The Day My Heart Exploded

On July 21, 1999, my husband gave a bottle to our daughter. Sitting in a steaming hot office somewhere in Chenzhou, China, I snapped a photograph of an ordinary moment.

But it was a moment that I had long despaired of.

So on Father's Day, I want to thank you, Roger!!

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to stand at an altar in a white dress.

Thanks for turning me from The Poor Thang, I Doubt She'll Ever Get Married into Mrs. W.

Thanks for refereeing the fights between screaming toddlers while I dashed out on the back porch for a cigarette.

Thanks for giving our little girls the opportunity to drunkenly confess to their girlfriends in a bar somewhere in 2026 that they've never been able to find a man that really lives up to Daddy.

You're sort of the odd man out in this family. Your biological parents are still alive, and still married. The three girls in this family will never look a biological parent in the eye.

You'll forgive us if sometimes, late at night, we may lie in our pretty bedrooms, surrounded by the trappings of suburbia, and wonder what it would be like to be able to pick up the phone and call the people who created you.

Behind the dazzling smiles of our family pictures lie unimaginable grief. The grief of knowing that your fertility, and carefree youth, was brutally cut short by cancer treatment.

The grief I feel knowing that I was born unwanted, unfeted, and only saved from a tormented life by the luck of being a healthy white newborn girl.

The grief that our daughter's biological parents must feel, leaving their child in the street, wondering if she is living in an orphanage or...maybe..living the life of a treasured child in surroundings they might not even be able to imagine. A house, a pool, a van, private school, their very own computer...dolls, toys, new bicycles...fancy clothes, a Pottery Barn bedroom...a future bright with unlimited promise.

The grief that our daughters will feel when they realize that their first companions in this journey of life may spend their childhood in an orphanage and be cast into the world at age 14, alone, uneducated, and unloved.

The grief and anger and frustration they will feel knowing that they probably will never know their heritage.

Somehow, our family fought through the smoke to find each other, and we're lucky to have you.

Happy Father's Day!!!