Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [42]
“And by the way,” he said, “your babies are waiting for you at the hotel.”
Jan grabbed my arm. We looked at each other after all our hours of traveling and said, “I think we did it!” We were overwhelmed . . . not home yet, but God had clearly moved mountains of paperwork and other obstacles for us.
Outside, there weren’t many people on the streets. They scurried by, wearing masks, not looking at us. We got to the hotel. On other trips it had been full of American couples and Chinese babies. Now it was deserted. No other Americans anywhere. For that matter, once you left the first floor there were no other guests in the entire hotel.
We got to our room with no time to waste. Our babies would be here any minute, and we didn’t even know what kind of bottles or formula we had for them. Jan started getting the video camera ready to capture our historic moment. I opened the suitcase that Terri had bought at Target. I had no idea what she’d bought; all I knew was that whatever was in there had cost almost nine hundred dollars.
I unzipped the bag, and the first thing we saw were tons of Clorox wipes. Nothing could have made Jan happier. “We’ll need to ration them,” she said. We had been told we might have to be in the country for three weeks or a month, and she wanted to be sure we had enough. “Are there scissors in that Target bag?” Jan continued. “I’m going to cut all these wipes in half and put them in Ziploc bags – ”
I was laughing, and then the phone rang. Our babies were being brought up to the room.
We weren’t ready. Freaked out. We ran around trying to set up the video camera so it would automatically film this amazing event on tape, as both of us would be busy meeting our new children. We splashed cold water on our faces so we wouldn’t look like we had been up for five hundred hours. Then there was the knock on the door. I almost peed in my pants.
The orphanage director, Smile the escort, and two nannies holding two babies were standing there. One nanny handed Ashley Rose to Jan. She was a plump, healthy baby, about seven months old. Jan was crying with joy, the Chinese people were all talking at once in Mandarin, and then it was my turn to receive my baby.
There she was – I think. She was wearing a huge, red, puffy traditional Chinese outfit, and somewhere in all that puff, I found a very tiny, very pale, very sickly . . . Stevey Joy! She weighed almost nothing. She wouldn’t have had half a chance against SARS.
As quickly as the adoption group came, they left. Jan and I were on our own. The two had become four, and all was quiet, except for Stevey Joy Ru Chapman. As Jan doted on Ashley by stripping her down and bathing her in the lavender baby wash we’d brought (thanks to Terri and Target), I was trying to console a very unhappy, loud, tiny, sick new daughter. I was so glad I’d felt the need to act quickly to get this precious little one out of China, but now I had this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Caleb and Will had prayed for a mellow new sister, and she was screaming at the top of her tiny lungs. And on top of it all, she looked like someone, I just couldn’t think who. Then it came to me. She looked like Phil Collins, the singer. I told Jan.
“Will you stop it?” Jan said. “She does not look like Phil Collins. She’s cute as she can be!”
The next day, Smile gave us a little update about the situation. “We don’t really know what will happen or how this will all play out,” he said, “but you could be here for about three weeks.” This was because of SARS and our uncertainties about how long it would take for the powers of attorney to arrive.
I watched as Ashley would sit for hours playing with toys. She was a bit passive; you could tell she’d needed the love of a mom, and Jan was beginning to take care of that.
But Stevey Joy wouldn’t even look at a toy. She was sick and sad. I had her on antibiotics now and was doing my best, but it was hard. And to top it off,