Our Girls

I was driving downtown the other day and and noticed a colorful banner stretched across the street before me. I scanned the panels as traffic slowly crept forward. Each panal depicted a different Broadway show scheduled to play at the Orpheum Theater this coming season.

Cindie and I have tickets and each year our assigned seats creep forward and get better and better; this year our patience has paid off, we finally are seated in the center section toward the front. The lineup this year proves to be excellent as always, but I noticed that one of the musicals scheduled to perform next spring is the ever-popular “Annie.”

How is that for irony? The same year that Cindie and I adopt older children from an orphanage, the musical of the same theme plays in our city. Aside from the obvious irony, I was left thinking. What about our girls?

Is this play something that I would want my girls to see? Would I want to take them with me? Or would I want to rent the movie and watch it in private before deciding, to refresh my memory of the plot, to make sure it was appropriate for them to see given their situation and age? Then that led me to think about other things. Like, why am I thinking about what plays I am going to take my girls to next spring?

Cindie and I are not just involved in the process of adopting two teenage girls from Ukraine. We are actively involved in the process of parenting our two teenage girls from Ukraine. We are not waiting until we actually get them before doing that. We are doing it now. We are actively imagining being their parents and them being our daughters. We are making plans, making decisions, planning living arrangements, talking to school officials, reading and educating ourselves on how to be the best parents we can be and on and on. It's a mindset for us.

We were in Omaha this past weekend and met two young ladies that were adopted from the same orphanage where our girls are living. These girls know Nastia and Inna, so we learned first hand information about our future daughters from them. We looked at their picture albums; it was a lot of fun.

But I was even more excited to meet these Ukrainian girls because they are just like my girls. I was able to hear English spoken with a Russian accent (it is beautiful, by the way) and to see girls in person I have only seen in photographs until now.

Being a visual-spatial type person, I can now much more effectively, in my mind’s eye, imagine my daughters, imagine our future life together, as we make our plans and get ready to be their parents.

It’s important to us, it’s important to them, that from our perspective, they are not “the” girls, but that they are “our” girls.