Pink Chair.

A Meditation on Loss.

We sold the pink chair this morning. The one thing I wanted to buy when we were pretty sure you were coming. It was expensive, but it meant something to me to have one tangible thing in this strange country that looked and felt familiar as we prepared to embark on the perilous and blurry journey of trying to make you ours.

I sat in that chair, night after night, half-blind with exhaustion, listening to your little suckling sound. Rocking you back to sleep. Singing and reading to you. Looking back into your little eyes as you studied me. Mostly looking at you in wonder and trying to be brave as little tendrils snaked out of you and knived their way deeper and deeper into every corner of my trembling soul.

This is the chair where I became a mother.

And this morning we sold it for $30 to some random woman from the neighborhood as we were racing out the door, in a hurry to get you to school for one of your last days, and I stopped on the hill and wished for a moment to go back and sit with you in it.

Take a picture. Have a moment. Rewind the clock.

Because we’re not just leaving the pink chair. We’re leaving the place I became a mother, we became a family, you first called me dada — and then eventually mama. The place you learned to sleep through the night, and crawl, and walk, and that little ooohhooohhh rumbly sound you used to make when you ran.

The place you charmed the neighborhood and walked around like a queen accepting the little gifts and attentions of your subjects. Where you noticed every little thing my eyes overlooked and wanted to know how to say hello in a dozen languages. Where you changed everyone’s minds about adoption just by being you.

We’re leaving the only place you’ve ever called home, the only way of life you’ve ever known. And baby girl, it hurts. My God it hurts. It hurts for my own self and it hurts looking at you, as we sit on the bus and I let you see me cry because the book says I should, and you give me a hug and talk in a cheerful voice of the good things to come.

And there are good things to come. So many good things. We’ve waited for this day for so long and so many people are waiting to love you well in person as they have loved you at a distance!

But there’s also loss. Grief. Separation. And it deserves to be heard. To be felt. To be given as much space as it needs. I don’t want you to miss it or numb it or block it, and end up with one of those massive grief towers that one day finally tip and demolish the lovely little life you’ll have made.

I want to show you it’s good to love, to feel, to live wide-open-hearted and let places and things and people matter. And when you inevitably lose those places and things and people — because that’s how it is here in the Shadowlands — I want to show you that it’s good to be sad. It’s good to take a moment and cry on the bus. It’s good to admit that you are going to miss a stupid pink chair. That it mattered, and you would give anything to sit it in one more time, in a moment and in a place already vanished into the vapor.

It will be okay. We will be okay. But for today I’m going to sit here and cry over a stupid pink chair. I’m going to let myself feel how much I’m going to miss it, how much I valued it holding us up as I held you up. And I hope I can teach you to do the same, baby girl. To cry over your roller skates and your school and your best little friend.

This is life, in all its beauty and, sometimes, in pain that doubles you over. Love and Loss. Grief and Joy. Until the day we lose it all to gain it all.

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For some reason I’m in a dry spell poetically, so I was looking back through my archives and stumbled across this. I wrote it a couple weeks before our first attempted exit from Turkey. It’s been a year, and most of my hopes have been realized—Joy being embraced and embracing this new life. But the griefs also—Joy told me yesterday she didn’t want to speak Turkish, which is as small and stupid maybe as the pink chair, but made me think of all the things she is already forgetting. A whole life, vanishing into the vapor.

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