(One year ago this month, Pa and I made the trek to China to adopt our sweet Sister Susie. I am going to take the first seventeen TWENTY-SIX days of February 2008 to revisit that trip. Hop in for the ride!)
I'm not quite ready to "fly home" just yet with this blog. There are a few odds and ends that simply must be talked about.
We had tour guides the whole time we were in China--four of them to be exact. But there was one who stuck close to our group for most of that time--Sherry:
Sherry was fun, goofy, efficient, and highly intelligent...no wonder I liked her.
She guided us through the maze of all things "China," like our paperwork for starters:
I'm not quite ready to "fly home" just yet with this blog. There are a few odds and ends that simply must be talked about.
We had tour guides the whole time we were in China--four of them to be exact. But there was one who stuck close to our group for most of that time--Sherry:
Sherry was fun, goofy, efficient, and highly intelligent...no wonder I liked her.
She guided us through the maze of all things "China," like our paperwork for starters:
And when she wasn't busy spewing out historical facts and figures, she was regaling us with stories of Real Life In China. (All spoken in Chinglish, of course.) You know, tales about marriage and her job and the one-child policy and music and Asian hair and skin and all kinds of tidbits that made me think, and helped me to understand more about the country our daughter first called "home."
Well, most of the stories made me hoot and snort, and just generally make a total buffoon of myself.
Nothing unusual there, I assure you.
But she joined right in with the fun:
And claimed those girls as her own:
We had to say goodbye to Sherry not once, but twice. And both times--I was a crumpled mess of tears.
That's so like me, you know.
(Pffftt.)
I've had over a year to analyze the whole thing--why I had grown such a strong attachment to her--why it was so hard to see her go.
I guess it's like this.
We had laughed together, cried together, worried together. Ran through airports together. Waded through paperwork together. Calmed my IV baby together. She was my peer; she was my friend. And like my girl, she was Chinese. My chances of ever seeing her again were slim to none.
Sherry had so graciously shared her life and her time with us--and all she asked in return was that we love and take care of her babies.
And maybe that's it.
Maybe there was a part of me that felt like Sherry was our Susie's "mother."
And so I wasn't saying goodbye to a "tour guide," I was walking away from a friend. And a dear one, at that.
