Grief
2006-03-31, 11:47

The baby woke herself up around 430am this morning (I've been up since). I detached myself from The Machine and moseyed upstairs to see if I could get her back to sleep in short order. When I entered her room, I found her sitting up, bleary-eyed, wailing a tired, barely-awake wail, and periodically asking for "mama". Or, more specifically, "mamamamama". She does that, and "dadadadada" too. I tried getting her to lay back down and latch onto her wooby, but she was thrashy and not in the mood to be comforted. I picked her up, and she wanted out of the room, I assumed to go see her mama. Holding her did no good, either, so I decided we should pay a little visit to mama, and see if that would end her night fit enough to calm her back to sleep.

As soon as I told her we were going, and that she needed to be very quiet because everyone else was sleeping, she managed to keep herself contained as we crept through the house full of squeaky wood floors and hungry, mewing cats toward the basement door, and down. Into our bedroom, barely lit by the predawn light filtering through the glass block, and we found a half-roused mommy in bed, and we joined her there. After a few seconds, however, even while sitting up on mommy's tummy, she started crying again. As I watched her refuse to be comforted, a thought occurred to me that maybe the "mama" she was looking for was not my wife. Perhaps the dreamed of her caretaker from her orphanage, and was expecting to be able to see her. Maybe some small part of her brain still remembered her few short days, hours (we will never know how long), with her biological mother, and she grieved, wanting that connection only nature can forge.

In that dim light, hearing my baby's exhausted wail, I cried - silently, so as not to worry my wife. I cried for my baby's loss, for her true mother's loss, and for that horrible, tiny splinter in my heart that says 'adoptive parent', knowing that no matter how strong the bond, it can never truly be whole.

I love this girl with a strength and depth that I didn't expect of myself, and it hurts me to see her suffer. I cannot make her forget who she is and where she came from, and make her completely ours. But I can love her with all my heart, and try to help her through the grief, and hope that she will love us back. Each little baby kiss, each lingering hug, each smile, makes it all worthwhile. Having this magic little girl in my life is more than I could have ever asked for. Every day, she becomes more my Little Dark-Haired Girl.

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