Stories in the Street

The word “Honduras” jumps out at me these days from the most random places. The other day, I was reading an interview on Cynthia Leitich Smith’s excellent blog Cynsations. Kate Hosford was interviewing author Laura Purdie Salas, as part of her Celebrating Poetry series.

One particular answer from the interview really captured my attention. Salas says, “I came across the poem I wrote about Honduran tent bats, these tiny cotton balls of bats that huddle along the spine of a large leaf frond. They chew through the leaf’s ribs so that the fronds of the leaf collapse around them like a tent and shelter them from rain and predators.” I immediately got myself over to Bookpeople to get a copy of Salas’ book A Leaf Can Be.

I had to see what these little Honduran White Bat creatures look like. Steel yourself . . . major squealing cuteness alert.

And now steel yourself for more squealing. We got another number this morning and scooted up in line, shuffling along behind #54 and in front of #56.

I wonder who they are, these other people in line? I wonder who SHE is, this little girl that will become our daughter? And mostly I wonder, and worry, about what’s happening to her right now.

Honduran White Tent Bats are about the size of a large marshmallow, the kind you use for s’mores. They can’t have much of a brain, but instinct has taught them what they need to do to protect themselves. I pray the same is true for our little girl. I pray some part of her knows how to beguile her caretaker. Some part of her knows how to hunker down and wait, snuggled up like a little white bat in the center of a sheltering leaf. I pray protection over her sweet self, until we can come for her. I pray these verses, Psalm 121:1-8.

And then I sing for joy for #55, and all the numbers to follow.

Guess who got their number???

Who would have thought I’d be so excited about waiting in line? We recently found out we’re #65 on the wait list. It feels real again, after all these months of waiting. We’ve got a spot, and we’re standing on it.

It’s been almost a year. On April 7^th, 2011, I sent an email to friends and family telling everyone that we had decided to adopt. A lot has happened since then. Lots of paperwork and notarizing and doctor visits and running around town. A trip to Houston to the Honduran Consulate. And then there was the waiting. I guess we’re still waiting, but this kind of waiting is different, because now we’re in line.

We can’t say how much longer it will be before we have that little girl in our arms. The committee who makes assignments meets once a month, and as referrals are made our number gets lower. Maybe our next number will be in the 50’s next time. Whatever it is, we’ll commemorate it with another onesie and hang it on the line.

We’ve hung this clothesline in what will be our daughter’s room, and we’ll hang reminders and encouragements and onesies with numbers on them until the number is 1, and we have a picture to add to our line. My niece recently gave us her fortune, and it went right up.

And if that weren’t enough, it’s time to plant my tomatoes again! Spring is here, Easter is around the corner, hope is all around us, and the Davises are standing in line, celebrating.

Did we hear that small, still voice wrong? Our type-A selves thought we had it all planned out. We thought we’d be getting our referral by now, and instead we’re waiting on a wait list number.

And then I get home from Spring Break and start cleaning out the fridge and we’ve got some cantaloupe that’s going bad so I tear off the lid to dump it down the sink, and I notice, on the lid, that it came from Honduras.

Random, or confirmation? That little word makes my heart leap. This isn’t the first time that out of the blue, Honduras comes into our life, like a little beacon that says, “Keep going, I have something for you, just be patient.”

Something sweet is waiting for us, and we are waiting for her. Until we get that picture and see her little face, I’ll take these small tokens. I keep a list of them in the middle of my Bible, and I pull it out when I begin to doubt, and I remember. There is a reason we stepped on this path. There are many of them.

The other day, Benji and his friend decided to make monsters out of all our furniture. They used every pillow in the house, wadded up shorts for eyes, used blankets for tongues, an old laundry hamper for lips, and scurried around for over an hour before the unveiling. May I present to you . . .

The Couch Monster

Couch monster consuming boys.

The Chair Monster

Check out the squinting evil eyes.

This one also eats little boys.

The Bean Bag Chair Monster

Ginormous fly eyes and wicked eyebrows make this a particularly ominous monster.

The boys had much more interesting names for their monsters, but I can’t remember them.

Life goes on in the Davis household, and we’re thankful for it. It keeps us distracted from the fact that as of today, we still don’t have a waiting list number in Honduras. The gears had started turning, though, and referrals and numbers are being given. While we wait, I finish the second draft of a new novel, Clay writes an app, the boys play lacrosse, and Alayna twirls around the house. And we make couch monsters. Life is still good.

I really don’t like getting messy.

My cousin's daughter, decorating Christmas cookies.

Unlike my cousin’s daughter, I hardly touched the cake served to me when I turned a year old. What, no fork? Too messy. I like neat and orderly. Maybe that’s why I like puzzles so much. I love the feel of the right piece clicking into place. Of watching the unsolved part get smaller and smaller until I slip the last piece in and stand back to admire the nice, tidy picture.

Over Christmas I went to my parent’s house and we started a 3,000 piece puzzle. After more than twenty combined manhours, we were barely a quarter of the way through it. We had to leave before it was finished, and it went against every fiber of my being to break up all that hard work without seeing the finished product, neat and tidy and done.

3,000 takes a lot of space!

As a writer, things have been messy lately. See how hard I try to be organized?

I had a complete picture of my story with my first draft, but I knew it wasn’t good enough. To fix things, I had to break the story apart, move things around, and hit the delete button an awful lot. As I crawl into my story’s space and tinker around with dialogue, or cut and move large chunks, it gets very messy. It’s the domino effect. If I move a scene from Chapter 42 to Chapter 10, then the character’s motivations are all wonky and I’ve got to keep going back and smoothing out the ripples.

The adoption has become rather messy as well. As much as we tried to keep things neat and clean and organized in the beginning, we are now waiting and hoping and praying that things work out. That’s all we can do, everything’s on hold. There were other things that made life messy this holiday season. Loved ones died, neighbors grieved, and life no longer looked like the pretty picture I sometimes imagine is on the box. The one I imagine is promised to us.

I do not like being messy, but I can’t avoid it. Life is messy. Writing, and relationships, and cake, it’s all messy. But it can be sweet and rewarding as well. I have a memory of another time when I got messy. Really, really messy. I was in Rwanda, and there was a line of street children waiting to get their plates of food. But before they got their plate, they had to wash their hands. It was my job to hand them a piece of soap, dip a plastic cup into a large bucket of clean water, and rinse them clean.

The water splashed into the red dirt as the kids ran through the line, and by the end of the afternoon my feet looked like this.

When I took off my sandals, you could still see the lines of them, outlined with red, Rwandan dirt.

My apologies to all those with feet aversions, but I would not trade that messy moment for all the completed puzzles in the world, even the 3,000 piece ones. I do not like being messy, but I do love life.

John 10:10- “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

We’ve come across a lot of funny warning signs in our travels.

Glad they warned me, or I might have slipped recklessly . . .

Everybody pretty much ignored this warning sign at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland.

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, but I was worried . . .

We came across this pamphlet lying around after a recent remodel.

PART-Protect Against Range Tipping

I never realized ranges were so dangerous they required an acronym and a pamphlet to protect people from possible tipping. It got me to thinking about warnings in general, and singing that Garth Brooks song The Dance in the shower. “I could have missed the pain, but I’d of had to miss the dance.”

What if life came with warning signs? Warning: you can have three children, but your hips will never be the same. Warning: you can go to New York with your husband but you’ll get really sick on the plane ride back. I would not have missed the dance in either of these instances. I’ve loved having three children (though not my hippy hips so much) and I’ll never forget that trip to New York.

I haven’t read The Connected Child by Karyn Purvis, a book many people say is a “must read” for adoptive parents. I’m drawn more to the memoirs. The stories. I think it has a little to do with warnings, and how they kill the joy sometimes. The Connected Child  is a great and important book, but it’s got a lot of scary stuff in it, things we’ll be struggling with when we adopt. Warnings make me worry, and I don’t feel like worrying quite yet. Worrying if she’ll attach. Worrying how I’ll handle tantrums and food aversions and parasites. I know they’re there, waiting on the fringes, but I’d rather focus on the girl right now. The worrying will come when it’s time.

But I couldn’t ignore Clay’s, “Oh no,” this morning when he got into his inbox and read a recent Honduran article. Warning: You can go ahead and decide to adopt if you want, go ahead and make plans for a baby to arrive sometime Spring of 2012 if all goes well, but some morning in late November 2011, you’ll read a Honduran article that mentions Honduras “going Hague.” If that happens, it may be years, it may be never, before you bring home a little Honduran girl. But go ahead. Try to adopt.

I clipped this from About.com:

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption is an international agreement between participating countries on best adoption procedures. These procedures have basically two goals in mind:

• The best interest of children are considered with each intercountry adoption.
• The prevention of abduction, exploitation, sale, or trafficking of children.

So that’s good. But becoming a Hague country takes a long time, especially for a country who can take three weeks just to walk a document across the street. So it isn’t good for us, if “good” means adopting a daughter soon. It’s times like these I hang on to these words of truth:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28.

I’ve heard the illustration that going through life is like holding a flashlight in the darkness. You only step into those small circles of light, you only see what’s just in front of you. We keep taking steps, until the light turns off. But while we wait for more news on the adoption front, I step into a day of Christmas shopping, reading the completed rough draft of a manuscript I just finished, and filling a crockpot with something that will smell good and warm our bodies for dinner tonight. That, even in the face of the scary article, is a step I’m willing to take.

I’ve said two hard goodbyes recently. Last week, we put Benji’s guinea pig to sleep. And as much as I complained about his smell and the way his hay tended to drift out of his cage all the time, I’m going to miss that little Mo. He was my companion when I was clacking away on a story, he wheeted to us every morning (because he wanted carrots) and he would “kiss” me when I puckered up (smelling my breath, really). When Mo stopped eating, we knew something was wrong. When the vet said it would cost over a thousand dollars to keep poor Mo healthy, we knew it was time to put him to sleep. Benji was very sad, and I was, too.

Benji and Mohawk, Christmas 2009

A week ago, I said my last goodbye’s to “the farm.” My cousins and I went to the farm all the time when we were growing up. We rode go-carts and horses, made forts in bushes and fished in the tanks, hunted Easter egg (even in cow patties, thanks to Papa) and picked blackberries so my grandma could make pies. It was nobody’s home, and everybody’s escape. The time has come to sell the farm, but before it’s gone, we had one last shindig. All the cousins came, and their kids. There were scavenger hunts and football games, good barbecue, swinging from trees and pictures on the front porch, running up and down those old wooden stairs, skeet shooting and “poor man’s” skeet shooting with dried cow patties, and lots of good stories.

Family and the Farm

It’s so hard to say goodbye, but I think in the act of letting go we take the time to remember the stories attached to the stuff in our lives. And I know that sounds silly when I’m talking about a guinea pig. He was a rodent for goodness sake. But he was part of this family. He altered how we lived our lives, and his presence is imprinted on us, from the Christmas morning when Benji got him and Clay teased that we’d eat guinea pig for lunch the next year, to the way he ate a carrot like a typewriter. Mo and the farm will be woven into the fabric of the stories we tell each other, and future generations.

There’s an old glider rocking chair in Benji’s room that’s been there since he was a baby. He rested his little curly head on the arm while he took a bottle, and squeezed in beside me to read stories together. He can still squeeze if we try hard. A few years ago, I half-heartedly started trying to move the chair out of his room, but he refused. Neither of us was really ready to say goodbye for the sake of a bit more floor space. That chair will be moved to the baby’s room when she arrives. And she will squeeze beside me, or Clay, or one of the kids. And we will tell her stories. And she will become part of our stories.

We received another update about the adoption. Our completed and approved paperwork has been sitting on a desk for almost two months now, waiting to be assigned a number. We found out Honduras now wants more lab work done on all three kids. So back to the doctor we go, and the notary, and FedEx. No number yet, no place in line.

As much as I’m ready to say goodbye to this waiting period in our lives, I’m trying not to look too far forward and miss what’s happening right under my nose. Though we anticipate having a new baby girl, it means saying goodbye to the way our family is right now. We will trade some freedom and spontaneity and sleep for another go at thirty minute walks to the mailbox, learning to blow bubbles instead of eat them, and the wonder of boxes and wrapping paper at Christmas. Each new season in our lives means saying goodbye to the old, and it is hard and sometimes sad, but it is good to stop and remember the stories. We never have to say goodbye to them.

And they lived happily ever after . . .