June 11, 2008

Today I laid eyes on our children for the first time. How different this moment is from the first glimpses of my two biological children in grainy ultrasound photos, where one couldn’t tell a knee from an elbow. These children are fully formed, in living color: Godebo, age, 6, and Bereket, age 4, from Ethiopia. They have already experienced so much: loss, grief and hunger. They have names, language, a culture so different from our own. Yet, I feel as though they are already part of my family, as dear and precious and foreign as my birth children were when they were first laid in my arms. Such is the miracle of adoption. The foreign becomes familiar, and the tragic makes room for joy.