Gotcha Day #9
Our ninth Gotcha Day celebrators: Back Row from left to right: Kaylee (Keegan’s wife), Keegan, Kamise, Dennis, Mez and Dominic (family friend)
Front Row: Lisa, Zoe (Cole’s girlfriend), Cole, Lindsey (Dominic’s fabulous other)
Grafting: The severed tissues adhere, the cells divide and the vasculature differentiates through a remarkable process of regeneration between two genetically distinct organisms as they become one.
Gotcha Day. It was easy to romanticize the idea as an outsider. As an insider, reality sobered me. Reality continues to sober me.
The other night, as our family was bantering about the court experience in Ethiopia, one of our girls declared with an edge, “I didn’t get to choose [to be adopted].”
I remembered when our adoption escort had driven us to the transition house where Meseret and Kamise had been living for several months awaiting our arrival. After 14 months of paperwork and waiting, we were coming face-to-face with our daughters-to-be. As we drove through the gates, children flocked toward our car, running alongside us as we crawled down the long driveway.
As I stepped out of the car, a little girl wrapped her arms around me and exclaimed, “Mommy.”
It stopped me in my tracks. I wasn’t her mommy. I would never be her mommy. Perhaps she was hoping it was her turn for her new parent(s)-to-be to arrive and make her their own. Someone had chosen her and would graft her into their family, just as we had chosen our daughters and would graft them into ours. This little one gave me a peek into the world in which our daughters had lived.
We walked up the stairs to a family room area, kids still swirling around us. A few minutes later a nanny brought our future daughters to us. They came near and my mind buzzed about what they could be feeling as my heart and arms enfolded them.
THE SEAL THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING…AND EVERYONE
The next day we went to court. A woman called out our name in the large square room occupied by adoptive families and family members relinquishing their rights to children. We took Meseret (Kamise was too young to join us) by the hand and walked into a small room where we were greeted by an Ethiopian judge. After 15 minutes of question/answer, she stamped a piece of paper and declared Meseret and Kamise as Brockmans.
Our Gotcha Day was sealed on October 31, 2011.
This adoption subculture in which children are cut off from their family of origin for any number of reasons are chosen by another, then taken to a transition house in a city far away from their village where they wait to meet the people who they’ll call mom and dad—it is not for the faint of heart on either side. Our girls waited in community with others whose lives have brought them to the same fate.
Children came and they became a family of sorts. And then children met the ones who had chosen them. And they left. And they said goodbye to their orphanage family over and over and over.
I had read a boxful of books in preparation for our adoption. As much as I had read and prepared for this interweaving of our lives, I discovered swiftly that no book could have prepared us for this life-long journey for no book could have captured what it would be like when our daughters’ unique stories collided with our unique stories and how each cut required for grafting would feel like a death.
Picture the grafting of two plants. First, you must make a cut on the existing plant. This makes a direct path into the heart of its life. Next, take the branch which you want to graft, place its exposed heart directly onto the heart of the living tree, and then bind the two together tightly. The result is this; over time the two become one so that it is difficult to see the point of the grafting. The two become one. —Jerry Watts
Grafting requires severed tissues from all parties involved. The cutting open exposes our hearts--the broken, hopeful, expectant, loss-filled hearts—which must be exposed in order for grafting to occur. We were bound tightly together by circumstances, yet it’s felt natural for everyone to resist placing our exposed hearts over another’s, which is required for the two to become one.
Healing comes when our story is raw, bone-deep, and full of hunger for what only Jesus can offer. —Dan Allender
If Jesus really does enter us through our wounds as St. John of the Cross says, then it requires a severing of tissues to create an opening for Him. Something in me still resists the cutting; something in me still wrestles at the longevity of the grafting process.
While sitting before that Ethiopian judge, I never could have imagined how, in this grafting journey, I would be tasting a shadow of the ache for bonding that the Lover of our souls holds in His heart toward us as He carries the pang of unmet longing within Him. It’s comforting to remember that our story is part of a faithful God’s larger story—that we are being redemptively grafted together.