I Will Remember You/Will You Remember Me?

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?"

Another shrug.

I warned the teacher to expect a downturn in behavior. Pretending we don't care means we don't have to feel the pain, but pain will find it's way out. Lucky for her it was two days before spring break. Lucky for me it was spring break and I bore the full brunt of the downturn in behavior. But by the time break was over, we were on an upswing.

Hubs and I talked and we decided we are not going to show T photos any more unless he wants to see them. We are going to get a photo album and put the photos in when they come. We will color code the spine so that red means "no new photos" and green means "new photos inside." And T can choose whether or not to look at them.

Today I opened an email from the social worker who accompanied us on our birth family visit. It came in on Monday, April 15, just as all hell was breaking loose in Boston. Between work -- the division I report to is located in Cambridge, Mass. --  and our adoption agency -- which is located just outside of Boston -- I know hundreds of co-workers and Ethiopian adoptive families -- not to mention my own niece and her fiancee -- who were caught up in the Boston lockdown, so I was receiving scores and scores of Facebook updates every hour, and it will take days to clear out my email inbox. But I'd remembered seeing that I'd gotten something from the social worker, so this morning while my little chatter-in-my-ear-while-I'm-doing-email-box was still sleeping, I opened it.

The social worker had run into Gashe -- T's uncle -- in the market in Arbegona. And Gashe had asked if we could send a photo of T and also T with us. So I fired off three photos and a brief update on how T is doing just before T got up.

My little reptile was lying in the morning sun streaming through the sliding glass door, warming himself. I asked him if I heard something from his family, would he want to hear it. He shrugged.

I told him that I did hear something, but that I would wait for him to let me know if he wanted to hear it. He could take some time to think and if he wanted to know, he just had to ask me. I started to turn away when I heard a very tiny, "What?"

"Are you telling me you want to hear?" I asked. He nodded. I told him about the meeting between the social worker and Gashe and that Gashe had asked the social worker to ask us for some photos.

"He remembers me?" T asked, surprise on his face.

"Gashe?" I asked.

He nodded, and said, "It's been three years. That's a long time."

My eyes filled up with tears instantly. I reached down and pulled him up off the floor. I hugged him tightly.

"Gashe will never forget you," I said. "Your brothers and sister will never forget you. They think about you every day."

"But it's been three years. That's a long time."

"They will always remember you. They could never forget you. They love you too much to ever forget you."

Oh break my heart. How long has this child been thinking that his family had forgotten all about him? How much was that silently tearing him up inside?

He smiled ever so slightly to hear that his family still thinks of him. A little, revealing smile. A child reassured that he hasn't been forgotten.

In all the conversations we have, how that worry hadn't come up, I don't know. Other than that he's been afraid of the answer.

Oh, break my heart.

There's a wonderful book by Nancy Tillman entitled Wherever You Are my love will find you, that I read to T from time to time, telling him each time that I think of his ama and how she is sending her love out to him always. 

"So climb any mountain...
climb up to the sky!
My love will find you.
My love can fly!"

I think today that love found him.

T's house -- known as a 'tukul' -- in Arbegona.