Where Did the Time Go?

Wow. Has he really been here five days? I can only imagine this is how most moms feel as they plan for their child’s first birthday or as they prepare to graduate or as they get married. Time flies. Muro was supposed to get here August 6, and like most moms, I put some things off to the last minute, not expecting my son to make an early arrival. And then he called. From the airport. Yeah. Duane and I got a phone message from some lady at Thrift Rental car telling us our host son was at the baggage terminal waiting for us. This was so not the arrival we had planned. We have only been parents for five minutes and already we are dropping our kid on his head. I hadn’t finished cleaning the house, I had no idea what I was cooking for dinner, I had no idea he was coming August 5. We both raced to the airport to meet him.

Muro is a tall, skinny kid with a kind of soft voice and presence that is somewhat humbling. He slouches slightly and is kind and polite. He rushes to open doors for me and always asks permission. He talks to himself saying, “I’m so lucky.” He is sweet and unassuming. His brain is like a sponge. He meets people and takes in everything. The first time I met him, he went to shake my hand and I gave him a hug thinking for the next year, I will be his mom. I was not sure at that moment how it would all work out, but either way, we had to press on—our kid had arrived, ready or not.

We showed Muro his room. As he was settling in, I saw him look around as a huge grin came over his face. He made a fist and pulled his arm into his chest as if to say, “SCORE!” I asked him why he was so happy and he said his new home is very beautiful. He said his family had worried what his accommodations would be like and their big concern was whether his new family would be nice. It seems he wasn’t disappointed.

Before Muro unpacked, showered, called home or began to settle in, he wanted to give us gifts from his family. He reached around his neck to reveal a small gold medallion of a mother cradling a small boy. His grandmother’s sister sent this with him to give to me. I almost cried since it looks exactly like the ring a friend gave me the night we delivered Connor. In some ways, I felt as though Connor was telling us he is thinking of us. On a side note, Muro and Connor have the same birthday. The gifts he brought included smoked Georgian cheese, honey his father’s friend collected, a lace table runner his aunt made, traditional wedding drinking glasses made of horns of a mountain animal, and a few other things that even we did not understand when he came to us. Everything became blurry as Duane and I began to process that this kid is going to rely on us for everything. He looks to us as he doesn’t understand. As he needs food or a towel or feels cold, he says, “mom—where are the towels,” (or I am hungry, or what does this mean). We are now his lifeline to the world.

I haven’t had much time to get to the computer and I think I am beginning to understand the challenges my friends with kids face in finding time to do everyday things. My days are taken up with registering him for school, making him food, teaching him how to do things, and I haven’t even been to work yet! Muro has been here five days and it feels like in a way he has been here our whole lives. He has brought so much light and sunshine to our world. He hangs back in the shadows and listens and tries to apply what he is learning and every now and again he injects his personality and shows us that he has learned what we have taught him. His laugh is infectious and he is a bit sneaky in letting us know that he just made a joke—he is very clever and he knows when he has been clever. He fits very well into our family. I will continue to write and I hope you get a sense of who he is through my writing. I have a lot more to tell you, but I think this is enough for today—he and Duane are outside mowing grass. Duane is excited he loves to mow grass and Muro is excited Duane wants to show him as he really wants to make him proud. It is nice to see Duane with him. I will begin adding pictures to the blogs soon as I write more later.

Living Life in Color

Life passes me by some days and I have no idea I am even in the process. Some days I am floating around in slow motion, with a view-from-above picture as everything happens without you having any input, despite being a key player, because after all, it is your life… This is how many of us live our lives. I try to stay grounded, but there are some things with which I struggle:

My life usually happens in black and white and I grow tired of knowing exactly what will happen next. At times, my life happens in living color, but to the rest of the world, I have to act as though my life is black and white. I act as if my life is under control and normal, operating perfectly inside the lines in which I learned to color when I was five. I take a step back from myself as I am sitting in our make-shift office (AKA the game room—our computer is perched atop our air hockey table and Duane is sweating and bustling over Muro’s room which was going to be the nursery one day). Life is whizzing past me— Muro will be here in two more days. I am numb, the clock ticks, so much to do.

I love my husband. He is my best friend and I admire him as he readies Muro’s room. When we got pregnant, we talked so much about how our lives would change and spoke excitedly about setting up the crib. As the months passed and no childrens’ voices filled these empty hallways in the half of the house we never use—we grew complacent. Tonight marks the end of all that. We will have a child in that room soon.

I see a spark in him tonight, something has come alive. He knows I am in the game room writing and he shut the door to vacuum—he really is tending to every detail of his son’s room, an important step since we have both grown so complacent in the past year. Duane is focused and I am so happy to see him this way. I set aside how I feel and try to realize that he and I are best friends and we have to support each other in the end to make it work.

At the same time, a spark, a fire has caught inside me. I know Muro has gone to his capital city of Tbilisi. OK people, he calls me mum. I have to tell you—I am worried now—he is about to say goodbye to his own parents and after that, he is in our care. He will rely on me to be his mom and I will need to ensure he arrives here in my house in one piece.

Please keep reading to see what happens next.

When a Man Loves a Woman

At some point in the next ten months, Duane and I are going to either have to explain to Muro or ourselves why we decided to open our homes to a foreign exchange student. As I sit here less than a week before he is supposed to arrive (and only three weeks into this process), I realize that our 17-year-old Georgian kid has been going through the rigorous process of trying to come to America. I don’t know if you know, but our country isn’t all that easy to get into. For many months before we knew he even existed, he has been attending seminars, practicing conversation, learning about our culture and writing essays. We have been traveling and eating and living our lives without giving one thought that he existed.

Something happened a few weeks ago as we watched, “The Blind Side,” with Sandra Bullock. Something moved us to put aside our monthly pain of trying to conceive a child and constant reminder that everyone else around us is a parent and somehow we aren’t able to fulfill that role yet. Nevermind the fact that we are constantly mentoring young Airmen and genuinely care about others’ children as if they are our own…that kind of love isn’t easy to explain—it is much easier to show. This is why I am not so sure I can explain to people when they look at me with that crinkled eyebrow, searching their mind for when I have ever mentioned wanting to take on a foreign exchange student, and ask me when we decided to pursue this. After all, foreign exchange students aren’t like sea monkeys where you pick one out, add water, and POOF, you have an insta-kid…or are they?

Duane and I had a discussion that we would look at maybe fostering a child if I looked into it and the agreement was only that we agreed to talk about the possibility. Before I knew it, I was at the computer at 11 p.m. searching the Mississippi database of children who I knew in my heart we could not love enough to bring into our home because of our previous schedules and commitments. My dream of fostering a child and opening our home in the interim of barren months of trying to get pregnant slowly slipped away in the hours of darkness.

Then it occurred to me—we could host an exchange student. I had always had the idea in the back of my head. I remember the exchange kids from my high school and the impression they left on me. I had always wanted to be an exchange kid. And when I told Duane about it all, he had to have thought I was crazy. First I get all Sandra Bullock and let’s adopt a kid on him and now I am like let’s get some exchange kid who will be here in three weeks. Thank goodness my husband firmly believes in the mantra, “Happy Wife, Happy Life,” because we began the process to get an exchange kid immediately. He will be here in five days.