Good-bye

Awake and alert with pain. The pain of losing, although it did not come as a surprise, the dull pain of restlessness, the ache of unfulfilled dreams, the pain of wanting and waiting, and the pain of tears at night when memories of love crowd in. I am no mother, and perhaps never will be, and neither am I one of those people who pine for children of their own. But there is something inexplicably aching in the pain of having a child you love taken out of your hands.

God, why? And why twice in one year?

I was quite brave when I was told that the Little Girl Who Lives With Us would not be coming any more. But at 11:30 at night, sleepless in bed, I do not feel so brave anymore and hot tears flood. Instead I remember those times, singing at the top of our lungs on a motorbike, playing hide and seek at the park, shopping for presents for father’s day, faltering through the beginning stages of reading, baking chocolate chip cookies, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and eating hordes of chocolate as we watched, praying together at night, stumbling through my Thai Bible stories, trying to read fluently enough to keep her attention.

And watching her sleep from my view on my bed- lustrous
black eyes closed in slumber, hair atumble, arms akimbo. Those were the times when I asked God for forgiveness for my sharp impatient words to her in the heat of the moment, or for being frustrated at my inability to spend a moment by myself.

Judy Unruh writes a poem called Foster Baby Bye. While my little girl was not a baby anymore, the poem rings within my heart.

I did not cry when they came for him,
my goodbye was suitably gay;
as if it were not a jagged-edged piece of my heart
that was torn
that was torn
torn away.