My Beautiful Orchid

I’m also coming face to face with another bedrock reality of life—one that is too often diluted by the ever-present nemesis of greeting-card sap, yet is known to every parent in history who has preceded me. Fatherhood is not a mission to be accomplished as much as a journey to be walked with someone. Like so many other carefree urban professionals who expected to be a parent, some day, I had my own ideas of what it would be like. She would get all the appropriate training in life, be taught all the right values, and learn from her daddy how the world really is. She would grow to love fly-fishing and jazz, hate rap and mindless reality shows, and would make a career of the natural sciences. I was going to do it right. Now I know better. Like her namesake, my beautiful orchid has an identity all her own—one that I can no more fit to my own pre-conceived templates than I could make an orchid seedling grow into a pine tree. She sees the world through her own eyes, and has her own way of doing things (“by self!....”). I can’t even give her gummy bear vitamins by rote. “Daddy I wanna choose!....” So we go through a ritual where she sifts through the jar and picks out just the gummy bears that strike her fancy. As my life unfolds every day brings new fears, hopes, joy, and surprises. Even fights with my wife are different. Very little of this fits any expectation of parenthood I ever had. Fifty years ago angler and conservation writer Roderick Haig-Brown wrote of his own life raising four children on post-WWII Vancouver Island. In his book Measure of the Year he tells of fishing trips, accidents, squabbles, and numerous parent-child conundrums. He sums up the experience with these words,

"These and many others are the things that parents of all time have learned and relearned. They are the things that one used to hear one’s elders speak of, but never expected to feel in one’s own sophisticated, well-ordered life—annoyance, impatience, fear in many forms, many times repeated; the lift of the heart in pride and joy; the sense of inadequacy, of the frailty of one’s own wisdom; despair at the slowness of reason’s growth in them. But mostly it is joy, in round babies, in tall daughters and sons who grow, not into one’s own image or into one’s weak imaginings, but into themselves.”

"I sometimes think the only crime a parent can commit, short of not loving a child, is to try and force it into the realization of his own half-forgotten dreams. There is no reason why the child of any parent should excel, or even want to excel, no reason why it should ever fight beyond its strength. A child, and the man or woman after the child, must strive within its strength, up to its own full realization. It must learn to feel and know the world about it, advance the world if it will, use the world so far as it must, understand the world as it can. Fulfillment may be in driving trucks as well as in signing treaties, in lying in the leaves as surely as in painting pictures. Let children only become themselves, using eyes and minds and senses, feeling and enjoying as men and women do, searching into the meaning beyond meaning if they aspire to, accepting the truth in light and color and movement before their eyes if that is more natural to them. Let them only be true to themselves, so that they have true selves to give. Let them be sure in this, feeling the strength of their sureness within themselves, not in relation to or in competition with other men and women, but in relation to an absolute standard their own hearts know.

This I wish for my children, not honors or rewards or riches, not the satisfactions of success or even of creation, but only this sureness, truly and solidly based, that makes them human beings, capable of sympathy, understanding and tolerance. It is in them now and growing within them. They see things with their eyes, interpret them in their minds, understand them in their hearts, and often show them again to Ann and myself with the impress of fresh thought upon them. They reach beyond us more and more boldly to touch the world and give themselves to it. I wish the world joy of them. And I wish them a world no more difficult and dangerous than man has always found it.

Even at the tender age of 3½ this sureness grows in Claire. No longer do I see her through the lens of my own weak imaginings. Nor do I imagine that through her life I will somehow redeem the failures of my own. I have been called to walk beside her—to tend the garden, expose her to things that will enrich her, do my best to model values that I hope she will make her own, and to pray daily for God’s loving hand on her life and the grace and wisdom I will need to negotiate the next set of rapids. Anything I can do within my own considerable brokenness to provide fertile soil that she can sink her roots into. Along the way I do my best to enjoy the ride, continually reminding myself that she is not “my” daughter, she is herself.

And yet, she is and always will be the taproot of my own heart. Claire Bear, Squiggle, Honey Girl, Princess, Sweet Girl, Lan Lan—my beautiful orchid who fills my life with a fragrance only she can give, and in her own way presides over my journey through an emotional and spiritual universe I am only just beginning to understand.

Last summer Audrey and I began the process for our second adoption. With luck we will be traveling to China with Claire next year and returning with her sister.