From Gotcha to Baba and Mama in Seven Heavenly Days

I have time for one last long post before we head off to tour the Forbidden City and Tiananmen in the morning …

I want to tell you all what it's like to experience a Gotcha Day, and then to get through the ensuing first week with an adopted ten month old. I want to get it down now, before we leave China. Before my ethereal impressions fade into distant memory, or are cluttered out of memory altogether by the burgeoning number of sensations each day offers me of my daughter, the excitement that discovering her personality is filling me with …

I must get this first Gotcha Day and Week down now, while Mama and Maeve are sleeping and all is still. And the only way I can think of to describe a first Gotcha Day and Week is to contrast it with the two-year long mountain climb that prefaced our Gotcha experience.

Receiving a mystery daughter from China is a dream that seems so far off during the early stages it might as well be a Himalayan peak, shrouded in fog somewhere on the far side of world, and requiring planning worthy of an Everest expedition in order to gain access to the mountain in the first place. You must clamber up through precipitous foothills of paperwork. You'll be tested, and must display the appropriate levels of fitness; patience and great endurance are requisites.

And once your daughter's proposal pics finally arrive, and the travel permits are finally granted, and the towering peak of Gotcha Day finally slips out of the clouds and into view, you are forced to concede that you're too busy to be excited. You tell yourself the reality of what's about to happen will hit when you slip through the tentflaps of your Canadian home-basecamp, and start the ascent for China itself.

But the truth is, the reality of first-time parenthood remains shrouded even when you're on your final sprint for the summit---when you've scrambled out of the plane after landing in your mystery-baby's home province on the morning of the day you are to receive her. For Kath and I, and for the other couples we spoke to in our Nanchang group, Gotcha Day refused to congeal into the realm of the believable even as it unfolded.

In mid afternoon our group set out from the Galactic Peace International---the wonderful hotel home chosen for the week of our Nanchang stay---knowing the moment we'd be handed our precious Chinese daughters was just minutes away. Yet our collective Gotcha simply would not, could not take on any form beyond the puffs of fancy that had inflated us since beginning our adoption Home Studies.

The surrealilty of marching in slo-mo down a major street in Nanchang, a line of thirty-odd Westerners, some with parents or children or friends in tow, looking very much like a line of overgrown toddlers being led by hand by a flag-bearing teacher ... We appeared very odd indeed to the workers and street vendors who stopped to stare at us. Perhaps a third of us were videotaping our ponderously-paced march, which wound through an underpass and up onto the sidewalk on the far side of the street. The office tower housing the adoption center was just a block ahead, and local passers-by were pausing in their tracks, holding their breath, it seemed, as we walked to the doors of the adoption tower.

We shot our videos and said to each other, "It still doesn't seem real!"

This floating-on-a-cloud, let-me-know-when-I've-woken stroll from the hotel to the adoption tower took perhaps five minutes. Nevertheless, it seemed a compressed version of the preceding years of surreality, until we walked into the ground floor of the tower itself---

And there she was.

Most of our group had already passed a group of four fresh-off-the-bus babies; but Kath and I paused, for we immediately recognized our daughter, Cai Ling.

Time froze as we froze, gaping and gawking and wondering whether she were real, whether we were really awake. We gaped some more. Kath's dad Marcus had presence of mind enough to take a couple of pics of the clearly scared little bundle before us, our Maeve about-to-be. She did not look our way or take notice of us, even as I tried to get her attention. She was as out of it as we were.

I may even have taken video of her, waiting there on the ground floor, swaddled in the arms of her orphanage nurse. I don't recall, and if you can believe it---surely you can believe it!---I have not had time to check whether video was shot or not. We were whisked away from Cai Ling, being the final stragglers in our group. We were guided into an elevator and were levitated up to some high floor's reception rooms, where we waited mere moments. Everything was happening really fast now.

Gotcha happens too fast to imagine. Several of us stood around remarking about the dreamlike quality of what was happening, our hearts still unwilling to accept that the yearned-for pinnacle had been reached. For suddenly everybody was turning toward the reception room's door, and we were cast into a communal birth-by-osmosis, absorbing the tearful curiosity clinging to the beautiful babies being carried in to us.

And there was Cai Ling again, second baby in line. Then Kath and I were being summoned forward. Did the hammer come down, did the long-overdue bolt of excitement strike us?

I can tell you only that we felt a breathlessness; oxygen being at a premium in that room, as on a Himalayan peak. I can tell you that I felt outside myself, watching Kathleen step forward, wondering how my own feet were carrying me forward. I felt suffused with gratitude for being allowed to be step close to this lovely overdressed bundle, cloaked in her own confusion. I could see Cai Ling's bewilderment near the surface, her fears clutched as tightly to her as the tiny bells she clung to with one petite fist.

Then she was ours in a quantum switch-over, an act so quickly performed it will forever remain for me a cosmic sleight of hand. Cai Ling was there, cradled before us in the arms of her Xinyu orphanage nurse. She was there, she was not there. She was in Kathleen's arms. A healthy adorable baby girl, Cai Ling-become-Maeve, wriggling now to peer in wonder at her new Mom.

And though it all happened right before my eyes, the instant of receiving our daughter was not really possible to witness; it was like trying to witness Fate prestidigitate … Ah, the inexplicable marvel of adoption!

Could it be that we really had Maeve? That she was really crying as Kath held her, comforted her?

Our daughter was really, finally ours!

This blog's post-Gotcha posts document Maeve's separation anxiety during our first days and nights together. But let me finish this long-winded post by updating our daughter's condition vis-à-vis her newbie parents:

Maeve has bonded with both of us incredibly well. We are truly incredulous at her progress after just one week with us … Indeed, we are besides ourselves, for she has given us her blessing in the most perfect of ways. On Saturday she cried out a demanding "Ba!" when I left the room; so I returned instantly, and she smiled at me. I left again. She repeated this fundamental familial syllable of Mandarin; and chortled when I again returned at her summons.

By Sunday "Ba" had become "Baba!". I can proudly report that Maeve's first new word since meeting us is essentially "Daddy!"

Nevertheless, Kath remains the ultimate comfort when our daughter is really upset; only Kath's arms and succor will do when Maeve is sinking deep into tears, nightmares, fears, etc. Baba is merely an amusing side-show feature of her new life … Besides, it is likely Maeve was not close to her foster father, as we understand he would have been working long hours, out of the house most of the time, out of her life. It was her foster-mom Maeve grieved for during our first week together.

Yet on Sunday, my marvelous wife won from our new baby a more astonishing monicker-mantle than I had won. Maeve pointed to Kath, packing the diaper bag for an outing, and cried definitively "Ma!" A syllable that Maeve stretched into the double "Mama" early on Monday morning.

Just hours before we'd shared a full week of her life, she has already bestowed upon Kath that most treasured title, one transferred from a woman we'll be indebted to forever for the love she obviously lavished on our little beauty. So much love did this woman give to Cai Ling that it took only seven days for Cai Ling to transfer it onto us. It seems contradictory, but we'd been told that's how it works: the more love our baby received, the faster she'd begin falling in love with us.

Somewhere back in Xinyu is a foster-mom who must be broken-hearted; she loved our daughter more than enough for that. We know how blessed we are, and our solemn promise is to give Maeve as great a love as the love she lost. If her new names for us are any indication, we've made a good start on that lifelong task, here in Maeve's far-off homeland ...

Tomorrow, we bid goodbye to the land that has granted us custody of Maeve by taking our daughter to the Forbidden City and then on to Tiananmen. If time permits, I'll try to put up a final all-pics post of our final day's exploits tomorrow night. Then it's off to he Beijing airport Thursday morning at 10:30 for the flight home to Canada, and Maeve's first meetings with those of you who've been following our adoption adventure.

Good Night from the State Guest,
Maeve's Baba