I'm Walking Today

A few random thoughts...

The discussion on names yesterday reminded me of a kid I knew a long time ago whose immigrant parents named him "Great". He used to joke, "Some people's parents get their names out of the Bible. Mine found my name in the dictionary." He was a wonderful kid and definitely lived up to his name. That might be a lot of pressure to put on a person, however. :)

I can't really explain the emotions one goes through at this point in the adoption process. There's no end in sight, but you'd do anything to spend time with your babies again - even if it means walking away and leaving them again. You almost get a euphoria at the thought of spending some precious moments with them again. It's like one big Christmas Eve. And at the same time, there's the hovering black cloud that something could still go wrong, like it has so many times before. There's that constant reminder that they're not legally mine - YET.

For some reason, I've been thinking about a random experience I had many years ago when I was volunteering as a missionary for my Church. I was serving in Southeast Florida. We spent a lot of time "tracting", or going door-to-door looking for people that might be interested in hearing about the Gospel.

I'm fairly certain that if you polled the general public, 99% of people hate it when random folks show up at their door. I know I hate it and I've been on the other side of the equation. At the same time I've met so many interesting people (like the guy I refer to as "Naked Box Man" and the man who told us a very lengthy story about how he and his horse had been reincarnated as horse and rider on at least 4 occasions - including participating in the Crusades and the Civil War - and that the horse had communicated with him so that he knew that the horse knew that he knew they had been together before) and had so many unique experiences from it. (The last part of that sentence seems redundant after the part in parenthesis before it.)

Today, though, I'm thinking about the door in an apartment building in Miami. It was hot, it was humid and we'd had slamming doors all day long. At this particular door, we knocked and the door was opened by a smiling elderly woman wearing a purple muumuu and not wearing her teeth. Before we could even introduce ourselves, she exclaimed, "I'm walking today!" and lifted the bottom of her muumuu to show us the braces on her legs. She explained that she'd been having so many health problems the last few years and that she'd been completely immobile for the last several months. Medicaid and her doctors had finally been able to get approvals and she had new braces and today was the first day in a long time that she was able to answer her door when someone came to the door. She was SO HAPPY that she could stand and walk again and very grateful for every little thing in her life that she could do again. We had such a good visit with her and sang her a song (random, I know, but it was a sweet moment for all of us) and we were all better for the time we'd spent together.

Today, I'm just thinking about how I'll be a mom next week - for a few days at least. Before you respond with "but you ARE a mom....", I know what you're going to say and I "get that" but it's honestly not the same as having a particular little person that calls YOU "Mama" and means it just for you.

I'm trying to remember that even if my kids are in an orphanage, they have food and clothing and medical care. They're relatively healthy based on recent reports.

We're walking today.