Two Years

TODAY it is very important that I write. Because TODAY is the second anniversary of our Giving and Receiving Ceremony. TODAY is the second anniversary of the day we went from being a family of three to being a family of four.

A few days ago, I was sorting through Lana's clothes, and bagging up things that were too small. (She has been growing like a weed lately). At the corner of one of her drawers was a wrinkled pair of yellow capri pants with a bad stain over the knee.

She is wearing the pants in this photo.


We bought those pants two years ago tonight, at a shopping center in Da Nang. (We also bought her a yellow sweatshirt with a red tulip on it, and a pair of pink pants and a turtle neck. And crayons and coloring books and boxed milk, and pretty much anything else that she pointed at in the grocery section of the shopping center, because she was so very thin. And she wouldn't eat much, aside from fruit.)

The reason that the pants have a terrible stain on the knee is because she was wearing them when I dropped her. In the road. Yes, in. the. road. In Vietnam. Where traffic is INSANE.

I don't think I blogged about this when it happened.

We were walking in the road near the Somerset Westlake in Hanoi and I was carrying her in my arms, when my shoe caught in something and I tripped...and I dropped Lana in the road and she was almost crushed by a taxi.

When I think about it now, when I think about what might have happened, what could have happened, it makes my heart beat really fast and I feel panicky.

More panicky, in fact, than I felt at the time it happened.

I think I was numb. I think I was in a state of heightened awareness. I think I had reached a level of 'completely-and-utterly-freaked-out' that was previously unknown to me. So dropping my newly adopted child in the road in front of a taxi didn't really register as it probably should have.

And with two years hindsight, all I can say is Thank God, Thank God, Thank God that taxi driver stopped.

This has been quite a journey. We are in such a different place than we were two years ago tonight, when Lana fell asleep watching a Strawberry Shortcake video in a hotel bed in the city where she was born, a city she may never return to.

Tonight we went to dinner as a family, and Lana gleefully ate a cheeseburger and french fries and lettuce and tomatoes. She stole shrimp off my plate.

Afterwards, Lana and went shopping, because Coldwater Creek was having a 70% off sale and Gymboree was having a 60% off sale, and Lana grinned at me and said, "Let's Go SHOPPING MOMMY!"

We are dangerous together, she and I.

I could not bring myself to throw out those yellow pants. They are tucked in the back of her closet, and someday, maybe, I will tell her the story of why there is a stain on the knee, and why, of all of her clothes, I kept that pair of wrinkled pants, even when they no longer fit her.