Starting On Our Way
When I try to relate the adventure we’re in, I often get stuck. When I try to look back on the events of the last eight months to piece them together and make them tell a story, I’m more often than not left struggling for the one big starting point that can launch us off.
Instead, I’m embraced by a soft storm of small images from these days, each one standing out against the fabric of everyday life and proclaiming its deep significance. I remember struggling to hold back tears in an airport waiting area and I remember gleefully collecting our first pieces of paperwork. I remember composing an email full of questions about a girl I didn’t know from a hotel room in Rochester. I remember asking my son if he would be willing to give up his role as our oldest child, and the wrenching tears Joie and I shared when despair and doubt convinced us that we wouldn’t be able to do it. But if I can’t see where these memories have their common beginning, I can at least see where they’re going: Three weeks from tomorrow we are going to Colombia, and we are going to bring our daughter home.
{Since August we have known her as Kelly, but now in a typical pre-teen assertion of her identity she says in our internet exchanges that she wants to go by her middle name Johana, “like her mother.” I think to myself, “But I so like the name Kelly!” Then I look at the other Johanna, my wife Joie, and see the light in her eyes when she reads her new daughter’s words, and I think, “She can call herself whatever she wants.” For these writings, maybe I’ll just call her KJ.}
Joie and I have talked to a lot of people about the road we’re on, both close friends and casual acquaintances. And we have wondered about remarks that surface from these conversations, remarks that characterize what we’re doing as “admirable” or “impressive.” This embarrasses us and we don’t know what to say about it. Perhaps it looks this way from the outside, if you can’t see what’s happening within our family and our hearts. But the truth is that this 12-year-old girl, from a city 10,000 feet in the mountains and only sixty miles north of the equator, has already given us so much that I’m not sure we will ever be able to repay her. She has given us new and lifelong friendships with people of great heart and decency. She has solidified old friendships and through the retelling of her story will help bring other girls to new homes. She has shown me how gracious and giving my occasionally self-absorbed son can be, and she has revealed depths in the heart of my wife of 15 years that amaze and humble me. She has made me a believer, finally, in the eternal grace of God. And we have yet to meet her.
Maybe it’s best to discard, now and forever, any thoughts of what we might do for KJ or what she has done for us. Maybe it’s best to embrace forever the concept that we are family, a familia para siempre, and understand that elevating one another and supporting the growth in each other is what the “forever family” is for.
*****
A word about KJ: Many people ask how it is that we wound up choosing—or being chosen by—an almost-teenage girl. Life is complicated enough at that age, without the added burden of being in a new society where you can’t speak the language as you try to blend in with your new family. In September on a business trip to Austin I answered my lovely Aunt Dee by email when she asked me a similar question:
I have been thinking this afternoon (and this evening, since I have long since had dinner and gone for a walk along the river here in Austin) about your surprise when you heard about Kelly’s age and background. It’s interesting to think about why we “lost our hearts immediately.” I think it is like this… There are lots and lots of couples that can’t have kids and want to adopt babies. But for us, we have always thought that even if could never have any kids but the ones we have, that would be OK. It would be beautiful. But there is so much to give. So we approached this from the perspective (perhaps without using these words) not of “Who do we need to bring home?” but “Who needs a family?”
When we first found Kelly’s picture, the one you saw, it was mixed in with lots of other kids in the newsletter, but most of these kids were sibling groups of 2 or 3. Here was “Kelly Johana,” all alone, smiling that hesitant, shy smile. And we kept going back to her. Something about her captured our hearts and held fast. We know so little about the last 12 years of her life but we do know this girl that captured our hearts loves music, dance, books and she wants to be a doctor. She has dreams. She has hope. She’s way past the age most kids get adopted, with a hundred-to-one shot at finding a family, and she still wants one. And I realized, sitting in the airport in PDX on my way to Rochester in August, talking to Joie on the phone, that this was what it was all about. Not finding a child. Not just taking this girl in and caring for her, but becoming Her Family. She’s never had a family that she could call her own, her forever family. You can’t imagine how silly I looked, sitting in a crowded waiting area for my flight, tears streaming silently down my face and afraid to say anything to Joie because talking aloud would release the sob I was holding back. She said, “You want to ask for Kelly, don’t you?” And it was all I could do to whisper “Yes” without breaking down. It was a long trip!
I pray we are doing the right thing. I have enough faith to say that if we go through teenage angst, and through sobbing loneliness from being in this strange place where no one understands her and where we all smell funny, that we can find a way to handle it together. If she has terrible wars and competition with her brother, and if he yells at me one day, “I hate you for bringing her here!” then I have faith that we will find the grace and the wisdom to slog through it, as a family. If she is brave enough to hope for a family, and if we are brave enough to do the unthinkable and go massively into debt and fly down to Florencia on the equator to fetch her, then I think we will find what we all need. It’s in Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: Faith, Hope, and Love.”
In this message to my aunt I provided an answer, but I think the answer will always be elusive. How did we end up choosing Colombia for our adoption program? We wrestled between China and Colombia, then chose China. Then we suffered some sleepless nights and together switched back to Colombia. Who is to say that these disquieting dreams weren't telling us that we were already connected to someone?
When I was on my business trip to Rochester New York in early August, Joie and I struggled (from our spots on different sides of the country) to know if this girl in this first newsletter we’d received was our girl. All we knew was what the newsletter said: “She got off to a rough start in life and will need a family who can help her deal with some of those issues.” We thought, Are you kidding? We can’t even deal with our own issues…
On a bright afternoon in my rental car I found myself stopped at a light on Mount Hope Avenue in Rochester, bordering the Jewish section of the huge, immaculate, summer-green Mount Hope cemetery. I sat there at the light, wondering whether we should stand up now, months before our paperwork was complete or we were ready, and say “We want her.” I gazed idly right, and my eyes rested on a rough-cut stone at the front of all the other stones, level with my rental car, and holding only one word: Ramirez. Of course, the girl who needed a home, who needed a family who could help her into her future was named Kelly Johana Sapuy Ramirez. I stared slack-jawed at the stone, the light changed, and I drove on, certain that I was being spoken to in some silent, ineffable way.
Instead, I’m embraced by a soft storm of small images from these days, each one standing out against the fabric of everyday life and proclaiming its deep significance. I remember struggling to hold back tears in an airport waiting area and I remember gleefully collecting our first pieces of paperwork. I remember composing an email full of questions about a girl I didn’t know from a hotel room in Rochester. I remember asking my son if he would be willing to give up his role as our oldest child, and the wrenching tears Joie and I shared when despair and doubt convinced us that we wouldn’t be able to do it. But if I can’t see where these memories have their common beginning, I can at least see where they’re going: Three weeks from tomorrow we are going to Colombia, and we are going to bring our daughter home.
{Since August we have known her as Kelly, but now in a typical pre-teen assertion of her identity she says in our internet exchanges that she wants to go by her middle name Johana, “like her mother.” I think to myself, “But I so like the name Kelly!” Then I look at the other Johanna, my wife Joie, and see the light in her eyes when she reads her new daughter’s words, and I think, “She can call herself whatever she wants.” For these writings, maybe I’ll just call her KJ.}
Joie and I have talked to a lot of people about the road we’re on, both close friends and casual acquaintances. And we have wondered about remarks that surface from these conversations, remarks that characterize what we’re doing as “admirable” or “impressive.” This embarrasses us and we don’t know what to say about it. Perhaps it looks this way from the outside, if you can’t see what’s happening within our family and our hearts. But the truth is that this 12-year-old girl, from a city 10,000 feet in the mountains and only sixty miles north of the equator, has already given us so much that I’m not sure we will ever be able to repay her. She has given us new and lifelong friendships with people of great heart and decency. She has solidified old friendships and through the retelling of her story will help bring other girls to new homes. She has shown me how gracious and giving my occasionally self-absorbed son can be, and she has revealed depths in the heart of my wife of 15 years that amaze and humble me. She has made me a believer, finally, in the eternal grace of God. And we have yet to meet her.
Maybe it’s best to discard, now and forever, any thoughts of what we might do for KJ or what she has done for us. Maybe it’s best to embrace forever the concept that we are family, a familia para siempre, and understand that elevating one another and supporting the growth in each other is what the “forever family” is for.
*****
A word about KJ: Many people ask how it is that we wound up choosing—or being chosen by—an almost-teenage girl. Life is complicated enough at that age, without the added burden of being in a new society where you can’t speak the language as you try to blend in with your new family. In September on a business trip to Austin I answered my lovely Aunt Dee by email when she asked me a similar question:
I have been thinking this afternoon (and this evening, since I have long since had dinner and gone for a walk along the river here in Austin) about your surprise when you heard about Kelly’s age and background. It’s interesting to think about why we “lost our hearts immediately.” I think it is like this… There are lots and lots of couples that can’t have kids and want to adopt babies. But for us, we have always thought that even if could never have any kids but the ones we have, that would be OK. It would be beautiful. But there is so much to give. So we approached this from the perspective (perhaps without using these words) not of “Who do we need to bring home?” but “Who needs a family?”
When we first found Kelly’s picture, the one you saw, it was mixed in with lots of other kids in the newsletter, but most of these kids were sibling groups of 2 or 3. Here was “Kelly Johana,” all alone, smiling that hesitant, shy smile. And we kept going back to her. Something about her captured our hearts and held fast. We know so little about the last 12 years of her life but we do know this girl that captured our hearts loves music, dance, books and she wants to be a doctor. She has dreams. She has hope. She’s way past the age most kids get adopted, with a hundred-to-one shot at finding a family, and she still wants one. And I realized, sitting in the airport in PDX on my way to Rochester in August, talking to Joie on the phone, that this was what it was all about. Not finding a child. Not just taking this girl in and caring for her, but becoming Her Family. She’s never had a family that she could call her own, her forever family. You can’t imagine how silly I looked, sitting in a crowded waiting area for my flight, tears streaming silently down my face and afraid to say anything to Joie because talking aloud would release the sob I was holding back. She said, “You want to ask for Kelly, don’t you?” And it was all I could do to whisper “Yes” without breaking down. It was a long trip!
I pray we are doing the right thing. I have enough faith to say that if we go through teenage angst, and through sobbing loneliness from being in this strange place where no one understands her and where we all smell funny, that we can find a way to handle it together. If she has terrible wars and competition with her brother, and if he yells at me one day, “I hate you for bringing her here!” then I have faith that we will find the grace and the wisdom to slog through it, as a family. If she is brave enough to hope for a family, and if we are brave enough to do the unthinkable and go massively into debt and fly down to Florencia on the equator to fetch her, then I think we will find what we all need. It’s in Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: Faith, Hope, and Love.”
In this message to my aunt I provided an answer, but I think the answer will always be elusive. How did we end up choosing Colombia for our adoption program? We wrestled between China and Colombia, then chose China. Then we suffered some sleepless nights and together switched back to Colombia. Who is to say that these disquieting dreams weren't telling us that we were already connected to someone?
When I was on my business trip to Rochester New York in early August, Joie and I struggled (from our spots on different sides of the country) to know if this girl in this first newsletter we’d received was our girl. All we knew was what the newsletter said: “She got off to a rough start in life and will need a family who can help her deal with some of those issues.” We thought, Are you kidding? We can’t even deal with our own issues…
On a bright afternoon in my rental car I found myself stopped at a light on Mount Hope Avenue in Rochester, bordering the Jewish section of the huge, immaculate, summer-green Mount Hope cemetery. I sat there at the light, wondering whether we should stand up now, months before our paperwork was complete or we were ready, and say “We want her.” I gazed idly right, and my eyes rested on a rough-cut stone at the front of all the other stones, level with my rental car, and holding only one word: Ramirez. Of course, the girl who needed a home, who needed a family who could help her into her future was named Kelly Johana Sapuy Ramirez. I stared slack-jawed at the stone, the light changed, and I drove on, certain that I was being spoken to in some silent, ineffable way.
posted by Michael Thelander at 6:20 PM
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