Adoption, the blogosphere, and me
It’s been a while since I had time to post. Mostly I’ve been working. Working on the house (some bookshelves, hanging curtains and a new living room clock (a cool George Nelson “turbine” design that we got on sale as a closeout floor model at DWR), working on work stuff, and working on the website. What’s that you say, it looks the same to you? Yes, unfortunately, it will be a while before the work I’m doing becomes apparent. One thing I’m doing that’s not obvious is trying to get it set up so it’ll be super easy to post entries while we’re in China and after. Maybe I’ll even get RSS set up like a real blog so you can subscribe and get notified when we post an update–no promises but I’m working on it.
Another activity that seems to be taking increasing amounts of time is surfing the adoptosphere, our current neighborhood in the blogosphere. For those of you unfamiliar with that term, it refers to that growing percentage of the internet that is taken up by blogs (short for weblogs), which is pretty much what you’re reading right now. For those inclined to do things the easy way, it’s trivial to set up a blog (try blogspot.com, for instance)–you don’t need any special knowledge or skillz. Or if you’re like me you can set up a regular website and then spend way too much time training yourself in a bunch of acronyms (XML, XSLT, XPath, FTP, .NET, and more), get a bunch of crazy ideas about making a blogtacularly simple tool to post from anywhere in the world, and hope you get it done before your world changes drastically and you’re too busy feeding, changing, playing with, and otherwise taking care of an amazingly great small human to worry about why browsers aren’t turning ' into an apostrophe even though the XHTML standard says they should (long story having to do with more acronyms like MIME).
The blogosphere contains a remarkable number of blogs by adoptive parents (mostly moms) and especially (it seems) parents of children adopted from China. Many of them are simply chronicles of the adoption process (often called something like “Journey to Hildy”); these are very interesting to us right now. We even found one set of parents traveling to China this month (the Werkmeisters) for a child from Lina’s orphanage (they just brought Allison home today!). Then there are the “famous” bloggers who build up huge readerships (generally due to just plain good storytelling). Virtually the whole adoptosphere was waiting with bated breath when Baby Gwen got sick while still in China (she’s home and doing much better now). Among our current favorites are Macy Day (note: contains pugs!), and dooce (not focused on adoption; dooce is an entertaining writer–and now pro blogger supporting her family on advertising revenue from her blog).
But back to all that work we’re doing. A lot of what we’re working on is trying to get ready for Lina, and another large part is trying to fill the time while we wait to hear our travel dates. As we get closer to the time when we’ll finally meet Lina, as Stephanie grows more and more impatient for news from our agency, I find myself growing both more excited and yet more calm. I’m not feeling very impatient at all, which surprises me because I’m normally very impatient about upcoming good stuff. After talking to Stephanie earlier today, I started to feel a little guilty about not feeling more impatient. But while Stephanie was at yoga class tonight I realized what I think is going on: the magnitude of the greatness, the incredible stupendiosity of what’s about to happen is so amazingly overwhelming that I…can…wait. Lina is literally worth waiting for, and I’m prepared to do so (within reason, of course). There’s really nothing I can begin to compare this to. Where else in life do we know in advance that something really really (I mean really really) great is going to happen?
This brings me some peace of mind. Not in some cosmic one-with-the-universe kind of way. Maybe it’s in the hands-pressed-against-my-ears I’m not listening kind of way. A not-a-river-in-Egypt kind of way. Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that when I think about Lina and I know that I’ll see her soon, it all seems okay. It stops mattering whether we get our TA today or tomorrow.
I do want to bring Lina home soon. Okay, now. I wish she were here already. But I’m okay with knowing that it will happen, and that it will happen soon, and that all my expectations about what I think it will be like to be a father are likely to be wrong, with the lone exception being my expectation that it will be incomparably good.