Next door to Macia’s favorite coffee shop is Magpie, a store I could spend all my money in. I love their things. It was there that I found this book. We bought it as a perfect gift to remember the day we brought our little girl home. We were really three then, all-day-every-day Three.
We brought her home on Halloween. It was a Monday. As Halloween approached this year my heart was full of thoughts and emotions and memories of the year past. What a year it had been.
The book is just a story about a family, about a little boy who wants to know where he came from.
“Don’t you remember?” his mother says, “The fairies brought you. It must have taken dozens of them to lift you, because they were so small and you were so big.”
“No,” says his father, “Don’t you remember? We found you in a basket, floating down the river. We’d been out for a picnic and it was the perfect end to a perfect blue-sky day.”
I will spoil the end for you–because it is so good. “Oh,” says his father, “I remember. It was quite simple. Your mother and I both dreamt you. And then you came true.”
“Yes,” says his mother. “I remember perfectly now. First there were two of us and then we were three.”
And although there are some reviewers (ahem, School Library Journal) who think the book doesn’t really answer the boy’s question (cough, biology), from our perspective as adoptive parents, I couldn’t think of a more true way to describe where Macia came from. Her story, and ours, is so much more complicated than biology. All stories are so much more than that.
You see, we had been dreaming of our first baby for years. On our own (before we were married) and together, every night, every day since our wedding. We wanted a child for so long. And we kept dreaming.
So when we met her, our dreams took on a very certain shape. A small shape, with beautiful olive skin and dark brown eyes and lots of dark brown hair with just a bit of curl.
But that wasn’t the end. Our dreaming and hoping for a baby, this baby, went on much longer than we expected. It was worth waiting for, of course. But Macie’s question “Where did I come from?” will not be answered simply by her birth.
There certainly is a biological story to tell of where our daughter came from, and we will tell her that part, too. But I’d rather have her asking questions about what it means to dream and to long for a family than about cell reproduction. I don’t think cells’ division isn’t important. But I don’t believe it’s the most important.
What’s most important is that we were two before, and now we are three.
