Pills, a kiss and a hug, and a dream

Pills, a kiss and a hug, and a dream--I've been thinking about these things all day. They're important to me, and they fit together in my mind, though how they fit together keeps changing.

Pills. The pills played a big role in the two mornings before this one.

Three mornings ago, I had made Kristina laugh, and she couldn't stop, even when she had to take her pills. Maybe, most especially then.

It started with strawberry jam and guava jam. Maia asked me if the strawberry jam was my favorite, and I said, "Yes," it was. That it was probably the best strawberry jam I'd ever had.



And Maia said that her favorite was guava jam. And then she said to Kristina, "What's your favorite, Mommy?" And before Kristina could answer, she picked up Kristina's banana, which was half rotten (Kristina never throws anything away), and said, Yuck!, because it felt sort of squishy and slimy in her hand.



And I said, "All Mommy's favorites are yucky," and that started Kristina laughing.

We each have a pile of five vitamin pills that we take every morning, and the laughing carried over to the taking of the vitamins.

Kristina is not a good pill taker. She takes her vitamins one at a time. She throws her head back, squints her eyes, and you imagine she must be trying to force something the size of tennis ball down her throat, only it's just this little pill.



She started to laugh as she took her first pill, and I laughed, and so she laughed harder, throwing her head back, and not getting the pill to go down. She laughed so hard she started to cry and I thought she was going to spit out the water. And somewhere in there, Maia got all upset, and started to cry, sort of, because she thought Kristina was in distress.

"'Top it, Daddy!" she said. She still can't say esses.

"It's okay, Maia, Mommy's okay," I said, laughing.



But she kept making crying sounds until Kristina got the pill to go down.

"Not funny, Daddy!" Maia said.

"No, not funny, Maia," I agreed, "but kind of funny, hunh?"

And after a moment or two she smiled at me, and then she laughed, too.

Yesterday morning, when it came time for the pills, Maia put her hand over my mouth and said, "No laughing! Mommy can't take pills!" But then she laughed, too. Though she was serious about my not laughing.

A kiss and a hug. The kiss and the hug came last night. I was going off to exercise. I was outside by my car, a goodly distance from the front door, when I heard Maia call to me from behind the screen, "Come, Daddy!"



"Maia, I'm going to exercise," I protested.

"Come, Daddy," she insisted.

"Okay." Begrudingly, I went to the front door to see what was up.

"I want to give you a big hug and a kiss," she said. And she said.

The dream. The dream happened last night. We were on a train. I think it was in Kazakhstan. I had been sleeping. I woke up and couldn't find Maia. I looked all over for her. And then I found her by a man and his wife and their family. The man was wiping a tear from her cheek. I didn't know what to do. So I just watched. And then I woke up.

It wasn't a good dream, but it wasn't completely a bad one.



As I thought about it later, I decided that the man was her biological father. I know that the abandonment will leave a mark in her, and that maybe at some point or other, only they will be able to do anything about it. I think that's what the dream was about.

I'm not sure why I put these stories together. I think I want her to know that she loved us, and that we loved her.

Maybe I want her to know that we love her enough that it's okay if someday she needs to find that family. Maybe even that we want her to.

(These are just recent pictures of Kristina and her mom with Maia, and of Maia with me. The last one is of a train station in Kazakhstan. We were on the way back to Shymkent from Almaty. We would adopt Maia that day.)

John, Friday, August 25, 2006