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Adoption is Costly but Result is Priceless Hopkinton family becomes whole again
by Elizabeth Eidlitz
An ancient Chinese belief states that when a child is
born an invisible red thread connects that child's soul to all those
people - present and in the future - who will play a part in that
child's life. As each birthday passes, those threads shorten and
tighten, bringing closer those people who are fated to be together.
Though a thread may stretch or tangle, it will never break.
One such invisible red thread has stretched almost 7,000 miles to connect the Howard family of Hopkinton with Lei Jin Miao in Leizhou, China.
Lei Jin Miao was born in September 2005 around the time that the Howards first met with an international adoption agency in Waltham and initiated the adoption process. The mounds of paperwork included application, home study, letters of recommendation, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service forms, fingerprinting, and dossier documents.
International adoption costs vary, but $20-25 thousand dollars on average pays the agency fee, social worker, travel, in-country and legal fees, donation to orphanage, and unexpected add-ons. A child, though already adopted in China, must be readopted in the U.S. to obtain a Certificate of Adoption and a U.S. birth certificate.
The process, which took well over three years for the Howards, followed the death of their infant daughter Molly. Their seven-year-old son, knowing a schoolmate whose aunt was adopting from Guatemala, said, “Can we adopt a baby from Guatemala, too?” REST OF STORY “He brought it up every day for several months,” his mother says. “The desire to make our family whole again helped us decide to do something beautiful and positive with Molly’s memory instead of wallowing in our loss.
“My husband was adamant about adopting from China. With only an Internet photo and limited information about Jin Miao, a tiny, malnourished, developmentally delayed little girl who, abandoned at six weeks, had spent three and a half years in an orphanage in Leizhou, China, we took a major leap of faith that she would be healthy.”
Last July, Carrie and Will Howard, and their two sons, Wills, 11, and Jack, 9, flew to Beijing with 18 other families.
“During the required two weeks’ stay we learned about Chinese culture, climbed the Great Wall, and visited a Buddhist temple, the Guangzhou Zoo, the Summer Palace and The Forbidden City.
“Finally on July 20th, Jin Miao, now Elizabeth or Miao Miao, was handed over to us. ‘Gotcha Day’, as adoptive families call it, is supposed to be joyful, but it was bittersweet for me,” Carrie explains, “watching kids who were being adopted wrenched from their nannies’ arms, crying, and screaming.”
Initially, Elizabeth avoided eye contact and seemed indifferent, then found her new environment overwhelming, but the past months have transformed the four-year-old.
Though at 27 pounds she looks half her age, two unconcerned American pediatricians have pronounced her medically fine.
She smiles easily, has Chinese books and dolls, enjoys music, and dance and is beginning to like TV. She sleeps contently now in a big bed in her own pink, green, orange and purple room.
She’s transitioned from a diet of congee (a watered down rice soup), rice, noodles and vegetables to many family favorites, including fish sticks and ice cream.
Her 30 word English vocabulary includes “Clover,” (the family dog,) and "Chill Out."
“Our neighborhood has been so supportive through our loss of Molly and the arrival of our new daughter. We returned at midnight to find greeting signs on the neighbors’ lawns reading ‘Welcome home, Elizabeth,’ in both English and Chinese.
“The group who traveled to China together has become a close knit family. We’ll enjoy watching these children grow.
“And what we discovered through this extraordinary journey is that there’s no difference between biological and adopted children in the way you love them.” |
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