The Exact Same Moon by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Author:Jeanne Marie Laskas [Laskas, Jeanne Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48446-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Okay now. And please forgive me. But here’s the thing about the meeting about adopting from China. The thing I probably should have mentioned. The meeting is scheduled for September 22. Yep. The birthday.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a reason I didn’t mention this. There is a reason I have not made too much of this in my head. Because when one is thinking about certain things like babies, there is a tendency to make too much of certain other things. There is a tendency to look for signs. Signs in every cloud in the sky and the position of every rubber band on your desk and the pattern of every other date on your calendar—most especially the birthday you happen to share with your soul mate and husband.

And I don’t believe in signs. Or I don’t believe in making decisions based on signs. I think whenever you find yourself making a decision based on signs, well, that decision was really already made. The signs are really just signs of how clever you are at inventing the validation you need.

And this decision is anything but made. We’re looking into the China adoption program, but we’re looking at a lot of other ways of building a family, too.

Where am I, and why am I not there to grab hold of that baby? This seems to be my driving question. If I’m a mom who needs a baby, and if there’s a baby out there who needs a mom—a lost little girl on a bench with desperate eyes—well then, it’s my responsibility to look, to do whatever I have to do to find her.

And yet I’m the one missing from that dream. So who really is finding whom?

Alex and I have talked about becoming foster parents. Maybe that’s where the girl is, maybe she’s bouncing through the U.S. foster care system. It certainly makes sense to go looking there. In the foster care system you have a whole population of kids who need moms and dads. So why not enter the system, take in a foster child—most of them are older children—with the hope of one day adopting? We’ve gone to a few meetings. We’ve learned that before we would even be considered as adoptive parents of a foster child, we’d have to take classes. We’d have to become versed in RAD, reactive attachment disorder, and PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome, and countless other conditions that some of these children suffer. We are game to do this. As a psychologist, Alex thinks he might bring special skills to a troubled child. As a new parent, I think: um. I think: I was hoping to maybe learn how to do the diaper thing first. Is this really the way for a new mom to jump out of the gate? I don’t feel qualified to meet the complicated demands of a child who has suffered through so much so young. On the other hand, who does? These are the kids with perhaps the shortest supply of potential parents.

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