Happy Birthday, Baby Girl!

Four years ago on October 11th, a baby girl was found in front of the steel doors behind a clinic in Guangzhou, China.  The doctors who found her took note of everything she was wearing, weighed her, photographed her, checked her over and called the police to report an abandoned baby.

Her birth mother will never be known to her, nor will the circumstances of her abandonment.

I have read the book Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother by Xue Xinran and I think it is safe to say it is anyone's guess as to why my daughter was abandoned.

What I do know is this - Carolina was born healthy, abandoned within hours of her birth, clothed well with plenty of blankets for warmth and placed in a very public spot.  The person who left her there, in front of those doors, wasn't doing something cold and unfeeling.  It was obviously a very well thought-out decision - I stood in that alley and looked around it to see if I could find a spot where someone might hide, watching and waiting to see when she might be found.  There were so many hiding places I lost count.

I am sure that the decision to leave her, to give her up, was a difficult one.  Maybe it was for protection from a family who demanded a boy.  Maybe it was because she already had another sibling and her birth family wanted more for her than to be a second child with no rights.  Maybe they couldn't afford to keep her.  Maybe her birth mother was too young to care for her.

Whatever the case, Carolina wasn't aborted.  Her birth mother carried her for close to nine months, based on her birth weight.  She felt Carolina's first kick.  She knew when Carolina was active and when she was asleep inside her womb.  She felt birth pangs.  She delivered my child.  She had the rush of hormones after the baby was born - the hormones that God blessed mothers with so that they will feel love and attachment to their children.  And still, this mother was unable to raise her child - or even keep her.  Perhaps she was unable to even lay eyes on her.

I have prayed for Carolina's birth mother from the moment we decided to adopt a child.  I am praying for her today, as I do every year around Carolina's birthday.  I pray she will come to know Christ.  I pray she will be blessed with Christian friends.  I pray God will confirm to her that her decision, or maybe her circumstances in giving Carolina up, was not in vain.  And I pray that she will somehow know that Carolina is loved and enjoying freedom that most Chinese people do not enjoy.  Freedom that comes with her rights as a citizen of the United States of America.

Four years ago on October 11th, a child was born.  She struggled for twenty months in a Social Welfare Institute.  Struggled for life, for food, to develop and even to live.  Twenty months - that's how long it took before she met her mother and her father.

She was my first.  First in our hearts.  We prayed for her before we even knew we could conceive a child biologically.

Happy birthday, Sweet Child.  We love you dearly and we will never stop praying for you and ourselves as we try to parent you in the best way possible.  I am so blessed to know you, despite our butting heads most days, and so blessed that you are a fighter.  Your personality is boisterous and infectious.  Even with the long nights you have given us, some of the most difficult days (and nights) of our lives, we will love you with an unyielding love always and forever.  I am so grateful God knit you for our family in another mother's womb.  Happy birthday.