Happy Birthday Lana

Today is Lan's birthday, and she is four years old. Four years. She's a whole person, with a whole personality and preferences and opinions and likes and dislikes. And I have NO IDEA what that little person is all about, and I wonder how long it will take for me to know her. Really know her. (Then again, isn' t it an age old conflict, of mothers and daughters and how well they REALLY know one another?)

For three and a half of her four years, Lan has lived with a foster mother, and I wonder if that foster mother has celebrated this day with her. I've read conflicting information about the celebration of birthdays in Vietnam - most of what I have read says that birthdays are not celebrated by the Vietnamese people.

Some part of me feels like a failure for not being able to ensure that she has a cake, a present, a song in celebration. I realize it is irrational of me to feel this way - if birthdays are not celebrated, certainly she doesn't know she missing anything. Certainly I do not have the power to make these things happen, no matter how much I would like to.

Lan shares her birthday with our niece Jo-jo. (A nickname, not her real name). Jo-jo turned 5 today, and we had a big birthday party for her yesterday, at a place called Joe Dumar's FieldHouse in a suburb of Detroit. They have lazer tag and bunjee trampolines and a gigantic, enormous (like 25 feet tall) inflatable slide, and skeeball and rock-climbing and video games. It was a triple birthday party, for Jo-jo, her brother M~, and her older sister, B~. All three of my brother-in-law's children have birthdays in November, within 2 weeks of eachother. Now, with Lan's birthday also in November (and the same day as Jo-jos) my in-laws will have 5 grandchildren - four of them with November birthdays, two of them sharing the same birthday. (Here is an unusual thing about my husband's family - of the thirteen people who now make up Husband's immediate family, there are now (counting Lan) eight people who share birthdays with one other family member. I think that is freaking weird. I am one of the ones who shares - my sister-in-law and I have the same birthday.) There are so many shared birthdays in my husband's family, that one of the ways I felt sure that Lan was destined to be ours was the fact that she shares Jo-jo's birthday, while I share Jo-jo's mother's birthday. (Does that make a lick of sense?)

We had a really nice time at the birthday party - we played lazer tag and jumped on the bunjee trampoline (this is where you are attached to bunjee cords on both sides of your body, and strapped in a harness, and jump on the trampoline - you can jump really high and do flips and stuff. Gabe loved this. I did it once and it was SO MUCH FUN. It was a lot of work, though, so, I didn't have the energy to do more than one three minute session.) I also made a fool of myself attempting to do Dance Dance Revolution Extreme. Oh well, such is my life as a rythymless white girl. My efforts amused my 13 year old niece, B~, in the extreme.

But, my fun was somewhat overshadowed by the feeling that Lan should be having a birthday party, that Lan should be jumping on the trampoline and sliding down the slide with her cousins and her big brother. I understand that patience is important, and that this delay between referral of a child and bringing that child home is necessary in order to insure ethical adoptions in Vietnam - it's just really, really hard. Especially today, on that child's birthday.

So, for now I am going to sign off by saying, Happy Birthday, my not-so-Baby Girl.

LM