Tonight I am filling in little boxes and blanks from our adoption agency to complete our annual report to Ethiopia. We have to send this until AJ is 15 years old. Supposedly this helps reassure Ethiopia that her children are doing well and adoption remains a good thing for them. I am not sure how well that is working since Ethiopia recently became a two-trip adoption country. Ugh. That about wipes out the newly refundable adoption tax credit.

Oh well. I don’t mind remembering that happy day three years ago.

Now every day I am blessed with this one:

Happy referral day, Yegetanesh.

Amaseganallo, Ethiopia.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.

Take the World Vision AIDS Test to see how much you know about the global crisis.

• Almost 35 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.
• 2 million people died of AIDS-related illness in 2008.
• 2008 saw 2.7 million new infections, with 1.9 million of these in sub-Saharan Africa. (Note: “Sub-Saharan Africa” means all of Africa except Northern Africa, so it includes Ethiopia, where my daughter is from.)
• 6,000 children are orphaned by AIDS every day. Worldwide, 15 million children have lost parents to AIDS; this number is expected to climb to 25 million.
• Every 14 seconds, a child loses a parent to AIDS.

Here in the U.S., where HIV is now considered a chronic condition rather than a death sentence, these numbers mean so much that to us they too often mean nothing. Who do we know who lost their parents? What town have we visited that has been socially, economically, physically decimated by the death of 10 percent of its population to one disease? No one and nowhere. But in Africa–and increasingly in India, China, the Carribean, and Eastern Europe–these aren’t numbers. They are names. They are faces. They are memories. And they are hopes and dreams that might have been.

They are counting on us.

Of the 15 million orphan-reasons to care about World AIDS Day, an estimated 4 to 6 million live in Ethiopia. Though to our knowledge our daughter did not lose her parents to AIDS, in many ways they are all AIDS orphans–for without this plague on the land would be millions more to raise the nation out of poverty, to grow crops, to give health care and education, to take all these children into Ethiopian homes to be loved and cared for. But there are too many.

I highly recommend There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene, a journalist who has added two Ethiopian children to her family. She writes of her reaction when in 2000 she encountered the UN statistics of 12 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa:

Who was going to raise twelve million children? That’s what I suddenly wanted to know. . . . Who was going to buy twelve million pairs of sneakers that light up when you jump? Backpacks? Toothbrushes? Twelve million pairs of socks? Who will tell twelve million bedtime stories? Who will quiz twelve million children on Thursday nights for their Friday-morning spelling tests? Twelve million trips to the dentist? Twelve million birthday parties?

Who will wake in the night in response to eighteen million nightmares?

Who will offer grief counseling to twelve, fifteen, eighteen, thirty-six million children? Who will help them avoid lives of servitude or prostitution? Who will pass on to them the traditions of culture and religion, of history and government, of craft and profession? Who will help them grow up, choose the right person to marry, find work, and learn to parent their own children?

Well, as it turns out, no one. Or very few. There aren’t enough adults to go around. Although in the Western industrialized states HIV/AIDS has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence, in Africa a generation of parents, teachers, principals, physicians, nurses, professors, spiritual leaders, musicians, poets, bureaucrats, coaches, farmers, bankers, and business owners are being erased. . . .
….
Adoption is not the answer to HIV/AIDS in Africa. Adoption rescues few. Adoption illuminates by example: these few once-loved children—who lost their parents to preventable diseases—have been offered a second chance at family life in foreign countries; like young ambassadors, they instruct us. From them, we gain impressions about what their age-mates must be like, the ones living and dying by the millions, without parents, in the cities and villages of Africa. For every orphan turning up in a northern-hemisphere household—winning the spelling bee, winning the cross-country race, joining the Boy Scouts, learning to rollerblade, playing the trumpet or the violin—ten thousand African children remain behind alone.

“Adoption is a last resort,” I would be told in November 2005 by Haddush Halefom, head of the Children’s Commission under Ethiopia’s Ministry of Labor, the arbiter of intercountry adoptions, “Historically, close kinship ties in our country meant that there were very few orphans: orphaned children were raised by their extended families. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has destroyed so many of our families that the possibility no longer exists to absorb all our Ethiopian orphans.

“I am deeply respectful of the families who care for our children,” he said. “But I am so very interested in any help that can be given to us to keep the children’s first parents alive. Adoption is good, but children, naturally, would prefer not to see their parents die.”

I did not adopt from Africa to stand on a soapbox. I have in fact had my soapbox enough years now that I may even have learned a bit about where I should and should not set it (a child’s crib is no place for it). But I am compelled by my love of my child to remember, to consider, to speak for and to help those equally precious who have so far been left behind in her country and around the world. And so as I perhaps have your eyes on my words and your heart on my child: yes, I will speak of AIDS, I will connect the dots, I will tell the truth on World AIDS Day: Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die. I, you, we can make a difference.

I’ve also been noticing quite a bit of play acting with little Fisher Price people and animals involving babies/children/animals crying for their mommies. So yesterday I started not only having the mommy come but telling her mama always comes. I talked to her about how when she goes away, like to Grandma’s, or I go to work, she might miss me, but I always come back. And so it’s okay to miss me but it’s also okay to enjoy going or playing with someone else because she can know that I’ll come back and spend time with her later.

At bedtime she said unprompted, “Mama comes back.”

I guess that connected, so I’ve kept it up today. “You can go to Grandma’s tomorrow and play, and then the next day I’ll come get you. Do I always come back? Yes, I always come back.”

We have been talking more about adoption lately just by virtue of her birthday coming up and friends having babies and her interest in how she came on a plane (we got I Love You Like Crazy Cakes from the library too). I’ve also been busy with work, trying (semi-successfully) to get hours in, and had a friend babysit when my mom was gone for a week. Some disturbed routines and extra busyness.

But who knows if anything has anything to do with anything else, for who can know the mind of the toddler? (Pretty sure that’s in the Bible.) Could be just a phase, like kids have and she’s had before. It’s just tough because she’s overall so fearless and loves her dad so much (and I so love the breaks he gives me!). But for whatever reason she seems to need more of me right now. I’m just trying to play Fisher Price Sesame Street on the floor as much as my body and brain can handle and not think what would happen if I ever get a “real job.” I think I would have to coat myself with Teflon to get out the door.

And I’ll just keep telling her, Mama always comes back.

It was one of the largest studies yet of transracial adoptions and focuses on the first generation of children adopted from South Korea. Some points from the executive summary:

• Adoption is an increasingly significant aspect of identity for adopted people as they age, and remains so even when they are adults.
• Race/ethnicity is an increasingly significant aspect of identity for those adopted across color and culture.
• Coping with discrimination is an important aspect of coming to terms with racial/ethnic identity for adoptees of color.
• Adopted people of all colors report that they experience discrimination, based on how they entered their families, in all settings of their lives.
• Most transracial adoptees considered themselves White or wanted to be White as children.
• Positive racial/ethnic identity development is most effectively facilitated by “lived” experiences such as travel to native country, racially diverse schools, and role models from their same race/ethnicity.

The study also makes recommendations for adoption practice and policy to promote positive adoptive and transracial/cultural identity. Check out the summary.

Related: New York Times article about the study: “Adopted from Korea and in Search of Identity“

From what I could gather between laundry runs, Tigger becomes sad about being “the only one” and goes looking for his family tree, which of course he thinks is an actual tree—cue two-year-old confusion. I try to help by explaining he’s looking for his family, his mommy and daddy Tiggers. I then realize where this is going: he’s not going to find them (after all, he’s the only one).

The plot thickens with the friends’ poorly conceived plans to help Tigger feel better by writing a letter “from his family,” leading Tigger to believe they’re coming to see him. The friends then dress up like Tiggers for the party he’s prepared, but when Tigger finds he has been deceived, he runs away in search of the real Tiggers.

I know all this is supposed to be a feel-good story about how your family is the people who love you. But trying to translate it down to my daughter’s level, it came across as these people lying to Tigger because he doesn’t have a real family, a mommy and daddy. And he’s the only one—the only one like him, the only one without a family tree, the only one asking these questions.

As a topper, when Rabbit leads the others to find Tigger in a snowstorm, he’s angry that Tigger had run off, and when Tigger says it was to find his family, Rabbit yells, “Stop all this family nonsense!” Tigger is crushed.

How many adoptees have been crushed like that?

How many have searched and never found?

Is that going to be my daughter?

My daughter’s family tree is more elusive than a leaf in a hundred hundred-acre-woods of trees. I don’t know how to find it, and the temptation is to deny it, ignore it, pretend it doesn’t matter—pretend that we, like Roo and friends, can pass off a letter we wrote as enough, call ourselves her family, and be done with it.

But it’s not enough. He wants to know.

She deserves to know.

The movie ends with Tigger giving Roo what he believes is a family locket and Christopher Robin taking a “family picture” of all the friends together to go in it. So they’re family, right, and they all lived happily ever after?

Well, yes and no. Family is more than a tree; it can be made, not just born.

But my daughter still wanted to know where his mommy and daddy are.

I just want her to know: she’s not the only one.

I’ll try, baby girl. I’ll try.