Strangers with Candy

Ben here, finally taking my turn at trying to capture and narrate a few vignettes from our fast-moving drama. I see that Brandy, dutiful as always, has tried to keep you, gentle reader, sated with timely updates, and has already supplied her reflections on "Day 3." I'd like to return for a few moments to Day 1, and the brightly-lit room where family after family plays out the surreal scene of sudden expansion after seemingly interminable months of waiting.

 

It's an extraordinary place, that room, host to dozens of simultaneous human dramas as the emotions of the various parties collide: the Big People's quiet, anxious joy competing with the Little People's enormous terrified grief--all of it mediated by officious nationals who've seen it all before: nannies, notaries, guides, translators, bureaucrats of indeterminate function. To anyone who has been in that room, those scenes seem to demand documentation in some form, as the mushroom fields of the adoption blogosphere attest (and try running a YouTube search for "gotcha day" and you'll see further evidence of what I mean).

Plainly, Brandy and I are not immune to that documentarian impulse ourselves. The trick is to answer it with sweetness, light, and restraint. So I'll spare you the tedium of either a play-by-play (YouTube performs that service rather nicely, I think, and we'll provide those videos once we're home and no longer scribbling under the tyrannous shadow of the so-called "Great Firewall," whose sentries make uploading of such footage a real pain), or (gods of writerly decorum forbid!) of an overwrought stream-of-consciosness narrative, and instead attempt to sketch, as I said at the outset, just a few vignettes:

1. The Worst Toy

Somewhere between blowing the second and third stream of bubbles through a purple plastic bubble wand and into the small space between my face and Serena's, it occurred to me that this was a terrible idea. We had gotten the idea somewhere that bubbles were a great toy for "gotcha day": cheap, simple, portable, quick, and almost guaranteed to distract the frightened adoptee from her fear and perhaps even fill her with a sense of appreciative wonder for the marvelous abilities of her new captors.

That is not what happened. The bubbles startled her into momentary silence, yes, and snapped her eyes from distant dismay into focus as they drifted gently toward her, and even, for a half-moment, began to relax her little features from a tight, snot-smeared grimace into--well, I'll never know, because then the bubbles began to vanish. "Ephemerality," I reflected, as her howls redoubled, "is perhaps not the quality that this child needs to see exemplified just now."

2. Closing date.

I grant you that my only experience of hospital delivery rooms is what I've seen of them from tv and films and documentaries, but that said, I've seen quite of them, and never once was the proud father tapped on the shoulder and asked to sign something in triplicate. One of the many ways in which adopting a child is less like producing one the ol' fashioned way, and more like securing a home mortgage.

Not that we weren't expecting paperwork. We're pros at paperwork. We've come to take for granted the governmental confidence that the ineffable and unquantifiable can be guaranteed if only enough notaries stand witness. Get the bea And some paperwork duties are special, even fun, as when we were asked to "officially" write Serena's new name. We'd already "officially" verified her new name about six times, of course, but no matter; this gave us and the other trembling parents-to-be something useful to do while counting down our final few minutes before the invasion of the kiddos.

All very well and good. But then, after her entrance, when we were both consumed with comforting her and each other, reeling in the extraordinary moment for which we had been for months preparing . . .

 

. . . we had to attend to this:

 

I handed Serena back to Brandy, took the proffered pen, and, with Molly, our agency representative and facilitator hovering over me, gamely waded in. Need our personal info. again? Fine. Passport numbers? Of course! How could we have been so thoughtless as not to have provided them on any of the other documents up to this point, save for the twenty or so with our passport numbers? Annual salary, for the umpteenth time? Naturally; we don't let anyone making less than six figures have children, after all, and we can't have adoptive parents thinking they're above the law. Oh, and all of this is in triplicate, so I need to do it again, AGAIN? Well, no, there's no problem--sure, that's my little girl over there wondering what the devil is going on, and maybe my wife could use a hand trying to reassure her, but hey, I'm a perfectionist, and if the t's need crossing, I'm your man! (Particularly because I've become an expert at forging Brandy's signature, which really sped things up once Molly left for a moment to confer with a colleague about something.)

That done, there came the last document of the day, and the best of the bunch by far: "Application to Adopt a Child." Well gee, if only we'd gotten this one right away, we could have saved ourselves about a year and a half, and over a hundred dollars in postage alone! If it seems in bad taste to allude, however ironically, to the costs associated with one's child, I would submit to you that it is in even worse taste to present new parents at a moment such as the one I am describing with a form requiring a short essay (I'm not joking) explaining why we wanted to adopt a child, how we planned to care for her, and how we could guarantee we would neither abuse nor neglect her--all worthwhile considerations, mind you, which is why we had addressed them (as you may have gathered by now) A LONG TIME AGO in hour after hour of discussion with our social worker, and page after page after page of forms for the reading pleasure of all governments, departments, and agencies concerned.

But no matter. It wasn't that much messier than cutting an umbilical cord, and there was certainly no ambivalence over whether or not we wanted to keep any of it.

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Brandy, who is ready to wake our gorgeous sleeping child and see whether her new Beatles t-shirt (thanks, Janice!) fits before we all head down to our third breakfast as a family together, wants to know just what kind of a manifesto I think I'm writing that is taking so long. She is wise, my wife. TTFN, gentle reader.

 

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