Angelus News | October 2-9, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 25

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WITH GRACE BY DR. GRAZIE POZO CHRISTIE Surprise on Shamian Island The process of adopting a baby girl in China was full of worry, fear, and anxiety. Then God stepped in The author with her newly adopted daughter at the Chongqing Zoo in China. COURTESY GRAZIE CHRISTIE 26 • ANGELUS • October 2-9, 2020
Chinese toddlers awaiting adoption at the social welfare institute in Chongqing. COURTESY GRAZIE CHRISTIE It is an incontrovertible fact to me that if we are but clear-eyed enough to see it, we can watch the hand of God at work everywhere along the course of our lives. Tenderly caressing, ceaselessly guiding, carefully shielding, gently pulling — he has not left us unattended for a moment. He does much more than watch and accompany. To think of his role in our lives as that of a loving spectator is to say that a good mother only yearns over her infant crying in his crib, and doesn’t fly to clasp him in her arms. When I was a girl with a child’s shining faith, I saw God’s hand in mine as plainly as I did my pretty mother’s. Later, as the scales of life grew over my eyes, this clarity of vision mostly left me. But (and how thankful I am for this!) there have been three occasions when a light broke upon me and I was granted a brief reprieve from my tragic blindness of spirit. The most beautiful one happened a few days after I met my youngest daughter. I went to China to adopt a little toddler girl after almost two years of anxious waiting. Two years is a long time, especially when they are filled with great uncertainty. Are we doing the right thing? Are we going to find challenges that we can’t easily overcome? Are there better parents out there for this child than us? These questions rolled around and around in my head for all the long months I spent waiting to hear from the agency. Finally the call came and off I went to China, without my husband, as he had to stay home to work and to care for our other children. I met our daughter on my third day in China when I, along with 12 couples in our adoption group, went to a social welfare institute in Chongqing. We joined a milling confusion of perhaps 50 foreign couples waiting to collect their long-hoped-for children. There was a room with a glass wall along the back and we all pressed our faces against it. That room had plastic gym mats on the floor and on the mats were dozens of babies and toddlers, all in either pink or green rompers. Our daughters and sons, on the other side of the glass. Imagine our exultation! One by one they called our names and a child was handed out to a weeping mother and a proud father, or in my case, just a joyful woman. At first my new daughter was calm and quiet. She seemed puzzled by me and looked at me thoughtfully when I tried to make her smile. She endured a warm bath, perhaps her first, with patience. She put up with my bumbling attempts to warm her bottle to just under boiling but not scalding, as I’d been told she was used to. She calmly let me hold her and hug her and caress her and hand her toys, which she promptly dropped, not knowing what a toy was. She suffered me to dangle her in front of my laptop computer so her father could exult over her chubby cheeks and rosebud mouth. Finally, it was all too much for a little girl who had spent all her short life lying virtually unattended in a hard wooden crib. On our second day together, she started to cry. She cried endlessly, disconsolately. She woefully but decidedly rejected all my timid advances and sobbed through her bottle. She wept and shook and rocked, and cried even in her sleep. All that night I heard her little hiccups of leaden despair and watched tiny teardrops gather at the corner of her tightly shut eyes. This went on the next day, all day. By nightfall I was as grief-stricken as she was. Me, a mother many times over, who had delighted in all my babies with a cheerfulness that had never faltered, and whose babies had delighted in her. Me, a woman who could change an infant with one hand while shoveling food into a squirming toddler with another, and all three of October 2-9, 2020 • ANGELUS • 27
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Angelus News | October 2-9, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 25

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