An EcclesIastical Procession of Nannies

On meeting my daughter in China, and everything I couldn't look at directly

I wrote this years ago and it popped into my head this morning. It’s about all the things you carry into a room when your life is about to change completely. I’m publishing it first because it tells you more about what this newsletter is about than anything I could explain.

My daughter and I, Hunan Province, 2005.

The room was overheated and ugly in the way that only outdated governmental waiting rooms can be. We peered through green air as if in an old Polaroid, as if swimming under water. People laughed watery laughs and gesticulated bleary hands and drifted along rippling floors, swollen with adrenaline.

When the babies arrived efficiently in an almost ecclesiastical procession of nannies who seated themselves (in synchronized fashion) in the long row of chairs at the far side of the room, another unwanted wave of adrenaline sloshed through the room. K and I ran this first gauntlet—finding her in the line-up of twenty-three babies—winning a hollow victory. She looked nothing like the chubby, ruddy-cheeked baby in the pictures.

Propped on the Director’s lap she was sallow, all elbows and knees, her bald head covered in scabs. She stared at her fingers, rocking back and forth, seemingly unaware of the commotion. Well, everything. Seemingly unaware of everything. We passed a second test (the receiving of the child) with another unwanted victory of sorts—she did not scream, cry, squirm, flail, emit a sound, or make eye contact. She did not move; she did not turn her head, the back of which was too flat.

I too was unwell, having been at the International Clinic with a lovely, nectar-filled I.V. bunged in my arm the previous day. Our adventure had begun marvelously—enveloping airline chairs reclining flat, cozy with warm blankets, amusing slippers, nonsensically small tubes of tooth powder. If at thirty thousand over the Pacific a feral bird reeking of ambiguity and vulnerability landed heavily on my eye-masked head it didn’t matter. Slumped under its weight I buoyed myself by recalling the extensive preparations. If the unthinkable were to occur these cushions were life vests and I could swim.

Out of the crisp hotel in baking air we stared at beautiful strange things, our note-taking clerical: the briny-sour of grocery shops, the flat-slap of pedestrians, the pearl-smoothness of ancient statuary. We documented with photographs and video, reporting back to our stateside people. We read corrugated plastic signs and checked things off.

The Bird-of-Ambiguity-and-Vulnerability (TBAV, whom we named Frank and whose purple talons would not leave my head) wobbled annoyingly, limiting my view and fatiguing my neck. With Frank we purchased what we been instructed to purchase (jade, porcelain, shoes with lions on them). The rule about no lettuce Frank and I followed exactly, K less so. We three memorized culturally relevant facts. We three looked fixedly at things, day after day, in an increasingly stoically happy and interested manner in the stale August heat, looking fixedly until one afternoon little pieces of the world began to dissolve and I, always prone, curled into a flat black bench, sweating and crying, asking K to please give the baby a kiss for me and tell her I was so very sorry. Then smeary snapshots of a lengthy, circuitous ride in a pedicab which resembled nothing so much as the last fifty or so pages of Moby Dick.

After the I.V. the flights were fine, the buses fine, the hotel room fine, the bed severe but flat. Flat was my favorite, next to motionless. And now here we were, the girl with the shark eyes, Frank, and I, on the hard, flat bed (which was fine), motionless excepting her occasional rocking, staring at each other, she thinking unknown thoughts, Frank occasionally pecking the furrows on my forehead.

Of course I knew many adopted children are withdrawn initially. I reminded myself we were only one night in, less than twenty-four hours from our introductions. I thought how Walt Disney (in unrepentant contrast to Dickens) told stories about orphans who were unrecognized princesses. There was something, though. Her lower leg-like appendages were previously unused, dollish in their floppiness. She solemnly vomited every time we put solid food in her mouth. The other girls recognized each other at breakfast and on the bus. The other girls ran up and down the hallway. The other girls were not suspended in a baffling fog, not with the unblinking button eyes of ghost children in Coraline’s Otherworld.

On our laptops K and I researched potential diagnoses. We said the word autism out loud, flatly but quietly, within the confines of our room. I emailed the thoughtful International Adoption doctor at the famous research hospital about our daughter whose head was not fine. K chatted up the other parents who had children with round heads. Out of the hotel room we remained stubbornly jolly as we continued to stare at things and take video, video which would one day represent the Before in the aftermath of a miracle.

The back of her head was hard to look at.

Heads. What can heads do? Heads can march in straight lines to solve Challenges. Heads can gather relevant facts and document incidents unequivocally. Heads can breathe while backstroking in chlorinated swimming pools. Heads cannot submerge themselves in murky water long enough to hit bottom and scrabble for ancient shipwreck coins. Heads cannot be flat.

The heads continued to go places and do things. The heads rode elevators and buses and wrote names on papers. Our heads stuffed large suitcases full of formula and diapers and checked out. Our heads wrestled multiple suitcases full of too-big clothes and unused toys and checked in. We pushed through touristy tours with elaborate cameras in front of our eyes. We slung the feather-light girl with shark eyes and together climbed up and down, in and out, over and through.

Frank shifts, comfortable in his elaborate nest in my hair. Together on the flat bed we stare into those dead shark eyes with as much joy as we can muster for as long as we can bear, finally resurfacing and gasping, sucking in thick unfamiliar air.