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How did the Angelina Jolies and Madonnas of this world do it? All I had ever imagined or read about the process of picking a child for adoption was that the moment you held the child in your arms, you knew. The child felt right. Yet after holding ten, twelve or thirteen children, after looking through their sometimes strikingly bright, but disinterested eyes, none had felt like home to me.
“Don’t make me come after you!” The voice rang out again.
How can a child sound so old? I wondered, smiling at the irony of thinking of any of the older inmates in the home as children. War survivors: their childhood years had been expended either serving as soldiers or serving soldiers.
“The older ones go to a school in the village. We’re hoping some of them will make it to college but we’ve also lined up skill acquisition programs.” The director of the home had explained away the sixteen older “children” before proceeding to show me the babies waiting to find homes.
“You should go and sit in the shade.” I was less struck by the age of the girl’s voice this time. As she continued to walk towards me, I realised it was not water on her face but pockmarks; relics of her victory over one of death’s many failed attempts to claim her early. Her shoulders were slightly hunched; they seemed weighed down by the burden of her many battles. Her mouth too was a battlefield; it protruded, pushed outward by her upper row of teeth which might have been easily beaten into retreat by timely braces. Her eyes were dim, their radiance too weak to light teenage years. I smiled, nodding but not making any effort to get up.
“Are you taking one of the girls or a boy?” She asked, as if she could sense my dilemma.
“I don’t know. I thought I wanted a girl.”
“Some of the other parents cry because they wish they could take them all but that doesn’t make sense does it?” She had the beginning of a smile and, in spite of her ancient eyes, her face radiated a beauty which seemed out of place on her worn body.
“No.”
“In fact, it’s greedy!” The smile had grown and as she covered her mouth as if in reproach for this momentary lightness of heart, the child in her shone through her eyes, peeking from behind the woman she had been forced to become. In that fleeting moment, I saw home.
She stretched out her good arm to help me up but I reached her first, knowing instinctively that it was not going to be easy trying to coax the child out of this woman.
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