regrets, realizations, resignations, redirection and REJOICING!

I'm going to do something I'm famous for. I'm going to tell you the cold hard truth. This post is mostly for all of you out there reading this who have or will be adopting in the future. Settle in for a long post and please read it through to the end. The rejoicing comes last and it's the best part!

I'll start with regrets. I'm very happy to say that we only have one regret regarding this adoption. If we had it to do over again, we would have taken Jake with us to Vietnam. I will not blame anyone but us for leaving him here, but we were encouraged by essentially everyone to do so - particularly our adoption agency and social worker. I have no doubt that for many or even most families perhaps leaving their other children at home is the best decision, but it wasn't for us. We are a family. We've always been inseparable and this shouldn't have been any different. Jake is a fantastic traveler and we have no doubt that he would have done great on this trip and enjoyed it immensely. We also believe that it would have helped in the first days with Olivia if she had someone her own size to relate to instead of just some big white people (me and Mike) who didn't speak her language. Kids have their own language. We absolutely believe that having Jake there would have helped and not hinder Olivia's attachment. I know without a doubt that it would have made it easier for us to have Jake there and he would have loved it. It was incredibly difficult for me to focus on Olivia because of my incredible - nearly indescribable - sadness over missing Jake. If he had been there it wouldn't have been an issue. Maybe this doesn't make sense to all of you, but if you have a young child at home who has been with you 100% of the time since he was born, you probably get what I'm saying.

Onto realizations. The reality is that I have wanted a daughter for as long as I can remember. I have searched for her for 3 1/2 years and I finally found her in Vietnam. I prayed and prayed for this child and God gave me a beautiful darling little 2 1/2 year old girl. Well, that was the reality that I knew going to Vietnam. The reality I found once we were there was a bit different. I'll never forget the first moment I saw my Olivia. We were on the second floor balcony of her orphanage and she was coming up the stairs to meet us fresh from a bath. She had wet stringy hair and she looked exactly like her pictures except that she was teeny tiny! She was beautiful and everything that I had ever imagined she would be. She came to us and ate Cheerios from our hands. She sat in my lap and let Mike hold her and even fell asleep in his arms. It was like heaven only better because it was right here on earth! She never shed a tear and she wasn't afraid of us. I had read books about adoption and read all of the horror stories and I of course knew from the very beginning that we would have a picture perfect adoption story and here it was coming true!

Olivia was calm and quiet the first two days. We even went to the beach the first afternoon we had her and she wasn't even afraid of the water. She held onto me so tightly and would only sleep if I was holding her. I took these as all good things. We drove from Ninh Thuan to Saigon the day after our g&r. That was an 8 hour drive and Olivia was fine the entire time. She also refused to use the bathroom the entire trip. She held it for 8 hours. Wow. She really is potty trained!

We got to the Kimdo hotel in Saigon and settled in. She was still doing great. Quiet and calm, looking us in the eyes a good bit, but not smiling. Then came the first night there. Olivia was TERRIFIED of the bed. She would scream bloody murder whenever we even sat on it much less try to lay down. Oh my gosh at the screaming. Feel free to ask any of the other families traveling with us that stayed on our floor. Olivia could crack glass with that scream. Then she became TERRIFIED of the hotel room itself. I can't tell you how many hours we spent walking Olivia up and down the 7th floor hall of the Kimdo hotel. The hotel staff certainly knew who we were. We finally got our first smile from Olivia when I threw her up in the air for the first time standing outside the Park Hyatt looking for Brangelina. That was a great great moment. Of course at some point we had to go back to our room. The screaming would begin as we approached room 723.

I want to explain something about the bed situation. When we first saw Olivia in the orphanage one of the things we noticed immediately were the sores on her legs and feet. She had fresh sores, scabs and scars. We weren't sure what they were until a week or so later when we met another American couple who had been living in Saigon for the last 2 1/2 years. They told us they were bed bug bites. That explained a lot. Whenever we would lay Olivia down in the bed (screaming at the top of her lungs) she would kick her feet up and down her calves wildly. We realize now that she was doing what she HAD to do at the orphanage, which was try to keep the bugs off of her so they wouldn't bite her. This absolutely positively breaks my heart. It's a horrible thing to watch. Now that we've been home she's quit doing it entirely. The sores have healed but our pediatrician says that even Mederma won't help the scars. Hopefully they will fade with time. They are a constant reminder to us though to continue to pray for the children left behind. I'll never forget the image of her kicking her tiny little feet as fast as she could and crying her poor little eyes out. I just wish I had understood at the time what was going on. We were so frustrated that she wouldn't lay down in the bed even when she was clearly exhausted. She still wakes up in the night crying but it's becoming less and she lays much more still than she used to. I'm hoping that her memories of the bed bugs will be soon forgotten. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in the night praying for her as she cries - when she's awake and asleep. Sometimes she cries in her dreams and never even wakes up and on occasion she has full blown night terrors.

The true reality of adopting our daughter was not a picture perfect post card as we had hoped it would be. It was hard. Not sort of hard, REALLY hard. Here comes the part that I'm very hesitant to share, but I feel like I have to if I'm going to be really honest about our adoption. I'm incredibly ashamed of some of the things I felt in the first few days with Olivia. I was missing my sweet, loving, affectionate son terribly and I was stuck in a foreign country with a child who down right hated me and did nothing but scream. I spent a good part of two days sitting on the bathroom floor of the Kimdo hotel crying my eyes out while Olivia cried her eyes out with Mike in the room. I wanted to go home. Here's the hard part. I didn't just want to go home. A big part of me wanted to go home without her. If someone had offered me an out at that point I'm not sure I wouldn't have taken it. I was scared to death. I didn't fall in love with Olivia the moment I saw her. We didn't have this amazing moment when I first met her where I immediately felt like she was my daughter. I certainly didn't feel about her the way I felt about Jake and that made me feel horribly guilty. I was so naive going into this. I truly believed that once I saw her that I would just melt and fall in love and never look back. The reality was that she didn't like me and sadly it made it very difficult to like her either. I thought we had made a huge mistake. What had I done to our family? What had I done to Jake? What had I done to poor innocent Olivia? I can at least say that in the middle of my pathetic pity party I hadn't forgotten about Olivia. I thought I had ruined her life. I had kidnapped her. I had taken her from what she knew to be a happy life. I believe that she was pretty happy at the orphanage. It was all she knew. She was very comfortable with her nanny and playmates. They told me she enjoyed school and loved to sing. Where in the heck was this child they had described to me? I wanted to go home. All I wanted was to go home.

Ok. Here come the resignations. After my two days of crying I realized that I wasn't helping matters and that I needed to suck it up. Mike was miserable because he was stuck with two crying lunatics. My poor husband. He is such a good good man. The fact is that we had adopted a 2 1/2 year old child and this was life. I know how that sounds. It sounds like I'm the worst person in the world. I think that if more adoptive parents told the whole truth, many of them would say they felt the same way I did. I had to resign myself to the fact that we came to Vietnam, we adopted Olivia - screaming and all- and she was our daughter. She was our daughter forever. After I broke down and accepted that, things started to look a little bit better. Olivia started acting happier in large part probably because I started acting happier. I accepted that she was here to stay and my focus became loving her.

Most of you are probably sitting there with yours jaws on the floor right now thinking I'm a horrible, wretched person who didn't deserve to adopt this beautiful child. I felt the same way if that makes you feel any better. I felt like the worst Mom ever. I wanted to love her. I really really really wanted to love her, but I didn't. She was a stranger to me. I hadn't carried her in my tummy. I hadn't nurtured her since her conception. I hadn't held her close to me and breastfed her while she looked up lovingly at me. I was so confused. I thought I was going to feel all these great feelings once Olivia was in my arms, but I didn't really feel anything at all. I felt like I was babysitting a very unhappy child who wanted nothing more than to get as far away from us (and most certainly the hotel room) as possible. Top all of this off with the fact that we were 10,000 miles away from Jake and our home and everything comfortable.

In this midst of my meltdown there was Olivia. A frightened little girl who had been taken from her home to live with people who didn't speak her language, didn't smell or look Vietnamese, and didn't know what in the heck to do with her. I'm not a complete idiot. I have a 4 year old son for heaven's sake. You would think having a 2 1/2 year old would be a piece of cake. Well, it wasn't. We were totally unprepared for her. We were unprepared for this fit throwing, stuff throwing, hitting at us, biting, screaming, crying child. I don't blame anyone for our lack of preparation. I'm not sure we could have been prepared. For the most part, adoption books, adoption agencies and social workers told us to be prepared for a developmentally delayed child because of institutionalization. "Expect her to be like a baby." A baby? Ha! We expected a "delayed, baby like child" and got a defiant, hard headed, stubborn, incredibly smart 2 1/2 year old little girl who was in no way baby like. She is VERY smart. She has been imitating since she first came out of her shell. She will say pretty much anything we ask her to say now and she says lots of words on her own. She has the sweetest little soft voice - especially when she says potty or night night. I love it when she says night night and blows a kiss to Jake as he goes to bed. It just melts my heart.

I started righting this post on December 16th and I had all of these things in my head to write about and it's really funny that I've already forgotten so much of it. God is so good! He is already clouding over the bad memories and helping me to only remember the good ones. I feel terrible about this post. I have gone back and forth about whether or not to put it out there for the world to read. I feel strongly though that I need to be honest about the truths of adoption for those of you who are adopting yourselves, and for those of you who have adopted and felt the same way and thought you were all alone.

Alright. Redirection. Once we got home, I was able to start focusing my attention a bit better. Let me say that I was worried to death about how things would go with Jake and Olivia. Jake is an incredibly sweet boy, but he's also been an only child for 4 years and I was afraid that he might be jealous. If anything, it was the other way around. Olivia wasn't crazy about this other child suddenly taking her Mommy's attention! From the moment they met though, they liked each other. They sat right down and started playing together. That's the only part of this that has actually seemed like the perfect adoption dream I had. They love each other so much. They play all day together and love taking baths together every night. They give kisses and hugs and wake up asking about the other one. They light up when they see each other. It's the absolute sweetest thing in the whole wide world. I could not have asked for my children to be more compatible. They are fantastic together. God still works miracles!

Rejoicing. Yes, there is rejoicing! I saved the best for last. Olivia has been our daughter for over six weeks and we've been home for nearly four weeks. There was a time a couple of weeks ago that I put Olivia down for her nap and she woke up crying. I laid down on the couch with her and she fell back to sleep. I was so exhausted that day. I really needed her to take a good nap so that I could take one, too. I closed my eyes thankful that she had fallen back to sleep. Ah - finally rest for me. Then I opened my eyes and looked at her again and I closed them. I opened them again and closed them again. The third time I opened them and I just looked at her. She was the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen in my entire life. God opened my eyes and for the very first time I saw my daughter. I didn't see My Diem Thi Tran, the little girl we adopted from Vietnam. I saw my DAUGHTER. I saw MY daughter. She was mine. It was in that moment that I claimed her. God had given me this precious gift to care for and on that day He opened my eyes and my heart to her. Things have been very different from that moment.

I'm not going to tell you that things have been perfect since then. That would be a lie. I'm not going to tell you that I feel this amazing perfect Mommy love for her 100% of the time, either. I will tell you that I love Olivia. I LOVE HER. I love her completely and totally and she is my daughter forever and ever and I am completely and totally THRILLED about that. You would have to rip her out of my cold, dead hands to get her away from this Mommy! It's almost impossible now for me to believe that I ever felt differently, but I did and I felt like I needed to tell the truth about that.

One of the things that helped with how I felt about Olivia was when I quit comparing her to Jake. In another of my posts I wrote about how I felt the spirit leading me to pray that I would love Olivia as God loves her. I had been praying to love her as much as I love Jake and that was the wrong thing to pray for. I have spent the last 4 years with Jake plus the nine months I carried him in my tummy. I don't really think it would be possible to love a child that much, adopted or biological, after knowing them only 6 weeks. Adopting a toddler, particularly an older toddler like Olivia, is tough. Truthfully, sometimes is downright sucks. Most of the time though, it's absolutely wonderful. We have had more fun in the last couple of weeks than I could have ever imagined possible with two wild kids! This house is more fun than ever and we are so incredibly grateful that God saw fit to allow this very unworthy family to adopt this very worthy little girl. She is funny, sweet, drop dead gorgeous, happy, sad, hopeful, loud, quiet, and mostly - she is ours. She may not be perfect (just as we aren't), but she's perfect for us.

It is still hard sometimes, but as I type, Olivia and Jake are sitting on the floor together playing a game and laughing. We definitely have way more good times than bad. We're still adjusting and getting used to each other, but we're so happy that God led us to adopt, and especially that God led us to adopt this beautiful child. 5 weeks ago I would have told you to run screaming from a toddler available for adoption, but once you get over that first mountain, it's all worth it in the end. Olivia is amazing. I keep thinking of the word delightful. That sounds like something an 80 year old woman would say, but that's what she is. She makes us smile. All of us. She makes us complete. We absolutely positively can't imagine life without her. THANK YOU GOD FOR THE MIRACLE OF OLIVIA. She makes us - well us. As I always say, and it's always true - we are so blessed. Those are the truths of our adoption. They aren't all pretty, but they're all true. I've said it before, adoption isn't for the weak at heart. Adoption is for families led by God because I firmly believe the only way you'll get through it is with Him.

Ephesians 1:11 says

In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.

Mike and I were destined to be married. We were destined to lose a child through miscarriage and then give birth to a beautiful little boy we named Jake. We were destined to adopt a precious little girl born on the other side of the earth and bring her home to be a part of our family. I am so grateful that God is in charge of our destinies! What a mess we would be in if we were in charge of our own. Everything is working out perfectly according to His will. We've put our family in His strong hands and He has made us whole. Thank you God.