February 02, 2010
Five years ago today...
...we saw a picture of our little girl for the first time. It was a baby picture, she was maybe 9 or 10 months, outdated, we learned she had just turned 2. The photograph was small, maybe even black and white, but we could tell she was smiling. (Much later, we asked for that photo but they would not give it to us).
It was Feb. 2, 2005, and we were at Ukraine's adoption center after a long journey of document-gathering in the U.S. and frustrating delays in Ukraine. But there we were, in folding chairs in a small room with a psychologist and a big, fat book that looked like a photo album with pages and pages of children without homes. The ones with special needs or recently updated health issues had sticky notes on them, with handwritten scribbles. This was their system. It was far from perfect.
The psychologist, a pleasant young woman, asked our facilitator again if we were looking for a girl? Yes, she said. The woman looked skeptical. But at last she showed us our daughter's page. My first reaction was, oh my she is only 2 years old. I had a notion that our daughter was probably older, maybe 4 or 5. Children younger than 2 are very difficult to find, we were told many, many times. But this little girl had just become available for international adoption only days before.
Would we like to go see her? Yes, of course we would. We were still in shock when we left the adoption center. Wow. A 2-year-old girl. We forgot to ask her name.
A few days of approvals and more documents went by before we finally met our daughter. This is your mommy and daddy, she was told. (Can you imagine?) She was scared. She cried. We tried to comfort her, we tried to explain.
We will be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And one day, we will take you home. We will give you everything we could possibly give. We will open the world to you. We are so happy for this day.
