Online dating means you could find a good partner across the world. Imagine finding your soulmate on your phone. First, you make your own profile. Second, you press your thumb over a random stranger’s profile. Last, you wish for the best (and that my parents like them too)!
One cool feature about Hinge and Bumble is letting other people know if you want to become parents. I have it marked as “maybe.”
Maybe I will want to become one. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I will raise my own child, adopt a child or foster a child. Will my partner want to be a parent? If so, how many kids? If not, why not?
Some Chinese adoptees had one parent growing up. I had two parents growing up.
My mom told me she was nervous about telling my dad about searching for a baby across the world….
(interview begins)
Mom: So I was like, “you've got to be kidding me, because I've been trying to figure out how to bring this idea up with you.” And so we just started running with it. It took a few months to put your dossier together and you sent it off to China. And it took three to four weeks to receive your referral. And from that point we were expecting to be in China three months from sending our dossier to China.
We were getting discouraged, and we started looking into domestic adoption. We wrote a Dear Birth Mother letter. You could be in more than one country with a dossier at a time, but you had to, if you got a referral from one country, you had to withdraw the dossier from the other country. But Vietnam seemed like it was going to move faster for us because of what was going on in China. So we were working on this dossier, but I didn't want to send it because I knew our baby was in China.
We decided to give it one year in China and then we would go ahead, dual track and send the dossier to Vietnam as well. I felt like it was being disloyal, though. I didn't want to do it. But we gave it this one year time period. Shortly before the one year was up, we got our referral,<older sister>, and we got this teeny weeny little picture and nothing was done really over the computer. That little tiny, tiny picture was the most amazing thing we've ever seen in our whole lives. It was the most amazing thing.
Emma: Where did you put it?
Mom: Well, first I scanned it and copied it. So there were hundreds of them. Maybe not hundreds, definitely dozens. One in my car, at my desk. They were all over the place.
Emma: And then what was the time period when you decided to adopt me?
Mom: We always knew we would want more than one kid. We got home with <older sister> June of 1997. I would say several months went by, and we just started working on another dossier. And one funny thing is that she was supposed to be named Emma. Yeah, your picture came and we were sort of throwing around names again, but I wasn't bringing up the name Emma because he told me the year earlier that he didn't like the name. He said, “let's name her Emma”. I said, “I thought you don't like the name Emma?” He said, “no, I really like the name Emma now, and I think that she's an Emma.” And so that's how you became Emma.
Emma: How has being a mother changed you now that you have four Chinese adoptees?
Mom: When you were all little, you gave me so much purpose to take care of you. And I loved how you guys needed a mom and needed me and teaching you and doing stuff with you and making sure you were having a happy and safe childhood. And you reminded me of what it was like to be a kid. Even silly things like eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with you. I would be like, oh, I forgot how good peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are. Because you go through a period when you're a grown up where you don't eat that kind of thing. Then when you have kids, you start doing that stuff again with them. I loved taking you all to kid movies. They were so hilarious. I just loved being a mom to you guys. And then as you got older, everything shifts and it's different. But you just keep teaching me things. You teach me what it's like to be a teenager. You teach me what it's like to be a high school student, a college student. It's fun to adapt to all those things as you grow and learn how to adapt as your mom and be the mom you need.
Emma: I never realized that.
Mom: Like, I've had to change as a mom because you guys have changed. You changed so much between the ages of 0 and 20. So I've had to learn how to be the mom you need at any given time. And you sort of guide me through that without even knowing it.