Ten Years of Yesterdays

Tomorrow is always ephemera.

Today is a fact, is happening as we move and speak and act, is created as we live and collide like atoms in aether with others living their lives in their own ways. Today is the play we're writing as we live it, passing moment by moment into yesterday and past history.

But tomorrow is a chimera.

Much of our tomorrows is entrained by our todays. But there's always an uncertainty, a randomness that makes tomorrow nothing but a vague sort of promise half-muttered, half-heard until the remorseless wheel of Time brings it to us as the next today.

Being human we love - have always loved, probably always will love - the idea of messing about with yesterdays and tomorrows. I think it has something to do with our contrasting the mutability of tomorrow with the intransigence of yesterday, and the contrast between hope and regret.

"If we fall in the race though we win
The hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin
Remaineth forever Remorse."
~ R. Kipling

If we could only go back and change this or that yesterday; say the "right" thing instead of the wrong one, do this instead of that, love more wisely, act more quickly, fight harder, think faster...if we could just do all of that we would have saved that beloved, not lost that marriage, gotten that job, become wealthy, happier, greater than we are today, and present ourselves with an even greater tomorrow.

I got to thinking of all of this while writing the two preceding posts.

Because there was a time when if I could have I would have stopped time, reversed the spinning Earth, undone the hidden tragedy that took my elder daughter's life, diverted my world into another tomorrow where little Bryn lived and grew into that young woman who burned the offering at my grave.

But...

If Bryn had lived...

The world that cascades from that chance spins off into an infinity of mirrors.

With a living older sister my son, even if he arrives as such, becomes a different kid. And there's no guarantee that Mojo and I even have a son; perhaps our second child is another daughter. Perhaps we never have another child.

And with a living daughter, we certainly don't go through the insanely difficult and painful adoption process that finally, through some bizarre miracle comprehensible only to Loki, the God of Mischief and several junior functionaries working for the China Center for Adoption Affairs, provides us with the little girl who we know as Missy Shaomei. That little girl becomes someone else, in some other lifetime. We never know her.

And having sat up with her just last night (she was feeling quite unhappy with a sick headache from having fallen asleep with her glasses on combined with a stuffy sinus) I can't contemplate that with anything but horror.

So to change the past we change the present, and the future; to regain a lost daughter we have to lose another.

That's not an exchange I could, or would, make.

So I have to release that phantom-Bryn, that skinny girl wrapped in night-bedclothes, that stern young woman standing over my grave, to retain my very real Missy who is at this moment cuddled up with the Yellow Blanket and her beloved "stripey wubbie" watching some sort of awful Air Buddies movie her brother adores.

And - while a part of me grieves at the betrayal - the greater part of me is not displeased with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes that the problem with result of making the inflexible pledge of death before dishonor means that time will produce only the dead and the foresworn. I am in the unenviable position of the latter; for my living daughter I must foreswear any wish to restore my dead one.

I'm sorry about that, lovie, but the dead must bury their dead. I have a now-dear child that calls to me from this side of the Veil, and I would - even if I could, even if I had the power to change yesterday to be otherwise - go to her.

This time next year I will grieve for you again. But buried in that grief is the smaller sadness that I would now choose her over you, choose the life I have over the life that might have been, choose the messy reality of today over the unrealized promised of the tomorrow that never came.

Please, sir, I want some more.

The other day the kids were a complete, utter pain in the fucking ass for the better part of the morning. By noon Mojo had just about had it as they were loading up the car to go home from downtown.At which point Missy decided she had had just about enough, too.Missy: "I wish I was an ORPHAN so you couldn't tell me what to do!"
Mojo: "Fine. You can stay here, then. Somebody should come along in a while and maybe they'll take you home with them." (Missy's eyes go wide) "So, Peep, do YOU want to be an orphan, too?"
Peep: Naw. The food sucks."For once, I was wise enough to say absolutely nothing.

Lost Daze

It was somewhere around this time in September four years ago that we were lost in Guangzhou in a muggy haze of exhaustion, confusion and grief.We had just lost the first little girl we had hoped to adopt. No, not lost. Abandoned.

Little Yun-yun had been afflicted with some sort of brain damage, and, already shell-shocked by the stillbirth of our daughter five years before we broke off the adoption rather than go forward into an uncertain future with a child whose ability to grow might have been unimpaired...or might just stop completely at five, or nine, or fourteen, to be with us as a toddler or an adolescent for the rest of our lives.So we were in pretty bad shape when the neatly dressed director of the Social Welfare Institute in Dongguan (东莞) showed up at our room at the White Swan Hotel with a tiny crewcut little girl in a white jersey and teeny plastic sandals.And that's how it went for the next week or so; she silent and distressed, we harassed and barely functional as we replayed all the miserable routines we had already gone through the first week of the journey with a different child.It is difficult now to look at the rude, chatty pixie who loves Beefaroni and "My Little Pony" and remember that silent misery.But she is still there, that sad little girl, locked four years in the past, and so are the we of then.We've come far since that day, though, Little Miss, you and I and your mother, and now I can't imagine being without you, or your artless chatter, or your wriggly back-scratching confidence. Or, as tonight, when you fuss and fret and cry yourself to sleep over a foolish lost trinket. In content and in contention you are ours and we are yours, now, until we go on before you to our long sleep.From a stony beginning we have begun to create a soil of love, and from there I hope you will grow straight and bloom brightly. For the road ahead is long and for all that there will be stony places again, and storms, and darkness I believe that we will have times to walk together in the light of love and the sun of happiness.Happy Family Day, daughter.

We love you very much, indeed.

Orphan out of Carolina

I wanted to point you to a very good essay about adoption.

I've followed Lorrie over at Clueless In Carolina for years. She's that rare blogging combination of thoughtfulness and literacy that makes for genuinely good reading. She's hit a rough patch lately, and I hope things look up for her, but she's still a good read.

And her latest post was about adoption - her own.

I blog about adoption quite a bit. I have to; when a quarter of your public is adopted it kinda gets in your face. So it was painful to read;

"Today I realized for the first time that there is an unbridgeable gap between an adopted child and a person who can pick up the phone and call the people who brought them into the world and point to the bed where they were conceived. "I dread Father's Day," I told Roger tearfully. "I've lost two fathers."

And realize that there's really nothing you can say beyond that.

You know our story; we lost a daughter. Lorrie lost a father. Twice. Which is more heartrending, to lose the future, or to lose the past? I don't think that grief bothers keeping score.

I once wrote something about the effects of grief, and said;

"I realize anew reading "We must never limit the universe." from my friend's blog that what this old grief scar does do IS limit my universe. I'm perfectly functional, but I've taken the big wound. I can't ever again KNOW that something good is on the way. Because it was once and what arrived was pain and loss and sorrow. And nothing I could do - and I once foolishly said that anything that wanted to hurt my family would have to kill me first - was enough to stop the awful emptiness that still exists, a tiny universe of nothing but Dark Matter, in the locked room at the top of the stairs in the back of my head."

And now Lorrie knows that she, too, has that locked room where she can climb the stairs, and stand in the doorway, and see the face of Loss and say, welcome, old friend, old enemy.

Have you come to stay with me for a while?

I think you can sum up the entire business by remembering that every adoption begins with tragedy.

We Americans are especially bad at tragedy. We're the ultimate shiny happy people, and in a lot of ways that's a good thing. But not here.

I wish I had some words of wisdom or consolation for Lorrie. I don't. Some things are just pure grief.

The loss of her fathers, like all losses, like all griefs, can be softened by time and distance. As they are for all of us; the grieving parents, the harrowed soldiers, the bereft adoptees.But they will always be there, waiting, at the top of the stairs, waiting patiently to ask us if we want to sit with them on the top step and remember all the pain and heartache of the end of our yesterdays, and our tomorrows.