Reflections on the Meaning of Family

How many of us baby boomers have adopted our children? How many of us would consider adoption after we passed the age of 50?

Baby boomer and National Public Radio host Scott Simon, his wife Caroline and their first adopted daughter recently traveled to China to adopt their second daughter.

Scott shares his reflections with us … and there is a link at the end where you can listen to him read the essay.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and daughter and I heard a knock on the door of our hotel room in Nancheng, China, and opened it.

Talk about room service: two smiling people from an orphanage put our new baby into our arms. Her name is Lina, and she is beautiful. We began to cry.

But in the next instant, my wife blurted what was on both our minds: Lina didn’t look like her picture. The thumb-sized portrait we had received from the orphanage showed a chubby baby with apple cheeks sitting in a field of yellow flowers, puffy pink pants pulled to her chin. This baby put in our arms seemed smaller; and even a little pale.

Dire thoughts flared in our minds. Had we been given the wrong baby? Would those people be back–in five minutes or five hours–with embarrassed grins to say, “Whoops, our mistake. Hope you didn’t get too attached.”

My wife and I rolled our eyes up and down Lina’s tiny limbs, looking for clues while she kicked and cried. Finally our daughter, Elise, reached her arms out to our new child with a gentleness with which I have never seen her reach for a cookie or our cat and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

It does not detract from the love I have for my wife or mother to say that in that moment, I knew a love for our oldest daughter that is more fierce, deep, and true, than anything I have ever felt.

When Lina was restive and distressed over the next few days, Elise was often the one to settle and comfort her. She’d put her own small hand on her sisters’ downy head, as if to say, “Look, our father is silly. But you can train him to do anything you want. And our mother is smart and beautiful. Don’t worry–I’m your sister.”

And in those moments, the kind of platitudes people are usually embarassed to utter with a straight face suddenly looked as big, bright, and undeniable as the sun and moon. Race, blood, lineage and nationality don’t matter; they’re just the way small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it’s warm; and beats through a loving heart.

I know our girls will fuss and contend as they grow up. But when Elise saw a child enter her life in tears, this little girl who was once herself given up reached out with instinctive tenderness.

My wife took Lina and Elise into the bedroom. The two grinning orphanage officials sat me down with a sheaf of forms. No words I ever put into an essay or novel will be as precious to me as the ones I wrote that will probably rest forever unread in the deep files of a vast bureacracy.

“Why do you want to adopt this child?” the form asked. And I answered, “We love our first daughter so much that we wanted to get her the best present in the world — a sister to come along for the ride.”

Here is Scott’s NPR audio essay, reflections on the meaning of family and the ties that bind siblings together. [click here to listen]

Oh, yes … we suggest having a hankie nearby.

[The editors of BoomerCafé invite you to visit Scott Simon's Web site.]

Popularity: 28% [?]