It happened suddenly. After years of waiting for our baby to be born, never knowing when our turn would finally come. And then, when it finally came, more months of waiting while all the paperwork was completed, torturous months where our only connection to the little boy who would be, already was, our son were the occasional pictures and short videos that we’d play over and over again. And then counting down the days while we took our last vacation in Hawaii, ultimately counting down the hours — 120 hours until we meet him, now 85, now 40, now 12 (tomorrow), now 3 (today!).
After all that waiting, it happened suddenly.
We arrived in Taiwan Sunday night, November 13, meeting up with my father-in-law, who lives right now in China and came to Taipei to meet his first grandson. A pretty good deal for me, since now I had two Mandarin-speaking family members to help me get around in a country where I don’t speak the language. Had dinner, tried to get some sleep, and in the morning piled into a car for the three hour drive south to where our son has been living with his foster mother for the past 10 months.
I was strangely calm. I was expecting to be anxious, nervous about all the things that could go wrong. Maybe he would cry at the sight of us, something we’d been warned to expect. Maybe we’d suddenly realize that we had absolutely no idea what we’re doing when we actually got him back to the hotel and had to bathe him, clean him up, put him to bed. But I wasn’t. I was placid, relaxed, almost numb, just breathing in and out and trying to soak up the occasion.
But once we got to the town where he lived, things started to speed up as we went through a bunch of frustrating preliminaries. Go to the agency. Meet some people. Shake some hands. Accept congratulations. Fill out some more forms. Then, for some reason, they take you out to a store to buy baby stuff. We’d been told in our orientation meetings that this was the routine, and I guess it makes sense to do all that before you pick up the baby, but it seemed an unnecessary distraction. I don’t need to go shopping. BRING ME MY BABY.
That’s when the movie started to really go in fast forward. We finish shopping, and I’m expecting to go back to the car, put away our stuff, get in the car, and drive to wherever it is they are keeping my son. Instead, we leave the store, walk down half a block, turn into a driveway, and there’s our car. That’s the house. We’re there.
We’re there. This is where he lives.
What now? I’m not ready. Totally not ready. Months of waiting, YEARS of waiting, and it’s about to happen. And I’m not ready. I can see, out of the corner of my eye, a woman holding a baby about 30 feet from me, in the vestibule of his house. That’s him. He’s right there. But I’m not ready yet. I have to savor the moment, put it in a box, store it away. And I need the camera! We need pictures, we need to get the video. So I don’t look at him. I look away, I focus on putting away the stuff, getting the camera. I turn to my wife. I ask her, “are you ready,” and she says yes, smiling, a nervous smile, a beautiful smile.
And so we turned to the house, and became parents.
