A view from her eyes...

What will it be like to our new daughter when we come to get her?  What will she think of us?  I won't be able to tell how she reacts for a few weeks yet, and I may never know what she was thinking (since she might not have language to tell me), but I can try and imagine from her point of view.....

Rehema has just turned two years old.  She has enough to eat, a routine around her every day, adults who take care of her, older children to play with and younger children whom she feels good helping out with.  Young children love the familiar and love what they know (for instance, young children would generally prefer to stay even in depraved or abusive situations rather than risk losing the familiar), and there is no particular reason to dislike the current world around her.  She might have some dim and distant memory that once there was something different in her life, perhaps some vague association with something about a family situation, perhaps with happiness and peace in those memories, or perhaps fearfulness and being constantly on guard.  But a long time ago (10 months) that home suddenly disappeared, and while Rehema was in a fog of hunger and a terrible sickness, everything around her changed.  She never saw those people again or heard the sounds of her village.  What might have been a calm and green country village changed for a walled compound in the middle of a city, and this is her new normal.  Eventually, she started feeling much better and stronger.  She started walking and climbing, and learned a few words.  There is always something to watch, and she is not hurting any more.

And then, who are these new people coming here?  She has seen white people before, when other adoptive parents visit their children.  But we must still sound very strange, and look strange, and smell strange, and dress strange.  She would prefer to disappear and hide so she can just watch and figure out what is going on, but these new people look straight at her, and her caregiver calls out to her -- her disappearance is not working quite right!

A baby might not have figured out the details of her own world and routine, and an older child might be able to understand a discussion about what is happening to her.  But a two-year-old, even one brought up in a calm and loving family environment, does not have much (if any) abstract reasoning ability in any language.  Does a two-year-old understand what "mother" or "family" means?  Of course, a child with a typical background understands who her mother is, and probably even someone else's mother, but "mother" as an abstract, interchangeable, concept?  I doubt it.  For a child who has never lived in a nuclear family, and who probably has no specific memories of her mother or family, and whose language development is delayed by her necessary focus on survival, these concepts are going to be meaningless.  Surely, her caregivers will try and explain something to her: "your new family is coming today.  Soon you will go home with them.  You will live with them forever and ever.  You will go to America and be their daughter.  Remember how Jane had a new mother who visited her and then she went home with her?  What a lucky girl you will be!  You will have so many presents and pretty clothes."  If we put this speech through the filter of two-year-old concrete understanding, added to no family experience, what do we have left?  Probably a reminder about a friend who inexplicably disappeared, followed by a nonsensical comment about clothes.  Rehema might later decide to go look in the dresser drawers for Jane!


So, although I will never be able to really know what Rehema is and will be thinking, I am already thinking about how I can make this time easier for her.  First of all, one of the reasons I chose this program is so that we can have a slow and gentle transition; we might have a full month of visiting before she leaves her home with us.  As soon as we were matched, we sent her pictures of ourselves, and I made a collage with all the family members in it.  This month, I prepared a little book for her, describing our family and our routines in pictures, interspersed with as many pictures as I could of her doing the same things.  ("We like to walk outside.  Rehema walks outside too!")  I doubt she will really understand much of it, but it is pleasant to feel like you recognize something, even vaguely.  We might not seem so utterly foreign to her, and when she arrives here, some simple scenes might seem remembered.

When we arrive, I would imagine that she will begin to feel comfortable with Emerson first, since children are more familiar and less threatening.  He will probably be playing with the bolder children at the orphanage within minutes, so that will make him seem normal, as well!  Hopefully, when she sees Emerson responding to and trusting his daddy and I, she will begin to think that we are not too dangerous.  I have been preparing simple games and toys and songs that we can use to practice interacting, such as passing or rolling a ball back and forth.  Hopefully, as time passes, I will be able to take over some of her care routines, such as giving her food or helping to bathe her, so she learns that I can take care of her needs.  We will use books and toys to talk about words, objects, and feelings, to gain some vocabulary.  Over time, she might be willing to sit on my lap as I point to the funny colors and sounds on the page in front of us.  Then she might let me carry/wear her around the orphanage, and decide that being physically close to someone can be a safe and pleasant place to hang out.  Meanwhile, she will get used to our smells and sounds.  I will build in special routines to the bits of our day together, especially times when we first see each other, and the scary time when we have to go away (because "going away" is always scary to children whose lives have already "gone away" too much).  Emerson and I have been picking out a goodbye song, and decided that we'll make "I love you" hands to say goodbye.  I think I will make up a "hello" song that is based on her own name, although first we have to decide what her whole name will be! 

So hopefully, by the time she leaves the orphanage and comes to stay with us, she feels comfortable and even somewhat safe with us.  That safety and the tiny bit of routine that we have established between us will be a fragile bridge to carry her through the next upheaval of her life.  She has probably hardly left the orphanage compound for the last year; everything will seem so busy and overwhelming!  Things to see, hear, and smell in all directions, and how does she know what is dangerous?  (Her natural assumption will probably be "almost everything"!)  We will be able to visit the orphanage, check in, and say goodbye (many times!), but that is again a bunch of abstract ideas for a very little girl.  Fortunately, we will have another two or three weeks in her country, where at least the sounds and smells and food will remain familiar, before we get on a very strange plane and go for a very long time in a very strange way until we end up in the strangest place yet, surrounded by the strangest people making a strange clatter with their language, and even air that feels strange in the lungs!


Sometimes it seems like so much to subject such a little girl to; I wish I could protect her and shelter her.  Every step of adoption involves so much tragedy for the little children!  But we will all have to have faith that things will get better eventually, and that we will be able to help her come out of her shell of fear and self-protection in which life has so far encrusted her.  We will face each day as it comes, and one day........  I will come back in January 2014 and tell you how our lives have all changed!