Six Years

Six years ago I met the single, most extraordinary person that I am likely to ever come in contact with. I was in a big conference room, in the middle of China and someone called my name. I stood up and walked to a large doorway and I reached out my arms and I took the tiniest bit of little girl into my arms and I became a mother. Not a very good one; a frightened one, and an overwhelmed one but one that was willing to give it her all for the little person I was now looking at.
Let me just tell you that for six years, I have thanked God daily, sometimes hourly for the chance to know this girl.
She weighed just 14 pounds, she had two little teeth, she had these impossibly tiny hands. Her little face was the most beautiful thing that I had ever laid eyes on. But she was tough. She was fierce. She had warriors in her heart and I had to convince them that I was up to the job.
The moment I held her to me, I felt this click in my heart and my soul. I was finally all there. There was me before her, and then there was US-it was that simple.
No one tells you how desperately and fully you can love a child. I think it's because spoken or written language is incapable of encompassing what can happen to your heart and mind when these little people make an entrance.
Six years and I still cry like a baby every time I think of that day.
She means so very much to me, this little girl born half way around the world.
She is still fierce, and quite frankly, I think her inner warriors are still deciding if I can do the job. She is whip smart, lightening fast. She is, and has almost at all times,  pure joy. She loves big, she hurts bigger but she does very little talking about either of those things.
She is pure magic.
And you can't have her- she's all mine.


                    This is the picture sent to me upon her referral on May 17, 2005.

Here we are on the day we met. 

And here she is just yesterday.