Karen's Journey

Recently we received some new photos of T's family. It's been two years since the last time we got photos, and the children have all grown so much. The baby is now the age T was when T came home, and is the spitting image of T. I want to reach back through time and hug my little four-year-old boy so much, knowing now what I didn't know then. I was so excited to have new photos. They arrived while T was at school. When he got off the bus, I told him to come inside -- I had a surprise for him. "A new Skylanders Giant?" he asked. Okay, not that kind of surprise. I knew right away that the photos were going to pale in comparison. But I opened my email and showed him the photos. He proclaimed that the woman in the photo was not his mother, marveled at how small the cow looked, and then walked away. "How do you feel about seeing these photos?" I asked. He shrugged. I persisted. "Does it make you happy to see your family, or sad, or maybe both?...

We arrived at the Big Kids House to meet T for the first time just as they were preparing to eat their afternoon snack of dabo (bread) and shai (tea). We were called inside the Alcatraz Room -- the one window had bars and only the kids with parents there were allowed out of it to play -- while we were still saying our "metcha" hellos. T had no idea who we were or why we were there. He's told us that he had no idea he'd end up on a plane with us and never going back to his first family. He hadn't been there long enough to see the steady flow of parents arriving and leaving with children and no one explained he was getting a new mommy and daddy. The photo album we'd so carefully sent on six weeks ahead of us had never been read to him. "I didn't know who the heck you were," he has told me. I often feel like we effectively kidnapped him. That's how it must have felt to him, even though he didn't know the word for "kidnap." We t...