Seeds of doubt - 03/17/2013

As we draw nearer to our court date, I cannot swallow this sense of dread -- for ourselves and our families, should an unfavorable result occur; but above all, for Melody, whose future is worse than bleak here.  In less than two years, Melody will be removed from her loving baby orphanage and shipped off to a mental institution as an un-walking child with Down Syndrome, a one-way ticket to life in confinement. 

In the U.S., adoption court is celebratory.  Families are invited to attend, the adoptees themselves participate, all gussied up, and even the judge revels in the only superior court proceeding where everyone present is HAPPY. 

Not so here.  Our court session, tentatively set for five days from now, will be adversarial in nature, with a prosecutor, jurors and witnesses present.  We will need to provide reassurances to those in opposition to, or skeptical of, international adoption in general.  We will need to prove that we are okay people and that we can provide for this child and that we don’t have some perverse agenda such as organ eating.  More importantly, we need to articulate why on earth we would want this child.  And that’s really the crux of it.  It’s a deep-seated problem that goes deeper than ignorance or poverty or lack of medical care, prenatal care, or special education systems.  It’s a cultural perception that will take generations upon generations to alter, that an extra chromosome is not a curse.  It’s not a tragedy.  It’s not a deformity.  It’s a difference; that’s all.  Melody is perfection, specially packaged.  We choose her.

Human rights, advocacy, early intervention, mainstreaming … it won’t begin until the perception shifts. I can only pray that with each “special” child that is hoisted lovingly to the foreground, whether in international adoption court, or the hallways of a foreign medical providers who scoff why bother, or hospital birthing rooms across Eastern Europe where mothers are convinced to give away children less than “perfect,” or a classroom where one mother dares to demand an education for her disabled child, eyebrows will collectively rise in these countries and seeds of doubt will scatter and take root.

Each visit, Melody spends the first several minutes spinning in my arms, gazing upwards.  We initially speculated that she wasn’t interested in us or did not enjoy being held.  Duh.  What we failed to realize is, she’s never been out of one room.  She’s never been outside.  The walls of her room are the confines of the only world she’s ever known. Sunlight through windows, different colored walls, echoes of hallways, unfamiliar light fixtures:  every bit of it is new, startling, exciting.  When she’s done spinning to and fro, she slowly turns to me … and smiles her big, silly, “I-am-so-in-love-with-you” smile.  And for the next hour, it’s just me that she wants.  Sometimes I take her to the window and let her gaze outside to the world not yet hers.  And while she gazes, I dream that soon she will step into that fresh air, feel that sunshine on her cheeks, and begin a life that any child should be entitled to.

Melody gazes outside her orphanage