Malu

Last Monday we loaded up the little car we rent when we are here in Nairobi with a couple bags, a scrabble board and a sack of snacks and headed out of town. Annabelle slept for the first hour or so of the trip and woke up right as we crested the Great Rift Valley. The precarious road hemmed only with vegetable vendors and herds of fat sheep wove drunkenly along the edge of the rift, while Mt. Longonot soared out of the patchwork valley far below us. I knew when Annabelle woke up because I heard her mumble groggily from the backseat, “Oh my ness…” as she gazed out the window.

The dirt road to Malu Lodge wound steeply up an escarpment outside of Naivasha town through brushy forest and over a couple streams. By the time we arrived our car was splattered with mud after a couple close calls. We stepped out into a meadow tired and hungry and at the beginning of what turned out to be an absolutely lovely first-ever getaway as a family of three.

We stayed in a two bed-room cabin with a stone fireplace and wide front porch overlooking the lake far below. The four-poster beds were made up with white-down comforters and the walls were hung with water-color paintings of Joy Anderson’s lions and old black and white photos of Karen Blixen. The water to the deep bathtubs ran from a tank over a wood-burning fire nearby. It’s just the kind of place that makes you realize with a thrill of delighted shame just exactly why former colonists were just so reluctant to leave.

We spent the next four days sunk deep into wicker chairs in front of a crackling fire (Naivasha is chilly) reading and drinking from steaming mugs. Annabelle scared off the skittish dik-diks who would tiptoe up to our front porch or, when we walked down the path labeled “To the Farm Animals”, would pet the rabbits and chase the chickens and guineas and dubiously let the calves suck her fingers. She even rode a saddled donkey named John on the trails around the lodge, scattering a family of indignant warthogs across the field in front of her. For lunch and breakfast we walked about ten minutes down a muddy trail to the clubhouse where we ate four course meals that always included bread and butter, both homemade. Supper was brought to our cabin on a huge tray and we ate in front of the fire in our pajamas. After Annabelle went to bed Bryan and I stayed up far later than we intended to, not as often playing scrabble or reading as much as just talking. Not about the future or even the recent past but about childhood memories we had never shared for one reason or another, or that professor in college that forever changed the way we see the world or why we didn’t fall in love with the people we knew before each other. And why meeting each other was different.

On one day we took a picnic lunch to Hell’s Gate National Park (which is far more inviting than it sounds) and took Annabelle on her first game drive. There are no big cats in the park making it open to mountain bikers and we had fun reminiscing about the day we biked across the park through herds of zebra in a weekend celebrating the discovery that Annabelle was just a few weeks old inside of me. We remembered that weekend as we drove instead of biked this time, our firstborn nestled up sound asleep in my arms on top of her pushy little sister.

On the day we left, we drove down the escarpment and took a boat ride, Annabelle’s first, across the lake. We slid across the salty green water, disturbing swarms of pelicans and pink clouds of flamingos. Along the banks we nosed up to great pods of hippos sunning like mounds of wrinkled wet rocks. The biggest ones would sink beneath the surface in a snort of bubbles as we floated by only to resurface closer to the boat minutes later. Annabelle was annoyed by my death grip and kept “moo-ing” at the hippos to get their attention.

The final hours of our holiday were tearful for me, and it’s hard to say exactly why. My emotions have lingered through the weekend and though I suspect they are the kind best sorted out by a long lonely run, I am long past fast movement of any sort and am left sifting through my heart with an idle body. Nostalgia is the word that comes closest to describing what I feel, though it alone cannot carry enough nuance to hold my strange self these days. But something like nostalgia is what I felt as we drove back across the Rift Valley and home (“home”, home? home…) again.

Nostalgia for many things. Nostalgia for pieces of my own childhood. Nostalgia for the stomach-dropping romance of falling in love for the first time. Nostalgia for the sweet intimacy of marriage without babies and nostalgia for these precious priceless days of becoming parents of our first baby and being just three. And then even in some strange way, nostalgia for what hasn’t even come yet much less passed us by. Nostalgia for being parents of two little girls (maybe more?), for the nights we will sit around fires and play board games and stay up late talking about what they will be when they grow up or retelling the story once again of how mama and papa met. In some strange time warp of the heart I find myself cherishing and grieving all the sweetness of life, both that which has come and gone and that which is still ahead.

Something about last week was briefly perfect and as such it was unable to hold itself all in. And I think some of its sweetness must have sloshed out of place, splashing time both ahead and behind it. And the overflow of goodness and the sweet stains it leaves long after it has passed has left my heart thoughtful today.  

Ordinary

I’ve just realized that most of my friend’s blogs are really good at keeping me up to date with their day to day lives. I read them and know how their baby is adjusting to the addition of solid foods into their diet; how they feel about their new workout routine; what they thought about The Hunger Games movie; how a new Pintrest recipe turned out. Of course from time to time there are thoughts on bigger life changes like a family illness or new jobs. But generally there is just lots of news about the fairly ordinary.  

And I love it.

In a world where I often feel a million miles away from their day to day lives, I like knowing the mundane.

I’ve realized that I, on the other hand, am often bad about the day to day. I think this is for several reasons. For one, my day to day tends to look pretty different from one week to the next so sometimes its hard to know what to explain and describe. For two, the bigger stuff can sometimes, in some weird way, be almost safer, can’t it? I don’t mind that there are complete strangers out there who are reading about my spiritual journey with adoption, but it’s odd that some of my own loved ones probably don’t even know what country I am in right now, much less what I ate for breakfast. I’m not completely sure why this is. We all have our own kinds of guardedness, I guess.

So for what it’s worth, I’m in Kenya right now. I was in Uganda last month and Tanzania a couple weeks before that. I will be in North Africa next month. But for now I‘m in Kenya. Oh, and I had pancakes for breakfast.

I broke down and read the Hunger Games trilogy a couple weeks back. If you ask me about it in public I will maintain my literary snobbery and tell you how over-inflated all the hype is. But if you catch me in the right mood in private, we just might have a long talk about war and peace and the nature of true love. Maybe.

I have started driving in Nairobi. This probably seems like a long-overdue accomplishment, but with a perfectly functional public transport system in a writhing mass of humanity in a city of 4 million with about three working traffic lights (observed only certain hours of the day) all overseen by corrupt policemen, I have been perfectly happy just taking the bus or letting Bryan navigate the chaos. But with a feisty one-year old a belly that only fits down matatu-aisles with increasing difficulty I finally bit the bullet and got behind the wheel. And guess what? SO fun. I love it.

I haven’t been working out. Period.

The hormones that relegate memories of sleep-deprivation and comatose exhaustion to the darkest recesses of your mind have kicked in full-swing making me deliriously excited about meeting my MaryKat in just a few more months. My back is starting to hurt and I can’t breathe and bathe Annabelle at the same time anymore, but every time she moves I feel such a surge of joy.

Annabelle…oh, mercy where do I start. Annabelle is all little girl these days, complete with pigtails and fits to put on Mama’s perfume. She has two or three Hello Kitty band-aids at any given time, most of which are from actual injuries. She likes to talk to my tummy, which tickles, and frequently says, “Oh my ness!” when something surprises her.

I don’t have a Pintrest account. Should I? Can’t decide.

I’m happy to have Bryan with me again. He’s taken two trips up North in the past month or so leaving us apart much more than we prefer; the time we have been together has been full of branch meetings, team-building retreats and lots of reporting and paperwork and logistics to prepare for our transition back North. So on Monday we are taking our first family getaway as a family of three to a cottage on a Lake Naivasha. I. Can’t. Wait.

In Nairobi, the land of every fresh fruit and vegetable you can imagine on every street corner for dirt-cheap, we have been eating lots of delicious salads and stir-fries. And ice-cream.

So there is a glimpse of my mundane these days. It’s a good day to day. A happy ordinary. One that is soon to change to something entirely different. But in some ways, knowing everything is just for a season makes the present even sweeter.    

Zahra

Bryan and I have always said that if we ever decide to adopt, we want to adopt a child that God plops into our life in desperate need of a family. Someone we might have developed a relationship with over time, whose story we were already familiar with. I think we have always said this with the relative security of not feeling “called” to adoption ourselves (Christianese for – “That’s somebody else’s good deed,”) and not really knowing any kids that fit the bill. But at the same time we have been deeply moved by the stories of some of our friends and peers who have chosen to adopt children whose lives intersected at some point with their own. So with all the piety of the completely clueless we have often casually remarked, “Yeah, maybe we’ll do that one day too.”  

When we are here in Nairobi we stay in a big house that is the occasional home to a random handful of people from various backgrounds, working in various places in various jobs. There have been times when some interesting mix of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Sudanese, South Africans, Brits and Americans have ended up passing through at the same time (each of us with our own charming brand of craziness I might add) and I have thought to myself that surely there are cameras hidden somewhere here filming the most bizarre reality show ever.

One of the younger members of this household is an eight year old girl I’ll call Zahra. She is a refugee from a neighboring country and living here with a family friend and his own two daughters who are close to her age. Unlike the other girls she is pretty quiet, a little shy but she eats up any scrap of conversation or attention that might drift her direction. She is obedient and quick to help. But I’ve seen her be quite the goofball too. Annabelle loves her. The story I’ve heard is that her parents un-amicably split after one of the two converted from one major world religion to another. Her mother took Zahra’s younger brother and remarried a man in Uganda. Her father immigrated to Canada and has started a new family of his own. Inexplicably, Zahra was left behind by them both and is now living on the compassion of a family friend with his own host of problems in life.

I had heard bits and pieces of this story over the weeks and months that we pass back and forth through this house. It never stirred much more than passing sadness in me until one morning quite recently as I was watching the girls play in the living room it hit me like someone dropped an anvil on my heart, “This is the kind of child we were talking about. It’s someone like Zahra.”

Over the weeks since that realization I haven’t been able to stop praying for Zahra, that someday she would have the kind of family she deserves, whether mine or someone else’s. I can’t stop thinking about her.

I don’t write this to hint that Bryan and I are near adoption. Holy cow, he would probably think I was crazy for writing this blog considering only a week ago I was bawling snot into his chest at midnight as I pondered whether or not I will be able to handle two baby girls come January. Furthermore, I don’t even know enough of her story to know whether adoption would ever even be an option. I long to think that her mother and father are out there somewhere desperately trying to get her back into their arms. They have lost such a treasure. I write this mostly because I started half a dozen other blogs today that remain unfinished. I have learned by now that nothing ever really gets written except what is most on my heart. And today, almost against my will, it’s Zahra.

I can easily imagine my motherhood encompassing two blond-headed blue-eyed little girls that look a lot like Bryan and me. But I can also imagine our family getting a little messier in the years ahead, in the best sort of way imaginable. And that’s not something I really could imagine very well before Zahra. At least not in the detailed way that I imagine now. Now I imagine comforting new kinds of bad dreams and birthday parties not just for babies; I imagine learning how to braid different hair and new dynamics of family vacations; I imagine endless hours of paperwork and legal hoops and how our families would react; I imagine a lot of laughter and enormous help with two littler ones; I imagine hard days but lots and lots of love. It terrifies me to be honest. And it excites me.    

I don’t know if any of these things will ever be more than just imaginings. That in and of itself has been a humbling, eye-opening experience. What I do know is that I am so thankful for Zahra teaching me something about God. He is relentless. You can never, ever get to a place where he will leave you alone. He is always, patiently, persistently, lovingly pushing us further and deeper into what he wants for this world. And if you open a door in your heart even a crack that he thinks should be flung open, you can rest assured you are going to have a hard time closing it even if you want to. What a terrifying and beautiful realization that is.

Mary

In May, Annabelle and I drove to Friona, Texas to visit my grandmother, Mary Lee Talley. I had been warned that she would be much weaker than last time I had seen her, that she might not remember me. When we walked into the home where she was staying, we found her sitting in the entryway with many of her neighbors. She was holding a stack of papers, shuffling through them slowly while the old men and women around her craned for a better look. When we walked up to hug her, I could see that the papers she was holding were pictures of my Annabelle that someone had printed off for her from emails. When she saw us she lit up and said, “And there she is, my African baby!”

As I feared it might be, that was the last afternoon I spent with my Granny. Three days ago she passed away. Though she went quickly, faster than my dad could fly back to the States to be at her bedside, her death at 87 was not a shock. I say that even though in many ways death always seems like a surprise doesn’t it? As though it is not patiently waiting for each of us. As cliché as this truth is, we have all found ourselves celebrating through our tears this week. The thought of her at complete rest, reunited with her own parents and grandparents, with the love of her life from age sixteen, it’s hard to be too sad. We grieve our own loss. Like many of my cousins, as a grandchild I grieve the promotion of my parents to the next generation at the front of the line. But we can’t help but be anything but happy for her.

I wasn’t especially close to my granny and I feel far away from the commemoration of her life now. But even so I feel like I have my own unique touch of sadness and happiness this week. Yesterday we went in for our 20 week ultrasound here in Nairobi. The doctor patiently worked the wand across my jellified belly as the grainy image of our wiggly baby twitched across the screen. He finally settled on a good angle and squinting into the monitor told us with a grin that we have a healthy, (energetic!), beautiful baby girl.

She will be Mary Katherine, named after the paternal grandmother she never had the chance to meet. It makes me smile to imagine them crossing paths on their way in and out of this world, my Granny and her newest African baby. I know Granny would give her a wet kiss right on the lips just like she always did to all of us regardless of how young or old or distantly related to her we were. And I can only hope that in the handing off of a name, some of the residual love from a life well-lived will still cling to it as it is passed on to my daughter.

You are already so loved, Mary Katherine. You carry the name of one God chose above all others for the most honorable task a woman has ever had. You carry the name of one who loved her husband and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all of her life with apple-cakes, hand-made quilts, the occasional spanking and lots and lots of wet-lipped kisses. We can’t wait to see how you will make this name your own, how you will serve God and love people. We can’t wait to meet you, sweet girl.  

   

Stories

I actually wrote most of these words late last night in my daughter’s muppet notebook by the intermittent light of my cell phone while Annabelle slept in the room with me. Now it is late once more, the night before another long trip. But the words are still burning in my heart, like they need to be written again.

Granted, I had a few reasons to cry already when Bryan called. Devastating news of cancer from not one but three dearly loved people in my family’s life has reached us this week leaving us feeling far away and helpless. It was my baby sister’s last night in Tanzania for what will probably be a long time, and the last time I will see her before some sweet and yet unknown reunion in the future. And after almost three weeks apart I am just flat out missing my husband. Five minute phone calls on a satellite phone just aren’t cutting it anymore.

So Bryan could have told me just about anything last night and I probably would have started crying. But when he told me about some of the stories he had heard that day, not so much narrating a story as flatly stating facts out of his own numb shock, I felt like something inside of me broke.

He told me that people spent the afternoon talking to him about how when they ran for their lives, leaving everything behind and walking through the wilderness for weeks to get to safety, the very old and the very young were most vulnerable. This is not surprising. I’ve probably even said that very thing to others before. But I’m not sure I ever stopped to imagine what that might mean. I didn’t imagine crippled old men whose houses were burned down around them by their own people while they were respectfully left in their beds instead of being abandoned to the approaching enemy. And I didn’t imagine the mothers who made it days, maybe even weeks into their journeys’ before realizing that they could not carry all of their small children any longer. And deciding to save the children they could, they left their smallest babies to die alone under a tree while the rest of the family carried on. But those are the stories Bryan heard yesterday.

I can’t stop crying about those babies. And I know my tears are mere raindrops in a roaring river. I find myself begging God to have please, please, please picked up every single one of those babies and cradled them in his arms while they died alone. I don’t know if I can bear it otherwise.

I find it so difficult to understand that this world is a place in which one day, while I was chopping an onion for dinner or sleeping dreamlessly or washing my baby’s hands, another woman was kissing her baby’s head and walking away to leave him under a tree to die alone. How is that possible? How could those things have happened simultaneously? Surely I should have felt her heart break into a million pieces in that moment too. One soul cannot contain that kind of pain; surely all of creation should stumble under that kind of burden. And yet she walked away and somehow, miraculously, my world did not so much as shudder. I didn’t know to stop chopping or sleeping or washing, to fall on my face on the floor and weep for her. For all of us.

In my grief and shock I have this reaction, this flicker of audacity to believe that surely, surely I would have been able to do something different. That, had I been in her place, some source of strength or store of resources would have been made available to me that were not available to her. That I would have found a way to save all my children. I comfort myself with the lie of thinking that I could ever understand and dare make different decisions in that hell. That I somehow love the child I pushed out of my body any differently than she does.  

Some days preparing to go to this place – to develop an unwritten language, teach people to read and write, help people process their trauma – these things feel too big for me. But sharing their stories is one thing that has never felt like too much. I have always been excited thinking about listening and giving voice, even if only in very small ways, to the suffering and injustice of the voiceless. If nothing else, I have thought, when I am not strong enough to try and heal or comfort or restore in any measure, I can listen and I can write.

But when I imagine sitting before that woman and hearing her voice and her story for the first time, while my children and hers play at our feet, I think, oh dear God, I am not sure I am even strong enough to do that.   

  

    

Phone Call

I’ve imagined the conversation so many times. I’ve always been nervous that I wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it, but when the moment actually came, to my surprise, the words appeared out of nowhere quite naturally. Whether my eroded Arabic made choosing words easy, or the traumatic circumstances that prevented goodbyes in the first place allowed small talk to have an ironic comfort, I’m not sure. But it was good.

Bryan and I had talked a couple of times already and sent a dozen or so texts back and forth between North and East Africa. But trying to cram the emotional and sensual experience of reuniting with old friends in a refugee camp of 110, 000 people in a place that shows up on very few maps in the world is not something that can fit into a time-conscious long distance phone call or fifty character text.

When Bryan passed her the phone at first I just heard the background murmur of a tea shop. But then Zainab’s voice pushed to the forefront salaaming me almost shyly, as though she was sitting in the chair across from me and not a thousand miles away. My first reaction was to laugh and she laughed too. And then a tidal wave of emotion swelled over my voice and swallowed it whole. I was suddenly grateful for the physical and cultural gulf still between us, that she couldn’t see my contorted face or hear my voice break. I was afraid she would think, what do you have to cry about, though in my heart of hearts I know she wouldn’t.

How are all your people? And your children?

Praise be to God, we are all well. How is your baby, is she walking yet?

Yes, yes. Hana is walking..

The conversation was laughable. For a moment I could almost doubt that she had ever been running for her life, that she had ever walked for weeks with her babies to get to safety. For a moment I almost thought she really did have all she needed to eat and feed her family.

I have had several conversations like these this week. As Bryan finds (and is found) by friend after friend after friend, a woman who once showed me how to brew coffee properly or who patted my pregnant belly knowingly will ask him if she can use his phone to call me. And almost a year since I last heard her voice, we greet and chat and inquire about each other’s children. We say, God willing, we will see you again soon.  

Bryan is excited. I can hear it in his voice as he rattles off stories of whose families are there safely, what’s available in the market and what people are predicting for the future. He says the situation is bad, very bad, and yet maybe not as dire as we feared. People are hopeful, as though the worst has passed and somehow, in the slowly settling dust, hope is still standing there alive.

Bryan says there are babies everywhere and has reported back about several friends with new little ones. I am amazed and amused by this fact, as is everyone else apparently. I suppose there are limited recreational activities on hand when you are sitting in a refugee camp (or hiding in the bush?). People thank God for his generosity and congratulate us on the blessing we will also receive in January. Many of our friends back home think we are crazy to be thinking of taking a baby and pregnant wife to a refugee camp. But we are in good company it seems.

I’ve felt residual guilt about having been away for so long, for having jumped on a plane in the middle of the night and not come back. At least not yet. But Bryan tells me everyone left not long after we did, not on a plane obviously, but they scattered and lost track of each other too. And as he walks around this camp, stopping by tents and huts to greet former neighbors and teachers and shopkeepers, he witnesses reunions of old friends and relatives, other people who haven’t seen each other for almost a year. It would be absurd and wrong to compare my situation to that of our old friends. The differences are innumerable. But in small ways, ways that for some reason matter to me, those differences may not be as vast as I may have once thought. And that excites me.

One of the people that Bryan ran into a couple days ago was the man who built our house in North Africa. He made it across the border safely along with his wife and children and grandchildren. When Bryan met him again he was busy making bricks for someone else’s house and he and Bryan shared a laugh. “Are you ready to do this all over again?” Bryan asked. “We’re ready!” our friend replied.

I think maybe I am too.

    

Pangolin

We just came inside from an early morning rendezvous with a pangolin.

Apparently these rare creatures are known for their divining powers around here and in-between using him to predict the next rain shower, some local farmers brought him by the house to show him off. It’s by far the weirdest animal I have ever seen. Somewhere between an anteater and a hedgehog, it looked like a lopped off dinosaur tail loping around the yard on two tiny back legs. With its surprisingly calm and wise little eyes buried under thick armor I almost believed it really could have told me the weather forecast if I asked it to. Annabelle, still in her Carter’s frog pajamas and with oatmeal on her face, tottered around barefoot after it, dragging babydoll behind her. She squatted down next to Aunt Abigail (who was braver than her mother) and posed for a picture, grinning “cheese” before reaching out and running her hand across the scales as wide as her palm. Not even a year and a half old and already petting pangolins.

Bryan jumped on a bus to Kenya a few days ago and is flying North from there today. He will be gone a couple weeks, spending time in the refugee camp trying to find answers to our many questions. I already miss him like crazy, but am anxious to hear what he learns. There is a long list of people I hope he finds and I am both hopeful and terrified to hear how they are. While he is traipsing around the bush in North Africa, Annabelle and I are hanging out in Tanzania at my parent’s quiet, cool house, waiting again, but enjoying the company.

It has been fun to watch Annabelle readjust to the continent of her birth. She spends most afternoons wandering around the back yard, picking up bruised franjipani flowers or rocks, or sometimes slipping leaves through slats in the baby goat pen for the kids to nibble. There is a troop of neighborhood children who whisk her off from time to time and she alternates from overwhelmed to overjoyed by their presence, depending on her moods. Her shins are scratched up and she is filthy by bath time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her so happy. Watching her through a screen-door is a bit like watching an echo of my own childhood and it makes me realize how much I want my daughter to grow up in Africa.

I want her to grow up in Africa because I want her feet to be honest-to-goodness filthy at the end of the day. I want her to grow up, maybe not color-blind exactly – she’s already had her hair and arms rubbed enough to know that people are different – but to grow up so cheek-to-cheek with those differences that they don’t really feel like differences anymore. I want her to know what poverty is, what it eats and drinks and how it plays. I want her to be outside. A lot. I want her to learn languages and music styles, even ones much of the world has never heard of. I want her to be a dang good tree climber. I want her to see enough of this big world that she never once regrets missing out on high school band trips or cheerleading tryouts. I want her to have first crushes on boys that look different than she does. I want her to grow up aware of how wealthy she is, and thankful for it. I want her to grow up thinking that beauty is thick hair and bright eyes and a strong, healthy body. And I want her to grow up having strange pets, probably not pangolins, they’re a bit too scaly for me even if they can tell the future, but other peculiar things she will one day tell her grandchildren about.

There are plenty of things still to wonder about, even a few to worry about from time to time. But watching my daughter play this morning I couldn’t help but think, “It’s good to be back.”

(P.S. - I am back in the land of touchy internet too so sorry for the wonky formatting of pictures and text...)