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The Dawn of the Crying Babies The morning we're leaving by van to visit orphanages in western Hubei, we're invited to witness the adoption of a group of older babies and toddlers who've been brought to the Lijiang Hotel from a location outside Wuhan. We take Victoria and Ying Ying up to the second-floor lobby and introduce them to the babies and their foster mothers. The foster moms look happy, the babies relaxed. One foster mother tells me how relieved she is that her lovely baby is about to get a family that can be hers forever. Our girls circle among the foster mothers, holding the babies' hands, stroking their cheeks. The foster mothers watch our girls--their Chinese faces, their American ways. None of us is prepared for what comes next. The American adoptive parents arrive and are herded past the foster mothers into a room that's too small to hold everyone. Someone is dispatched outside to pluck each baby from her foster mother's arms and deposit her into the arms of the waiting parents. These are not tiny infants. They are all nearly a year or older, plenty old enough to experience extreme separation anxiety. The air fills with the escalating cries of the babies. Outside the foster mothers become increasingly anxious; several burst into tears. The adoptive parents look worried, uncertain what to do next. They are not invited to talk through an interpreter with their child's foster mother. They aren't even all introduced. Inside the room, all the babies crying at peak volume, the parents try to listen to an official who's giving a speech. Ying Ying and Victoria stand together at the door, their arms crossed tightly in front of them, staring at the screaming babies. Victoria takes a rattle and tries to cheer one up; Ying Ying circles the room, watching. Shanti and I try to encourage more parents to come and meet the foster mothers, but the adults are overwhelmed by their children's distress and their own transformation into parents. Ying Ying is so exhausted from witnessing this scene that she falls asleep in a moving vehicle for the first time in three years. We talk about it every night we're in China. Before we go to sleep, she asks me if I'm sure the babies have stopped crying. Nothing I say--your adoption wasn't like that, you were just a tiny baby, you smiled and fell asleep, your friends who had foster mothers spent time in the same room with their new parents and their foster mothers together, they got used to each other a bit before the foster mom went home, it's good that these babies love their foster moms, soon they'll love their forever parents just as much--no words can match the power of the scene she has witnessed. I know we will be talking about it for a long time. Perhaps, I tell her later with a little prodding from the adoption educator Jane Brown, this is why change is sometimes so scary for children in adoptive families. Later, in Cambridge in October, Victoria asks me if I remember "the take-away." I'm not sure what she means. "You know," she says, "that time they took the babies away and gave them to their new parents and all the babies screamed." The cries of those babies are actually a good sign for their new parents, a sign that the babies have learned to care, that they can trust, that they can attach to a loving caregiver. Their grief at separation cannot be avoided. But surely the moment of adoption can be handled better than this. The babies need to see their foster mothers and their new parents acknowledge each other, and photos of all of them together can be reassuring in the weeks and months ahead. The parents need information about the babies. The foster mothers need to hear the parents' appreciation. Every participant in this life-changing moment deserves the gift of a little unrushed time together.
Foundation for Chinese Orphanages |