A treasure trove

I was going to tell you about the problems Maia has been having at school--aggression, that sort of thing, and how they seem rooted, to me, in a desire to be accepted.

She's different, and she knows it. She doesn't speak as well as her peers, and she can't but have appreciated that. And yet her memory is at least as good as theirs and her facility at thinking is as well. Last night at a family dinner (there were six of us), I asked her how many people would be left at the table if Daddy went. "Five," she said.



Much later, my brother-in-law sought to test whether the answer had been correct by chance. So he posed the same question again. She held up five fingers. And then she said, "And if Daddy and Maia left, four. And if Auntie Kalei left, three. And if Mommy left, two." And so on. We were all quite impressed.



How can she not know she's different when she thinks so well and yet cannot speak with the fluidity of her peers?



And the ear plays a role in all of that, of course, and I have no doubt that adoption does as well. I believe word has probably gotten around at her preschool, and though probably none of the children know what "adoption" means, they do know that the word marks her. As different.



But, happily, I got sidetracked.



My Sony laptop died a few days ago, and my service contract finally brought a man around today to fix it. There is a slot in the machine for Sony's memory sticks, which is mainly why I had gotten a Sony laptop--I also have a Sony cam corder and had taken many pics on memory sticks.



Tonight I finally took the stick out of my cam corder and stuck it in the computer. I guess the near loss of my laptop and the possibility of never being able to see what was on the memory stick in my cam corder finally gave me enough motivation to take a look.



And what a shock! The pics reached all the way back to the day after we adopted Maia.



These pics that you are looking at are from our hotel room in Shymkent and also from some shopping we did at a flea market in Shymkint.



That's Aina with Kristina and Maia. Our main interpreter.



She's married now, we understand, and recently gave birth.



This is from our last day in Shymkent. We had found a park, and Maia had found a swing.



This is two days later. We were headed to the park across the street from our hotel in Almaty. Almaty and Shymkent both had many parks and open spaces.



Maia has always liked dogs. She also has always loved steps, like those behind her here.



In Almaty, she went up and down steps, again and again, almost as though she was intentionally trying to build up her muscles.



She also seemed to take great pleasure in sweeping up in the parks. She would look for a branch, like the one she's holding here, and then sweep with it.





The next pictures on the memory stick were from some months later--August 21, 2004.







What a face!

She's put on some baby fat--gotten rid of the parasite she had. And the impishness--that's her.

The last pictures were from this evening (I had left my "real" camera at work). Maia has been wanting to play "feed the fishes" with me and that's what we did after dinner.


We sit on the low stone wall that's behind her there, and tear up leaves and seed pods into little pieces to throw to the fishes.



She insisted that I put my camera down so it was hard to get shots of her.



At one point, she brought out Pooh so I could take a picture of him, too.



She helped me water the plants.



And at the end, just before we went in, she picked some flowers for Kristina.



These are all true things--what happened this evening, that smile of delight from the recent past.

But it isn't all like that. And it isn't just growing up, either, or just the ear. There's an aggressiveness in her, and a kind of resistance to being helped and loved, that comes from her early experience.

I don't know how to wrap myself around that yet. I just know that it's there.

John, Friday, August 11, 2006