Tonight your daughter called me "Mommy" and eagerly sat in my lap for a bedtime hug, and I'm thinking about you. I saw your name for the first time on a court decree that my husband and I had pulled in order to complete some post adoption paperwork today. The beauty of your name struck me, and I began to wonder what you look like - you are surely beautiful, judging from Kamelia's perfectly shaped lips, dark brown eyes and curly hair.
I wonder if you named her, or if that honor fell to a hospital nurse or a staff member at the orphanage. I wonder if the moment of her birth brought you some measure of joy and relief or if both were overshadowed by the pain of knowing you would give her up. I am sure that pain outweighed any of your labor pains. I wonder how much pressure you may have faced to terminate your pregnancy during those nine long months and what motivated you to choose life for your child.
Beyond all of the things I wonder about you, I have a few things I'd like to tell you. You will come up in conversation regularly because belly buttons get a lot of discussion time in your daughter's new home. Kami will soon understand that her brothers and sisters grew in my belly but that she grew in yours. I'll tell her your name when the right time comes - I wish I had a picture of you to show her!
When we first brought Kami into our home, she was a shell of a child. She had spent seven years merely surviving. One year later, she is no longer a shell, empty and hollow. She is filled with life, ambitions, potential, and the joy of the Lord. It's taken me several months to feel some of the emotions that you surely felt upon seeing her face for the first time. Sometimes I find myself unable to look away from her face because she looks so beautiful to me in that moment. As she learns each day by leaps and bounds how to behave and function healthily in a God-glorifying way, she becomes even more lovely.
I wish I could speak with you about how Kami came into this world, about your relationship with her birth father, and about how your pregnancy went. Did you know she was a girl? Have morning sickness? Experience cravings? As I get to know your daughter more and more, I wonder if you and I would have been friends. And if we had been, I wonder if maybe I could have somehow helped you find the support, resources and encouragement you would have needed to raise your sweet baby girl. She must have been so adorable and precious as a newborn baby! We must both feel sadness that she was met by such a harsh world. Instead of snuggles and nursing, she was met with isolation and a bottle that gushed liquid into her small mouth, short cutting the development of the sucking reflex. Instead of rocking gently in loving arms, she resorted to rocking herself, and violently. Instead of receiving gentle, loving care, she was treated more like an animal. Despite the suffering she endured in that orphanage, though, your choice to give her life was a kind and nurturing one. For whatever reason, you believed you could not raise her yourself, and you chose to place her where she would be most likely to have her basic needs met. We do thank the orphanage staff for keeping her physically alive those seven years. Did you ever visit her there, or would that have been too much for you to bear? Was it "easier" for your hurt heart and empty arms to turn your head and look the other way as you drove past the city's social home for children? Are you even in the city anymore, or did you travel elsewhere in search of a fresh start after Kami's birth? Did you get a feeling on July 28, 2014 that something had changed and that it was almost as if your little girl was being born again? Because she was.
Since writing this letter, I have taken advantage of many appropriate moments to speak Natalia's lovely name to Kami. She has perused her siblings' baby books enough to understand the basics of her early life. She continually goes back to her own Bulgaria scrapbook, discussing Vidin by name and putting as many words together as she can to express her memories and understanding of the images. As I shared here months ago when I first gave her the scrapbook, she has spent much time poring over the one distant photo of the institutional playground.
In adoption, we trust God to help us balance the goal of forgetting the former things and not dwelling on the past with respecting that past which has so significantly shaped our child. So the other day I asked on a Bulgarian adoption forum if anyone had photos of the Vidin playground they'd be willing to share. The response I received was a big blessing: one woman was from Vidin herself, and her mother and sister still lived there! She kindly offered to ask them to take some photos of the playground. I was taken aback by her kind offer and the potential for Kami to have more images of a place that was so special to her - likely the place where her best memories live. I was even more taken aback a few days later when she e-mailed me not one, not two or five or ten, but THIRTY crisp, clear photos of the playground, taken from within the orphanage gates! When I first paged through the photos, my stomach clenched up and I had to catch my breath as I realized that these pictures will likely throw Kami for a loop. They could captivate her for hours and days. She could see them and mourn all over again for the life she left. Just as I was beginning to turn these thoughts over in my head enough to nearly convince myself that Mason and I had somehow been part of an ill-intentioned international kidnapping, I remembered that these objects of play equipment in the orphanage yard, though they were full of emotion and memory for our daughter, carried no promise of life or love. The swings, her favorite by far, would not love her back, and they would no longer be available for her to use when she reached the point of aging out of the institution.
No matter what her reaction to these photos may be, she needs to have them in order to bank all of the memories she can from her early years. I pray that she will then be better equipped to press forward into her hope-filled future. No matter what regressions she may experience as she relives some of her past in these images, she deserves to see each one of those thirty photos, to study them in detail and process once again the difference between her past life and her current life. When the book arrives by mail in a couple of weeks, I'll try to post an update.
Tonight, despite all the challenges of the past year, I'm thanking Jesus that Kami is no longer living in the bleak building pictured above or depending on those swings to meet her needs.
Since writing this letter, I have taken advantage of many appropriate moments to speak Natalia's lovely name to Kami. She has perused her siblings' baby books enough to understand the basics of her early life. She continually goes back to her own Bulgaria scrapbook, discussing Vidin by name and putting as many words together as she can to express her memories and understanding of the images. As I shared here months ago when I first gave her the scrapbook, she has spent much time poring over the one distant photo of the institutional playground.
In adoption, we trust God to help us balance the goal of forgetting the former things and not dwelling on the past with respecting that past which has so significantly shaped our child. So the other day I asked on a Bulgarian adoption forum if anyone had photos of the Vidin playground they'd be willing to share. The response I received was a big blessing: one woman was from Vidin herself, and her mother and sister still lived there! She kindly offered to ask them to take some photos of the playground. I was taken aback by her kind offer and the potential for Kami to have more images of a place that was so special to her - likely the place where her best memories live. I was even more taken aback a few days later when she e-mailed me not one, not two or five or ten, but THIRTY crisp, clear photos of the playground, taken from within the orphanage gates! When I first paged through the photos, my stomach clenched up and I had to catch my breath as I realized that these pictures will likely throw Kami for a loop. They could captivate her for hours and days. She could see them and mourn all over again for the life she left. Just as I was beginning to turn these thoughts over in my head enough to nearly convince myself that Mason and I had somehow been part of an ill-intentioned international kidnapping, I remembered that these objects of play equipment in the orphanage yard, though they were full of emotion and memory for our daughter, carried no promise of life or love. The swings, her favorite by far, would not love her back, and they would no longer be available for her to use when she reached the point of aging out of the institution.
No matter what her reaction to these photos may be, she needs to have them in order to bank all of the memories she can from her early years. I pray that she will then be better equipped to press forward into her hope-filled future. No matter what regressions she may experience as she relives some of her past in these images, she deserves to see each one of those thirty photos, to study them in detail and process once again the difference between her past life and her current life. When the book arrives by mail in a couple of weeks, I'll try to post an update.
Tonight, despite all the challenges of the past year, I'm thanking Jesus that Kami is no longer living in the bleak building pictured above or depending on those swings to meet her needs.
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