Looking For You

I'm in the mood for haunting.
The places I once went.
A bench. A room. A street...
Rubbing hands together in the cold night air.
Turning the coat collar up.
Dressing all in black.

I'm in the mood for contemplating
Blazing lights from pretty windows
Up and down the boulevard.
Faces at the glass
That stare blank into the night.
Reminding me how we stare
Blankly past others
Treat them as if they were ghosts
Invisible in the wake of our own light.

I'm in the mood for pretending
I am
Rootless and forgotten.
A faint trace of something that is lacking.
Insubstantial.
Left holding the fort alone.
I want to tell you
My heart might be pure but
Do not invite me in.


I'm in the mood for wandering.
Back and forth and lost.
In the mood for wishing and a million sunlit smiles.

But the night is dark and dangerous.
There is no helpless laughter.
No joyful creasing eyes...
Where are you?
Where did you go?
Are you on the bench?  Are you at the window?
Are you blazing light?  Are you insubstantial?
Am I just looking past you?  Are you all alone?

5 Things That We Didn't Expect When Adopting Internationally

Aside from the long-awaited referral call, for many families that choose to adopt internationally, the journey to another country to meet and legally adopt their new addition is one of the most exciting parts of the entire adoption journey.

It certainly was for us.  It's a thrilling, dizzying time of preparations made at breakneck speed. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of traveling to an exotic destination and the joyful anticipation of finally meeting the new baby or child.

In many cases, the adoptive family doesn't have much time between the Big Call and the Big Trip.  In our first adoption, we traveled to Sri Lanka a mere two weeks after getting the call that told us the sex and age of our child.  It's easy to get carried away with planning for the upcoming journey because throughout the whole adoption process, adoptive parents are left with little control.  All the control we imagine we have over our lives, in terms of privacy, finances, timing, is stripped away until we realize somewhat painfully, that we are powerless, dependent.  Then along comes this trip.  Once again we have control.  We can buy tickets, get vaccinations, give notice at work, pack our bags, decorate a nursery, celebrate with family and friends because for the first time in years, we have something concrete in our lives!

It is thrilling and breath-taking and wonderfully exciting, don't get me wrong.  It's an adventure.  Like any adventure however, on our journeys to meet our soon-to.be children, we didn't really know what to expect and surprise of all surprises, we didn't really have any control.

Here are five things we didn't expect (but perhaps should have) when we traveled to our children's birth countries to adopt.

1)  That it's not a vacation.

My husband and I are travelers at heart and normally would have tried to soak up all we could in these fascinating, vibrant places, but these trips were not vacations and we weren't tourists.   We were there for a reason and that reason was so all encompassing that it blocked out almost everything else for us.  This isn't to say we didn't have some amazing experiences like riding elephants, visiting beautiful temples, and eating altogether too much incredible fish curry and fresh mango.  We did have the chance to do some things that our guide suggested but the whole focus of our trip, the uncertainty of whether we would actually be allowed to adopt the baby we were visiting every day and coming to love, put our minds into "one track" mode.  That mode was basic survival mode, catching moments of wonder where we could but mainly concentrating on the task at hand, adoption.



2) That it's tough.

We were overwhelmed.  Our days were a mixture of stomach churning stress and mindless vegging out.  The two kind of balanced each other out.  We started almost every morning by smiling at each other over breakfast, squeezing each others hands and saying "We can get through this, remember, we've been through worse."  This wasn't because we had bad attitudes, rather the opposite.  We were positively acknowledging that this was tough and draining but we knew with all our hearts, it was also worth it.   We usually ended our days collapsed on the hotel bed, ordering room service with good Sri Lankan beer.  We were happy but we were exhausted.



3) That we were traveling to a country in recovery.

Many of the countries people adopt from are recovering in some way from some form of trauma.  We knew that Sri Lanka's 30 year civil war had ended only four months before our arrival but knowing it intellectually and seeing the evidence of it before our eyes was a different experience for us.  We were unprepared for the guards with machine guns outside the hotel or for check points or for having our taxi driver point out bullet holes in the wall where people had been executed as though it was just another sight to see.

4) That we would love it so intensely.

We weren't prepared for the intensity of the feelings we experienced for our children's birth countries.  We feel that these places are a part of us, that they are knitted into our souls. The pride and love we feel for these countries is as strong as what we feel for our own lands.

5) That Not Everyone Will Approve Of International Adoption

Our instinct was to excitedly tell people we met that we were spending time in their country because we were adopting a child.  We learned fairly quickly however not to announce that this in casual conversation.  While many people had positive reactions, some people did not and the idea of a child being taken out of his or her country by foreigners upset them.

Everyone will have their own unique experiences with this.  This is simply ours.  The two trips we have taken to bring our children home have been the most exciting we've experienced.  So if you are preparing for an adoption journey, God speed.  It is worth every hurdle and challenge!

The Closing of October

I walked by an old house today.
The yard was full of trees.
The trees were full of birds.
Singing.  Glorious.  Chaotic.
And I thought how strange
That they should sing
With so much soul
So much relish
At the closing of October.

Shadow Places

Sometimes I don't want to tell you big things.
I want to drown
In the comfortable, the known, the light.
I want to shut my eyes and hide in plain sight.
I've been a ghost
And I've felt at ease in the lull.  The silence.  The no-man's land of pain.
I've gone outside and no one has seen me.
I've knocked on the glass and waited to be let in.
I've smiled and spoken
And passed through time
Lingered all the places
You once saw me.
You have a memory of a girl with a scribbled in guidebook.
A tired girl sitting on a bench along the Rhine on a cool September night.
A shadowy glimpse of a girl walking away feeling as light as the air.

Sometimes I dream of time moving backward
To city fountains and light reflecting on black water and smoky night cafes.

Forward to all the things we would never have expected in a million years.
To spirits outside the doors and in the water and black heavy skies and sudden flashes of brilliance.
Destruction and radiance all over the place.

What happened?  What went right for you?  What went wrong?

Sometimes I have nothing to say.  Nothing to tell you or anyone.

Then sometimes I want to only tell you the big things.
I lose all patience with the little things.
I want loss.
Revolution.

I want to overthrow all the gods of falseness and the little white lies we worship.
I want to leave their temples in ruins
And forget them forever.

I want to tell you something.
I've had enough of being someone
I just barely recognize.

I am going to sit and stare at the stars,
Stand on sand and listen to the ocean,
Lie on the grass like I did when I was a child
Until I recall who I am.

The Cringe Worthy Poet

Oh dear.  You see, I've been writing poetry and creative prose since I was around 13.  I can't imagine who my influences were at the time aside from the flowery, romantic British poets we learned about in English class.  I often used slightly old fashioned, ornamented phrasing  in my poems and bizarre rhyme schemes that made sense only in my head.  But I took myself and my writing quite seriously.  If you had asked me at 14 what I wanted to be I would have said a writer.  Actually I would have said a penniless writer because that is just how seriously I took it.  I didn't just want to write, I wasn't going to be a writer unless I could be some tragic obscure figure, suffering and starving for my art.  It just wouldn't be worth it otherwise.

At the age of 14, I went off to a Catholic girls boarding school and wore a uniform every day and I met writer friends.  We purposely did things that proved we were writers like dye our hair fiery red or cut it very short or wear old man's pants we found for a couple of dollars at second hand shops.  Of course these pants we only wore after school hours when it wasn't necessary to wear our navy blue kilts and crisp white shirts.  Once we even had a weekend away from the school and daringly went to a poetry reading in a smoky cafe.  We liked obscure artsy things.  To be fair though, we also did write.

This is on my mind now because I hadn't really looked at my earlier writing for years and recently decided to pull them all out and give all that brilliance a dust off.  I don't keep much but I had kept binders and journals and scribblers full of words.  In my mind, they were quite good.  In reality, as I read, I found myself blushing, cringing and laughing to myself in a mildly embarrassed way, eyes darting nervously around the room to make sure no one was there.  My first instinct was to rid my life of the evidence.  Throwing it away would be dangerous...burning it perhaps would be wiser.  But then rather fondly, I began to think what if I had never written these things at all?  There is no doubt they were very poor pieces but we have to start somewhere.  If I would never have written them then maybe I would simply have never written at all.

My point is, we need to write bad things we think are worthy and decent at the time.  They are the stepping stones that lead us forward, into the practice of writing something halfway decent, something that doesn't embarrass us and then lastly after a very long time, perhaps if we grow and learn and stretch, we write something we are truly proud of.  Nobody starts off excellent and as much as writing is a talent, it is an extremely difficult discipline as well.

So here's to hundreds of crappy poems.  They were intensely felt but poorly executed.  They have their place in my life too. 

(I am not saying I am past the cringe worthy stage anytime soon, but I am giving it a go at least!) :)

The Girl Who Used to Write Poetry On Trains

This past July marked eleven years that I've lived here in Norway.

Each anniversary spurs me to mull over the years that stretch between the first and the latest.

There's been a lot of life in between meeting a group of wild, friendly Norwegians on a white Icelandic night in the wilderness at 2 something in the morning at the age of 18 and sitting here now, 16 years later, in a city I never imagined living in all those years ago when I traveled and lived for months out of a big backpack with the slogan "War is not healthy for children and other living things" on it. Always was a bit of an idealist. ;)

Some of those years were friendship, some were love, some were heartbreak.
Always this knowledge that in a lot of ways I am still that girl I was at 18...waking up to write poetry on night trains that spun me across these beautiful Northern countries, collecting cool, misty Scandinavian days and nights in my mind, confident and optimistic because living was an adventure and if I met any challenges along the way, well, wasn't that what made the good stories?  Wasn't that what laughter was for?  To deal with the hard things? 

This knowledge that I am still the woman I was at 24, leaving Manitoba on a sweltering July morning and knowing somehow that I wouldn't be going home this time. Then getting engaged a month later, and married just over a month after that.

But then I catch myself, shake my head and think, I am not that girl, that woman, at all. Who WAS she? Why was she so confident?

11 years of everything. 11 years of complexity: becoming, undoing, learning, regressing, loving, despair, light, darkness, journeys to far corners of the Earth to bring together the family God had in mind for us.

Sometimes I am amazed and sometimes honestly, a little bit tired when I think of the distances we had to go to for "regular" things...for a family.

A beautiful baby boy handed to me by his weeping mother on a dirty side street in Colombo. People stopping what they were doing to stare at us, at the picture we made: the screaming baby, the sobbing mother, the nuns holding her to keep her from collapsing on the road, and us...feeling so wrong, just so indescribably wrong in the heavy tropical heat, holding this piece of all of our hearts.

Then five years later, a laughing judge in a courtroom in Chili saying in rapid Spanish that we would have parental rights straight away and us, bewildered, walking away from the courtroom with an almost three year old son we'd known for three very short days. It was terrifying and good. Just like that, suddenly ours. We were and were not ready. But this time people were laughing, kissing our cheeks in congratulations. This time no one's heart was breaking. It was as different as night from day.

But after so many years of interviews that leave a person with almost nothing of their own, the question that tags along behind me like a child tugging on a mother's sweater is: Are you really good enough? Are you? Are you? Are you?

So sometimes it feels like a lot of the time in these years has been spent fighting so hard, proving something to someone, proving we can do this thing, we promise, not really ever free from scrutiny, yet also as a dear friend wrote in a photo caption earlier, these are the "happy days". Maybe also the happy years? It seems as good a description as any for these years that can't be neatly labeled because no word can really sum up anything, let alone the way it feels to live a life.

Maybe it is much more simple than I imagine and these, all these days, simply are the happy days because they are my days.

It's been a long and a short 11 years here in Norway.   Grueling in a lot of ways.  There have been so many lessons.  So many surprises. 

Maybe there is not much more to say but that they've held everything.  They've held all the love in the world. Shattering and healing such a multitude of things...

The Prairies That Whisper To Me

(My brother Sean takes stunning pictures of the prairies.)

Fall. The sharp bite in the air.  The crisp sunshine.  The days so perfectly outlined they dazzle with their brilliance.  I always claim to love summer and I do, who doesn't after all, but fall is more satisfying to my soul.  It has a different depth to it than the light, carefree days of summer.   I love the vivid colors, the scents of pumpkin spice, cinnamon, wood smoke mingling in the air. I also find it a spiritually deep season.  Somber and profound.  Embracing both death and life.  Allowing us to do the same.

Autumn is all memory.  Sense memory.  Memory in the heart and the blood.

It's autumn in Canada that I love.   Where I come from though, the air fairly crackles with aliveness.  Everything is dying all around us but it's such a gorgeous celebration of life.  A dazzling, festive good bye.  Everything exploding with color, with flavor, everything beginning to settle in, preparing for the long winter ahead.

Last autumn was the first one in eleven years that I had been in Canada during the fall.  I was home for my sister's wedding.  From the moment that I stepped out of the airport, I was hit with a homesickness so intense that I felt at a loss to explain it.  Everything whispered to me.  The stark black fields asked me "How can you bear this?  How do you bear being away from this place?  Why did you go?  Come back."  And the thing is to others not from the prairies, these fields would be ugly.  They weren't the gold of summer.  But I've been home often in the suffocating heat of summer when the fields are golden with wheat, brilliant yellow with canola blossoms, periwinkle blue with flax flowers.  I looked and saw beauty but I never heard their voices in my heart.  Maybe fall is so stark, such a contradiction of vividness and barrenness.  Stark enough that I can hear my own hearts longings more clearly.

You need a certain depth of character and imagination to find beauty in the prairies.  To those who don't know how to look, it is easily dismissed as boring.  It doesn't have the drama of mountains or waterfalls.  It has the endless sky though.  It has this.  That you can stand underneath this sky and see forever.  You can stand anywhere on a pitch black night and see all the stars.  In the winter, the sky will dance for you.  Even in the summer some nights, you will see the northern lights.  And you can't imagine how you can breathe.  The beauty of the prairies is subtle and soul soothing.  You need to look to see it otherwise you will miss it.

You will miss the open, open prairies.  You will miss the sky.  You will miss knowing your own soul in the midst of it all.  You will miss so much.