The Phoenix Family
by Pamela Stockwell
My husband and I stood in the hallway of a hotel in Nanchang, China. The air was cold, contrasting with the sticky late May evening outside, but I still felt sweat trickle down my back. Nerves, I thought. We had arrived in China three days before, leaving South Carolina and stopping overnight in Seattle and Hong Kong. The inconvenience of using frequent flyer miles now seemed worth it. We were fairly well-rested and freshly dressed. Not true for some who had arrived that morning and now looked tired and disheveled but no less eager and anxious.
I glanced at our fellow travelers. They came from Colorado, New Hampshire, Connecticut. Most of us had met online but were only now meeting in person. We came from different states, different walks of life, but I’m sure we were all wondering the same thing as we watched a group of Chinese women congregating at the end of the hall: which one was holding our baby?
We were all here to adopt a child.
We had just checked into our rooms, right after our guide announced the surprise arrival of the orphanage group. We had thought they were coming tomorrow morning, not tonight. We panicked. We rejoiced. We asked for fifteen minutes to freshen up and get our cameras ready.
It turns out when you’re about to meet your child for the first time, when that little picture you carried for the last two months is about to turn into a living, breathing, crying (as we should soon see) baby, fifteen minutes is a vast ocean of time. We should have said two minutes. One minute to change clothes and fluff hair, and one minute to hyperventilate at the sight of the crib the hotel staff had placed in our rooms.
We had all received photos and information about our soon-to-be children. I knew ours was the oldest by a couple of months, though all were under twelve months. So as we gathered in the hallway and watched the orphanage delegation, I craned my neck, trying to spot the biggest baby or the one with the most hair—wouldn’t the oldest child have the most hair? I spotted a child with a mop of black hair and kept my eyes on her. That must be our baby. My heart hammered.
Our facilitator began calling names. A couple stepped forward, and the nanny placed a child in their arms. The new parents beamed. The baby looked bewildered. They were allowed a moment for photos and the absorption of this new reality before the next name was called. What looked like the largest baby was placed in another mother’s arms. The baby with all the hair, likewise. Worry crept from the corners of my mind, spawning wild thoughts: what if there was a paperwork mixup? What if they left my baby at the orphanage? We might not have custody of the baby yet, but the little face in the photo had already taken custody of my heart.
Finally, they called our name. Time stopped. A nanny stepped towards us. We stepped towards the nanny—and within touching distance of a tiny baby with sparse hair. The nanny handed her to me, and I took her into my arms—and she became my daughter, my Kiana. The wonder of her swept over me. She studied me. I studied her. Our facilitator talked, and he might have been Charlie Brown’s teacher for all I comprehended. When I saw the nanny hand over a bag of formula, I hoped my husband was listening better than I was.
We left our room minutes ago as a couple. We returned as a family. The wonder of it still takes my breath away, twenty-two years later. Our new daughter remained quiet—right up until we laid her on the bed and changed her clothes. That seemed to be her limit with the unknown situation she found herself in. She began to cry. This is the introduction many parents of Chinese children get to parenthood: an overwhelmed baby and copious weeping.
We held her, rocked her, bounced her, and finally walked her. The hotel rooms were arrayed in a rectangle with an open courtyard nine floors. Across the wide atrium, we nodded knowing greetings to the other parents also walking their sobbing babies.
Kiana finally fell asleep and, after we laid her gently in the crib, we studied her perfect little face, delicate lips, snub nose. She slumbered quietly. We finally broke away and followed the sage advice given to every parent, everywhere: when the baby rests, you rest.
I awoke on the morning of the first full day of being a mother and looked at my new child who still lay sleeping. I studied the sparse eyebrows, the curve of her cheek. I thought of the months of frustrating infertility, the complicated paperwork, the tears I cried along the way. But all that brought me here, to this moment.
She stirred, woke up, and our eyes met. She burst into tears.
So the adoption wasn’t all smooth sailing, but I didn’t expect it to be. I had spent the better part of two years envying mothers with children. One time, I saw a kid throwing a tantrum in a store, and I thought, rather wildly, “I want my own screaming baby!”
Wishes do come true. I had one right in front of me.
We managed to make it work. My husband and I had been confident adults for while. But as parents, we were bumbling newbies, painstakingly changing diapers and clumsily wiping cheeks and chin, feeding one noodle at a time to our new daughter until we looked over at one of the other adoptive parents who had taken the noodles, put them on a plate, and cut them up. Then they were able to scoop them up by the spoonful. Absolutely brilliant, we thought! What an idea. Kiana, with her solemn little face, seemed to be wondering what on earth was wrong with us. But we blundered on. When we finally made her laugh, we felt like we won the gold medal of parenting.
We adopted two more children in the next four years: Another one in a hotel hallway and one in a hotel meeting room. (“You don’t get babies from hotels,” said a first grade friend to my kindergartner daughter. “We do,” my daughter answered.) And each time, I was filled with heart-pounding trepidation but also heart-stopping wonder.
When we stood years ago in that hotel corridor, I knew we were embarking on a new journey, but I had no idea I would end up so far from where we started. That I would throw out what I knew about family (blood relatives), what I knew about race (the world often sees my children as foreign and they, unlike my husband and I, deal with racial slurs and dirty looks), what I knew about pretty much everything. I had no idea that the dust of our infertility and the tragedy of their early lives could blossom into something wholly new and different. But like a phoenix, a family rose from those ashes, remade, reworked, transformed.
Pamela Stockwell was born in Texas, raised in South Carolina, and now lives on a small farm in New Jersey. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and the Princeton Writers Group. Her poetry has appeared in several literary sites. Her first novel, A Boundless Place, won the 2020 LBW Page 100 Writing Competition and a bronze medal in the FAPA Annual President’s Book Awards Contest.
