Crumpled Post-It Notes

For trivia's sake, as I dust off the final files and tuck them into their nooks and crannies for safe keeping, I went back into my laptop's "Adoption" folder and did a quick count.

It holds 278 MB of information. Not terribly impressive, until you consider it's all text.

There are 205 individual files.

There are 19 categorized subfolders.

The total pages they contain? I couldn't even imagine. Many of the files are multi-page documents - some of them 10, 20, even 30 pages long - I would estimate, conservatively, there are about five or six hundred pages of paper if I had to print them all out. These are things that somebody, somewhere needed us to do, write, file or give to them, to adopt the kids.

That's what you're in for if you plan to adopt a child. From start to finish, about six hundred pages of paperwork. That's after the Paperwork Reduction Act of Who-Knows-When, by the way. Before then, whew, hire a tow truck.

Add to that another five or six hundred pages of DFS case notes, medical and therapy records, background and history given to us as hard copy a few weeks before we went to court, when we were finally allowed to see it, and that doubles the material we have on file.

Add to that another 200 pages of training notes, handouts, emails and communications from the Department of Family Services that haven't made it through my scanner yet, and it's fairly safe to say -- again, conservative estimate -- it took us anywhere from 1,100 to 1,400 pages of paper to place, train ourselves, care for, medically manage, and ultimately adopt Justice and Justin.

1,400 pages. Two adoption agencies. I couldn't even tell you how many case workers and DFS employees. Two therapists. One occupational therapist. One physical therapist. One pediatrician. One psychiatrist. One orthopedist. One neurologist. One medically fragile case manager, and 2,694 miles on the odometer going to and from medical appointments and required trainings from June through February. I haven't even tallied March yet. March 19 -- finalization hit -- and my first instinct was to jump in the air, click my heels, and build a great big paperwork bonfire.

I mention all of this numerical trivia not for the accolades, because no we are not saints, and no we are not crazy (presumably). I only mention the mind-boggling paper trail above because it puts the following into total perspective.

Out of all those minutes and all that minutia and all those miles, the thing that made the greatest impact on me -- the one piece of all of the above that stands out as the document, note or file I'll keep closest to my heart today, tomorrow and thirty years from now -- are the five yellow Post-It notes...written on, crumpled up, then smoothed out again, that I got in a training class and I now keep in my desk upstairs, where I can see them every day.

Five crumpled Post-It notes explain all of this.

Adam and I took our final training class back in February.

"Take your Post-It Notes," said the instructor, "And write down the five people or things in your life who are most important to you."

The class wrote things like "Mom," and "Home" and "Family" and "Dreams."

"Now crumple them all up," he said. "Throw them away. You don't get to have them anymore. And even worse...if you still want them, I'm going to send my assistant in here to take them away from you. She'll crumple them up for you. You have no say in the matter."

And he did. An assistant came in, took all our notes away, crumpled them up and threw them on the floor.

"Now pick them back up," he said. "Smooth them out. Let me try to give them back to you, so you can start over."

We dutifully retrieved our crumpled Post-It Notes, smoothed them out the best we could, and put them back in front of us.

Parents. Family. Home. Future. Dreams.

"What do they look like now?" he asked us.

"Damaged," someone said from the back of the room.

"Not the same," I said.

"Not new anymore," someone else said.

"Those are your kids," he told us.

And he stopped for a minute to let that sink in.

"Everything they knew was taken away from them. It was crumpled up and thrown on the floor."

We try to straighten it out again as best as we can, but that's the thing about being crumpled.

You're never quite new again.

Not fully, anyway.

So, there we have it. Some major food for thought as we sit here basking amid the accolades and celebrations we were immediately blessed with as soon as we finalized in court.

"Please don't tell me how lucky I am," adopted children often try to express when the well-meaning congratulations become too overwhelming. To them, in their first year, this brand new life is still very much an audition.

I'm afraid you will abandon me. Fear and abandonment are inextricably woven together and tied into one big knot in the psyche and spirit of the adopted child. Listen to the word pictures adult adoptees use to describe the abandonment they felt as children...being left behind while others go on with life, being left behind at the side of a road, a child looking into a window on a cold winter's night at a happy family. [When you adopt, you are essentially] entering your child's haunted house. - "Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew" - Sherrie Eledridge.

Adam and I are the lucky ones.

Justice and Justin?

They are sometimes happy. They are often haunted.

They are my beautiful crumpled Post-It Notes. My sweet and silly, always complicated, often angry, damaged, amazingly-resilient children. Even after a finalized adoption, they are a long way from happy-go-lucky and home.

We smooth them and soothe them the best we can, but let's remember "luckiness" is in the eye of the beholder, and all us who behold them are definitely still on the outside looking in.

Lovely, complicated, beautiful angels.

Tread lightly when we call them lucky.

For now, let's be satisfied with calling them loved.