'd been brought out of Saigon on the same flight to the United States he'd been on.

Ballard had only been three weeks old at the time of that flight. Yet he felt a bone-deep bond with those other children, as they represented one connection to his lost beginning that he could be certain of. Eventually a reunion was organized. And almost all of the children on that flight flocked from across the U.S., Canada, and Europe to attend, all drawn back together by the same need.

The need to know the whole of their own stories.

Since attending Ballard's talk back in 2008, I've had a chance to read "On the Origin of Stories", a book that discusses the urge all human cultures share in telling stories. There isn't a single culture that has not had an oral tradition. And consider this: the oldest stories we know of are painted in dozens of caves in the Pyrenees; those painted tales date back some 30 to 40 thousand years; several of those cave paintings clearly illustrate the sequence all stories told ever since share, the narrative direction captured simply and precisely by the words of Lewis Carroll ...

Begin at the beginning, then go on till you come to the end, then stop.

Ah, but there's the rub for international adoptees like Dr. Ballard and our daughters Maeve and Elspeth and the other girls in our adoption group. Our girls cannot begin their stories at the beginning.

My old notes from Ballard's talk included more than quotes. I'd jotted down my initial skepticism about the relevance of Ballard's experience to our daughters (by then we were well into the adoption process for El) ... Later jottings capture in short form how much I'd recognized and related to Ballard's claims about the universal need to know one's own story.

I'd jotted DICKENS!! followed by COPPERFIELD, a title which I'd then put a big X through ... What our girls are missing most is right there, in the classic beginning to Dickens' most famous novel.

CHAPTER ONE: I AM BORN.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I report that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Yeah, that's precisely what our daughters and the other girls in our adoption group don't get to know: the Copperfield opening. "To begin my life with the beginning of my life ..."

Beneath my crossed out COPPERFIELD, I'd jotted one final word in my notes:

PIP!

And underlined that three times.

You just have to turn to Dickens to see how universal the adoption experience is. He'd explored the matter in OLIVER TWIST, of course. But Pip, the central character of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, my favourite Dickens novel, declares the really universal stuff on the novel's first page. The opening scene has the orphan Pip visiting a lonely church graveyard (where he is about to meet the convict Magwich), and there he studies all the info he has on his lost parents, who are buried behind the church.

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.

Oh my, how true that reads to me ... When we received Maeve back in February 2007, we were given some sparingly terse lines written by her foster mom: answers to questions we'd posed to the foster mom about Maeve's first ten months of life. In total, we received about a paragraph of info on her first year. Those brief lines we have studied backward and forward, trying to read entire chapters into them, trying to make out the character of her life from the phrasing, and so on.

Had we actually received a note written by Maeve's birth parents, and left with Maeve along with the bottle of milk she was found with---some parents of adopted Chinese girls have been given such handwritten notes---we'd probably have had the writing analyzed by an expert, to see what it might reveal to us about our daughter's missing beginning.

Reading huge amounts into the smallest details, the merest gleanings of observation, the offhand comments made by the orphanage nannies ... That captures the experience of Gotcha Days about as well as anything else that can be said about them.

And now only a morning and a short flight to Jiangxi separate us from the Gotcha moment with Elspeth. This afternoon we'll be trying our best to ask whatever questions we can think of that might help El pierce the mystery of her missing beginning when she grows old enough to ask us what we learned on this amazing day.

We`ll try to post pics of Gotcha moments with El, and Maeve and El together, later tonight or tomorrow morning ... :)

P.S. We are now safely in Nanchang, and it's almost 3 pm! Maeve is fast asleep on the bed, and in another 2 hours, she'll be getting the best present we'll ever be able to give her ... Her little sister!