My Beautiful Orchid

With a growing realization that we will only pass this way once, Audrey and I are repositioning our lives. To date both of us have been blessed with careers that allow for strange hours. As a network operations center administrator for a global e-commerce firm, I’ve been able to position myself with 12 hour shifts and unconventional start times that open up large weekday blocks of time. As a psychiatric nurse practitioner (ARNP) Audrey has enough flexibility to alternate her work schedule with mine allowing us to avoid day-care. Claire never wakes up to anyone but Mommy, Daddy, Nana, or Grandma. Even so, our new life has given us a deeper awareness of how fleeting childhood is, and with it a desire to raise the bar further. Heeding the call Audrey has decided to switch careers. While continuing in her medical profession she is also training to be a mortgage broker so that she can work full time out of our home and be present with Claire round the clock. The transition is neither easy nor safe. The hours are grueling and stressful, and the learning curve is steep. Being on a limited timeline she must complete the transition in the next few months. Yet she has negotiated this obstacle course with speed and grace, and slowly but surely she is building a referral base that will provide stable ongoing business. Raising Claire has also brought us both a deepening burden for those who remain behind orphanage walls in China, and a desire to be part of something larger. Audrey will be partnering with the Oklahoma based relief agency Love Without Boundaries to raise funds for surgical care to orphans in China. 5 percent of every loan commission she makes will go in-place LWB programs that are providing these services. With China’s changing social welfare apparatus still in its infancy, surgical care is a luxury in many orphanages, but through LWB it can be made available at surprisingly low cost. A life saving heart surgery can be provided for $3,000-$5,000. $1000 buys a vision saving cornea transplant or 2 to 3 cleft palate surgeries. We’re committed to making this work!

How Claire has Changed Me

Dusk has arrived and a chill October rain is beginning to fall. Mommy is working tonight and we’re on our way to Nana’s for dinner and Mickey Mouse videos. We pull into Starbucks for Claire’s favorite treat, vanenna milk (vanilla milk). As we hurry toward the entrance her eyes light up. “Daddy, lookit!” she exclaims. “It’s a little doggie!” And so it is. A small stuffed puppy with black eyes and a little button nose lies in the shrubs where it was dropped, or discarded by a distracted child. “Wow Honey, looks like he needs to be rescued, what do you think?” We lift him out of the garden. He is wet and dirty, but otherwise like new. “Daddy, let’s rescue him and take him home!” Taking him to her breast, she names him “Buttons” and he comes with us.

The metaphor is of course, too poignant to be missed. Three years ago she was left on a street corner and the first year of her life was spent in a temporary foster home—unwanted, without a face or a story of her own. Now it is she who brings the forgotten one in from the cold wrapped in the arms of love. I soon realize that it’s not the autumn rain that’s filling my eyes.

When I look back over the last 2 ½ years of my life, I am at a loss for words. How shall I describe the way life with Claire has changed me? What have I learned from being father to an adopted Chinese girl? Sadly, my limited writing skills leave me ill equipped to answer such questions without evoking the sort of greeting card sentimentality that draws new-age gurus and pop music stars like fruit flies to cheap wine. I could say the experience has been transforming (it has), even redemptive (that too), but even there I tread dangerously close to banality.

Perhaps it would be best simply to speak from my own daily experience of life with Claire. More than anything else I’ve been struck by the changes in my emotional landscape. Since August of 2003 experiences like the one in the Starbucks parking lot have become increasingly common. I’ve grown sensitive to so many things that used to pass me by like ships in the night. I can scarcely remember a moment when I wasn’t on the verge of tears. A ray of sun finds its way through the clouds, somewhere a child laughs, a flower stirs in the breeze, a few measures of Dvorak find their way to my ears in a crowded mall…. and my eyes water. I never realized my heart could be this full.

The gospels record numerous events where Jesus is said to have “had compassion” on someone. Interestingly, the original Greek versions of these stories all make use of the same word for compassion, splagcnizomai. There is no direct English equivalent and “compassion” is at best a loose translation. Literally, the word means “passionate bowels” and is perhaps best captured by the phrase “gut-wrenching.” The widow who had lost her only son (Luke 7:11-15), the two blind men by the side of the road (Matt 20:29-34)—to everyone else they were statistics—invisible, unclean, inconvenient. Those people…. Matthew even tells us that when the two blind men pleaded for mercy, the crowd “sternly told them to be quiet” (Matt 20:31). Yet to Jesus, they were human—with names, faces, and stories to tell, and their suffering was a gut-wrenching tragedy. Every time I hear yet another UNICEF report on child disease and mortality in post-invasion Iraq—while Claire plays at my feet—I feel a little closer to what he must have felt. Who knows? Maybe after a lifetime of Christian faith I’m finally getting it. Some day I may even have as many sleepless nights as He did.

I play more than I used to and I’m goofier in public, which admittedly can be more annoying than amusing. Yet that bothers me less than it used to (another change). Under Claire’s gentle tutelage, I’m learning all kinds of things. At construction sites for instance, there are mommy, daddy, and baby cranes (I’m still learning how to tell them apart). The tic-tac-toe play structure at one of her favorite mall playgrounds is actually a gas pump that can be used to fill up the toy cars she likes to ride there. It even takes my debit card! As a 20 year veteran U2 fan, I’ve always thought of myself as having an intimate grasp of their music…. Until Claire began referring to it as “that music underwater.” Huh? Returning to old U2 favorites I sift through Bono’s impassioned anthems and the reverb soaked propulsion of Edge’s guitar with a new set of ears…. And I see! It does sound like music playing underwater! Never in a million years would I have come up with an angle like that. How on earth did she?