the time goes on ...

October 24th …  One year.  I feel like I can send/post this now because it’s officially tomorrow in Ethiopia.  My mind has been on so many things … mostly remembering this time last year.  I met Lucy!!!  I got on an airplane on the 22nd, arrived in Ethiopia late in the evening on the 23rd and the morning of the 24th I took Lucy into my arms and it was real!   I know I became a mother during those months of waiting to travel.  I got a scary medical update and could not be soothed. I was desperate to get to her into my arms and hear her breathing.  I stared and stared at each of the four photos I received while I was waiting for her.  I looked at her eyes, ears, hands, feet, lips … I examined the spit up on her jacket.  I was in a word: obsessed.  I still am!   The morning I met her I was so in another world, I felt a little detached from my emotions.  It’s almost like the emotions were so strong that I had to leave them or I wouldn’t have been able to hold her.  She was sleeping when I picked her up … minutes later she opened her eyes and her gaze met mine briefly before she fell back to sleep.   I stayed there with her in that crowded room, eight babies, a couple nannies, a nurse, Mel and Sara for some time getting trained in on Lucy care before being released to take her upstairs to the guest rooms.   From the moment we went upstairs, she was in my care.  A year later, she sleeps in her room … soundly (most nights).  She’s the same … observant, silly, smart, loving, trusting, wonderful child she was then.   She loves home.  I love that about her.  When she comes in the door to her home she laughs and twirls around and around.  She feels safe here.   I can’t believe a year has passed, some days it feels like it’s only been moments, and other days it feels like it’s  been forever.   I look into her eyes at night when she’s falling asleep and I marvel at all she knows, and all the memories she has that I will never know.   It’s overwhelming at times, the responsibility I feel for her as her mother, but also as the keeper of her story and the means for her to learn more and know more.  I feel compelled to seek for her, I feel like it’s an urgent job …  I know I am not alone in this. I feel connected with all the mothers, but especially the momma’s of children adopted from Ethiopia. We know too much about the situations that brought our children to us, we have responsibilities now that no amount of imagination could have prepared us for, we have a weight on our loving, tired shoulders. Lucy is a beautiful child, something about her touches the spirit of people who know her, she connects.   She brings joy and peace.   Thank you to everyone who has been a part of her story over this past year.  Love Stacy and Lucy Eskedar.