WiW #4 - The Mitosis of Love

During this past week, I finished reading There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene.  It's the kind of book that you get to the end of and wish it wasn't quite over yet.  Especially the adoption stories that the author includes toward the end of the book--I would have enjoyed reading many more of those!

Still, all good things come to an end; but before I put the book back on the shelf, here are a few more quotes from it that grabbed my attention.

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"Doesn't anyone ever want to adopt an older child?" she [Haregewoin, the main character in the story, the Ethiopian woman who ended up taking in many, MANY orphaned children that no one else would take] asked one day as a Spanish agency rep loaded twin baby boys into his backseat.  For these scenes were becoming unbearable, the older children feeling more unwanted with every glorious departure of a baby.


At the beginning, the older children had run to comb their hair and change their shirts when visitors came, hoping that a last-minute excellent impression would make a difference.


"No," said the agency rep.  "People want babies.  Sometimes toddlers, but mostly babies and, most of all, baby girls."


In the adoption world, Haregewoin learned, even a three-year-old was an "older child," declined by most prospective parents as possibly too damaged or traumatized by early experiences.


"But won't someone adopt the older children?" Haregewoin sighed as a Canadian-agency person prepared to depart with a baby.


"Try the Americans."


"What?  Really?"


"The Americans will adopt anyone."


"What does it mean?"


"There was a boy at the Mother Teresa Home who lost both his legs..."


"What?"


"I think he was herding his goats over train tracks and the train came and caught the boy.  But the Americans are adopting him.  They'll adopt school kids.  They'll adopt kids with CP.  They call them 'special needs.' They'll adopt--"


"Boys?"


"Yes, boys!  They adopt boys, they adopt siblings."


"But big boys?  School-age boys?"


"Yes, I'm telling you!"


Haregewoin was off like a shot.  She sprinted to her house to start making phone calls to find the Americans.

It's true:  Americans are incredibly generous when it comes to adopting older children, special needs children, sibling groups, etc.  My own brother and his wife adopted a sibling group of two brothers and a sister from Guatemala, and we have friends who adopted a special needs girl from China.  When I read this part of the book, I thought, "I sure am proud to be an American."  :)

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Haregewoin cared for so many children that she was, at times, simply overwhelmed by their immediate needs and couldn't emotionally care for them as deeply as a mother would.  However, every so often, a child would come along that would capture her heart in a special way.  The difficult part about that was that, inevitably, that child would someday be adopted and would leave Haregewoin (who knew that it was for the good of the child but who still had to deal with the heartbreak of saying goodbye and letting go of a child who felt like a daughter to her).  As the author describes this process happening again with a little girl named Nardos, she writes it this way:

She hadn't consciously been looking to fall in love again, but suddenly, in the mitosis of love, Haregewoin's heart subdivided and a new chamber beat within it, this one labeled Nardos.

"The mitosis of love" - that's EXACTLY how a mother's heart works.  That's EXACTLY why we never run out of love, no matter how many children we have.  Not only do we not run out of love, but the love doesn't even diminish as it's shared between more and more little ones.  It grows.  It multiplies.  There's always enough.

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One time, a very wealthy family in Ethiopia decided to host a birthday party for their daughter at the orphanage, so that their pampered daughter and her equally privileged friends could see what life was like for the multitude of poor Ethiopian orphans.  While describing this party which was unlike anything the orphans had ever experienced, the author says this:

A three-year-old girl named Sara stuffed cake into her mouth and staggered about on the mud courtyard moaning, in Amharic, "Oh my God, oh my God, I have gone to heaven, this has got to be the most delicious thing I have ever tasted."

The image of her delight, brought on by just a piece of cake, is vivid and haunting.  Here in my house right now sits a half-eaten pan of peanut butter brownies, untouched for days because all of us decided that we didn't really like the new recipe I tried.  We aren't a family who wastes food, but in this case, why add extra calories to our bodies when we could stand to lose a little weight anyway?  The dried-out peanut butter bars will go to our chickens who will gobble them up and give us eggs--so we're not really being wasteful, right?  But when I think of how Sara and countless other orphans might have felt if given those peanut butter brownies, it makes my heart ache; and I ask again the familiar question, "Are we doing enough to help the orphans of the world?"

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For more gathered words, visit Barbara H.'s Stray Thoughts.