His warm smile took the sting out of his question.
Am I worth it?
He knows he’s different. He can’t remember the parents who discovered he couldn’t hear the words they spoke to him and decided to walk away from him when he was a toddler. He couldn’t hear the police officer who asked him where they were.
The orphanage became his home; the staff became his advocates, caring for his daily needs. I wonder if he felt worth it when he posed for pictures as a 5 or 6 year old when they prepared his papers to be offered to families to adopt. I wonder if he felt worth it when he never heard a thing about those pictures.
He’s 13 years old now, on the verge of celebrating a birthday that would make him never able to become a son. When he turns 14 in January, when his foster mother makes him a cake as I know she will, I wonder if he’ll celebrate or stomp his feet and cry. Maybe both.
For some reason, those pictures and papers that the staff prepared about him to show to potential families never became public until this past spring. For years, they must have sat somewhere in a stack of papers with those representing other children like him. At nearly 13 1/2, maybe 8 years after those pictures were taken, his papers showed up, right about at the same time that a team of Americans visited his home and met him.
They sat together with little expectation of actual communication. The boy cannot hear. He goes to a special school for the deaf, but no one else here at the orphanage or on the team knows sign language. This is going to be a short conversation.
But, it wasn’t. It went on for hours as he patiently somehow communicated to the team. He likes video games and the NBA. He loves his brothers who he shares a foster home with. His foster mother cries when she talks about him; she thinks he’s a “clever and positive” boy. She says he always smiles. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he simply says he wants to be a son. He says they don’t have to know sign language; he hasn’t had that for 13 years. He just wants to call someone Mom and Dad, maybe have a brother, know he belongs, and that’s he worth it.
He needs a family willing willing to move fast to beat the January deadline the law has in place that will make him no longer eligible to be a son. He’s on the shared list now which means any adoption agency working with China’s special needs program can lock his file for a family, even if they have not started any paperwork yet. Want more information? I’ve got his file which I am guarding for his protection and that of his future family, believing they are out there. But, I will do my best to answer any questions I can.
